the thought

Elizabeth Rector

Back when my parents were kids, blowing their allowance at record stores, music genres were served up in sharp and simplistic forms: Rock, Pop, Jazz, Classical, Country. Perhaps these buckets were, as they most definitely are now, all too encompassing.

But when did music genres become as abstruse as the word sounds?

I recently attended the Westword Music Showcase to see three local Denver bands - Mr. Pacman, Machine Gun Blues and Reverend Deadeye. While perusing the performer details I found that Mr. Pacman, a wild assortment of electro reverie and golden-ager calisthenics, classify themselves as Video-game Gangster Rock. That’s a tidy description for a band that makes their music from 8-bit computers and draws inspiration from video game soundtracks.

Reverend Dead-eye, my favorite local act, partakes in an equally exhaustive scrutiny of their art resulting in the Punk-Rock Hillbilly Gospel Blues genre. Other performers included:

Josh Ivy - excelling in Booty Junk Funk
Deviant - mixing the sound of Dark-edged Electro-Rock
Oakhurst - homegrown Rocky Mountain Guerilla Grass

Pacman don’t preach…

…but the Reverend will.

To my surprise, Machine Gun Blues consider themselves a Rock n’ Roll band. It’s not a novel concept, but still begs reflection – how rare it seems to run across something as simple and straightforward as Rock n’ Roll.

It seems like everything my parents know musically has been lovingly slaughtered, dismembered and mended back together in hopes of creating something unique, at the very least listenable, and at it’s best embraced.

Someone get this man a drink!

So while new genres and bands spawn (Gogol Bordello, Eastern European Gypsy Punk) the old genres and bands don’t go away - no matter how much time passes (i.e. the Rolling Stones). This is why the theory of the Long Tail (less huge/mainstream hits and more niche options) is so vital to new music development and propagation.

Fragmentation of music + new genres + hard costs associated with brick n’ mortar establishments could result in new music deficiencies and/or limits. There just isn’t enough room on the CD rack for all the music that already exists and all that is in development.

It would be a hopeless task to look for the High Energy Celtic Pirate Folk Punk Rock section at the local record store (there is perhaps only one band that stakes this claim - the Potcheen Folk Band). What brick n’ mortar is going to assume the cost of housing space for that one band for the ridiculous genre that maybe only a handful of people are genuinely interested in? Everybody loses in that situation – the band, the fan and the music industry.

The good news is that subscription–based services like Napster and Rhapsody and vertical search engines like iTunes allow bands of all genres, no matter how obscure, a place on the digital CD rack.

So get out there and find new music. A good place to start is Pandora, a site that lets you create a radio station based on a particular artist(s) and then plays similar artists as well. Also check out allmusic and NME for band biographies, contemporaries and breaking music news.