"I don't like to be categorized"

Cafe Society
1

What do you people think of all these musical artists that complain in interviews about being categorized? The implication is that album reviews that attempt to make comparisons with other artists or define the album in a certain musical context (ie. “techno” or “death metal”) are doing the artist a disservice by limiting their appeal to those who read the reviews.

My own view is: most of these so-called “artists” are self-important hacks who want to claim a larger palette of talent and influences than they deserve. The simple fact is that very few songwriters are capable of fusing more than a few choice influences into anything resembling a coherent musical statement. Reviews attempt (either successfully or unsuccessfully) to isolate and identify those influences for the edification of a reader who may not have the slightest inkling what of the artist is all about. Whether they manage to do this is often subjective, but we can tear the critics apart in a later thread (for the record, yes, I used to be a minor league music critic for several years).

IMHO abandoning this approach leads to hopelessly vague descriptions such as “alternative” or the aforementioned “techno”. Just as most words in the English language are mere shortcuts so we don’t have to digress into explaining the same basic concepts over and over in detail, it’s my supposition that musical categories are identified (rather than invented) for this exact purpose: so that the similarities between, say, Metallica and Megadeth, can be quickly gotten out of the way in order to focus on how the two may differ. It’s simply easier for the human mind to comprehend when comparing two similar objects and finding the differences subsequently than it is to treat each object as a brand new concept hitherto uncharted in the intellectual universe. Granted, many low-level scribes use these musical categories as shortcuts to substitute for a lack of articulation, but to make sweeping generalizations about the use of such categories is to me ridiculous (my favorite musician’s quote to hate: “we don’t play <insert cat.>, we don’t play <insert related cat.>, we’re just a rock and roll band”, which everyone from the likes of Rolling Stones to Radiohead have mouthed off at one point).

I’ll leave off before I get into a large-scale tirade about the overall watering down of the English language, but in closing please refrain from the usual knee jerk remarks about how critics are just mad because they failed as musicians, etc. etc.

Jeremy Ulrey

2

Depends on the group. Some groups can be very easily pigeonholed, but to fit others into a genre is to do a disservice to the range of music they make.

I can understand why artists say “we’re just a rock n roll band.” From their point of view, all they’ve done is got together, done some songs with each other on pretty simple instruments and played them in front of people. The people start saying that they’re “grunge” or “post-new wave” or “prog-meets-rap-metal” (don’t know if that last one exists, but it sounds awful).

3

I see what you’re saying, but when was the last time you read a review that said something like “Rolling Stones - Bridges to Babylon: pretty good rock-n-roll” and left it at that? My point is that the genre in question is almost always used as a starting point of the review description rather than the actual description itself. To call the Stones, for instance, a rock band is merely to succinctly establish that they have no obvious inclinations to jazz, techno, heavy metal, etc.

I’m with you on that. When a band or artist starts to describe themselves as “Leonard Cohen meets the Village People in a Weimar Germany cabaret where Slayer and Luciano Pavarotti are meeting for drinks” it definitely registers on the far reaches of the pretention meter. But this just goes to show how few bands actually pull off the feat of melding a disparate variety of influences. I prefer to read that someone like Napalm Death listen to Madonna on their tour bus without actually hearing them do a cover of “Like a Prayer” on their latest album.

Jeremy Ulrey