I checked out Wishy and agree with your assessment of them but one song sounded like lite rock Cocteau Twins (in a good way) so I was like "I bet Pitchfork says they're shoegaze" and was half right...they say they're also emo? I guess amongst certain people that emo just means pop hooks now?
Something is happening with genre: It's getting at once more specific and general. In my interview with XXHARDBIT3S, they theorized that the ultra-general genre tags are a result of TikTok. I would assume that SoundCloud plays the opposite role.
Ooh yeah, that makes sense. I guess genres have always been a mess though, I've been listening to a lot of old music lately where you can't tell at all if it's country, blues, jazz, or something else. And despite all the micro genres of dance music you'll still have like people in Rio de Janeiro going "I guess we'll just call this insane new style "funk"!
Also I recently read Nick Tosches' Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock & Roll and I thought this bit was interesting re: genre names in "fine art' vs vernacular music:
"Words such as realism, neoclassicism, minimalism, and Dada are intellectual niceties, terms invented to describe esthetics. Each has a definition easily rote-learned; each has a clear, sensible origin. You can look at the word Dada and think, Yes, Tzara invented it, in 1916, to shock he world. It means "hobbyhorse" in French.
But words such as juke, jazz, honky-tonk, and rock and-roll are elusive. None of them was invented for the purpose of art; each seems to have its own pneuma, from which the art evolved, like dark, primeval word magick."
I checked out Wishy and agree with your assessment of them but one song sounded like lite rock Cocteau Twins (in a good way) so I was like "I bet Pitchfork says they're shoegaze" and was half right...they say they're also emo? I guess amongst certain people that emo just means pop hooks now?
Something is happening with genre: It's getting at once more specific and general. In my interview with XXHARDBIT3S, they theorized that the ultra-general genre tags are a result of TikTok. I would assume that SoundCloud plays the opposite role.
Ooh yeah, that makes sense. I guess genres have always been a mess though, I've been listening to a lot of old music lately where you can't tell at all if it's country, blues, jazz, or something else. And despite all the micro genres of dance music you'll still have like people in Rio de Janeiro going "I guess we'll just call this insane new style "funk"!
Also I recently read Nick Tosches' Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock & Roll and I thought this bit was interesting re: genre names in "fine art' vs vernacular music:
"Words such as realism, neoclassicism, minimalism, and Dada are intellectual niceties, terms invented to describe esthetics. Each has a definition easily rote-learned; each has a clear, sensible origin. You can look at the word Dada and think, Yes, Tzara invented it, in 1916, to shock he world. It means "hobbyhorse" in French.
But words such as juke, jazz, honky-tonk, and rock and-roll are elusive. None of them was invented for the purpose of art; each seems to have its own pneuma, from which the art evolved, like dark, primeval word magick."