Know your genre
Time Out's Music and Nightlife Editor Andrew P Street didn't get to where he is by luck: it was all thanks to lies, carefully-orchestrated smear campaigns and appearing to know more than he did. It worked. Study his ways, young people
Roberta Flack - soul? She's more jazz, surely? This is exactly the sort of misleading labelsmanship that lead to this article being written. You're welcome.
Like most things in professional life, music criticism rests heavily on appearing to know what you're talking about. Central to this is the development of music-specific jargon, most notably the division of the wide range of human artistic endeavour into manageable, similar-sounding chunks we call "genres".
With some genres their meanings are universally understood: for example, while "jazz" and "rockabilly" have numerous subgenres and distinct movements, no one's going to look blankly at you if you say someone is a country singer - whereas describing K'do as a Kwaito artist will probably result in nonplussed stares outside of the Johannesburg house scene. However, some terms aren't hard to grasp because they're obscure; it's because they get used so often that the meaning gets rubbed off like the edges of a pebble. So, as a public service, we've picked a couple of terms whose meaning may still cause confusion to the casual music enthusiast in order that we might shed light on this seething, fungal mass we call popular music.
Indie
"Indie" is a contraction of "independent", because once upon a time - known in some circles as "The 80s" - the world was divided in The Majors (the big, generally multinational record labels who dominated the charts and radio and were run by The Man) and The Independents (the small labels whose records were comparatively low-budget affairs with limited distribution to record stores and a disproportionate influence in the cool music press, and who were doing it for The Kids). This was easy as pie and everyone knew where they stood: Van Halen were a major label act, with widespread distribution and huge media coverage, and The Smiths were indie stars selling out mid-range venues and getting NME covers every time Morrissey found a new subject to hate. Truly, it was a simpler time.
Certain elements are identical in 2008 - the majors still dominate charts and radio, for example - but in other respects the waters have gotten muddier. For starters, there are only four majors left in Australia (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal and Warner) and the definition of what constitutes "independent" is very hazy. Is a self-recorded album subsequently licensed to a major - as with, say, Sneaky Sound System - an indie release?
How about acts like The Presets or Muscles, who release on an independent label that has a distribution deal with a major (thanks to Modular Recording's deal with Universal)? How about bands on Red Label, a development label that exists under the auspices of SonyBMG? Or what about bands who are on a major overseas but distributed in Australia through an indie distributor like Shock or Inertia? It boggles the mind. And now labels like Amphead (who do release CDs but are concentrating on digital sales) are emerging, meaning that the aforementioned waters have gone from "muddy" to "like dirt with a bit of water in it".
Fortunately "indie" as a genre doesn't really have much to do with "independent" as a business plan. If someone describes a band as "indie", what they actually mean is "boys with guitars". "Probably likes Pavement" is another fair definition.
Want more? Listen to:
The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead
The Go Betweens, 16 Lovers Lane
Pavement, Slanted & Enchanted
The Shins, Oh, Inverted World
Arcade Fire, Funeral
Emo
It's a hard life, being an emo fan. There they are, fruitlessly rifling through the CD racks and MySpace pages for bands they can enjoy, but being forever denied because there are no emo bands in the entire world. Poor kids. No wonder they look so sad. See, no band ever, ever describes themselves as being "emo". Jimmy Eat World? Why, they're pop-punk! My Chemical Romance? Symphonic rock. Thrice? Oh, they're post-hardcore! Bands like Panic At The Disco and Cute Is What We Aim For have gotten very sniffy when interviewers dared to suggest that they were in any way emo, no doubt writing invective-filled blogs immediately thereafter.
It's understandable, though. Even before emo was shorthand for "whiny teen" (or, in the case of daily newspapers, "your eyeliner children at hair-dye suicide risk Facebook"), it was a little-loved term, primarily because it was so difficult to define. It began in the late 80s as a contraction of emotional hardcore (which, given how emotion-driven hardcore punk was to start with, seemed a less-than-clear distinction from the get-go).
By the early 90s it was more-or-less understood to be "boys with guitars singing songs about girls, plus screaming" and was limited to the barely-heard likes of Texas Is The Reason and Sunny Day Real Estate. By the end of the 90s it became "guitar bands listened to by people with jumpers and black-rimmed glasses", covering everything from the delicate balladry of Death Cab For Cutie to the Cheap Trick-influenced power pop of Weezer, while surprised Australian bands like Something For Kate, Blueline Medic and Bluebottle Kiss unexpectedly found themselves declared part of the movement in the early 00s. That, of course, was before emo morphed into "metal which, if released in 1985, would have been listened to by goths".
Want more? Listen to:
Hot Water Music, Fuel For The Hate Game
Taking Back Sunday, Tell All Your Friends
The Used, The Used
Dashboard Confessional, A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar
My Chemical Romance, The Black Parade
(note: none of these bands are actually emo - see above)
Roots & blues
The East Coast International Blues & Roots Music Festival, aka Bluesfest, is to blame for any confusion here. Blues? Traditional music form, based around relatively simple and well-established structures: everyone understands that. Roots? Acoustic blues played by an ill-shaved chap with dreadlocks. See? Completely straightforward. Then Bluesfest came along and started holding festivals with bills that contained people like Ben Harper (perfectly understandable), Wolfmother (a bit of a stretch), R.E.M (what?), Sigur Ros (guh?) and Resin Dogs (now you're just taking the piss). By this definition, "blues and roots" pretty much means "any sound deliberately made by humans", which is far too long to put on a record store CD rack divider.
"Roots" is also used by folk artists that think "folk" sounds a bit twee. The likes of Carus and The Waifs would have been defined as folk artists 20 years ago, but luckily "roots" was invented as a genre to avoid disappointing those punters who might otherwise turn up at gigs expecting some sweet lute action. It also sounds a bit earthier and sexier, although it's worth adding that, in this article's context, "roots" is being used as a noun rather than a present-tense verb.
Want more? Listen to:
John Butler Trio, Sunrise Over Sea
Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals, Diamonds On The Inside
The Mess Hall, Devils Elbow
Jack Johnson, Brushfire Fairytales
The Vasco Era, Oh We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside
Rap & hip hop
Again, hip hop has developed countless sub-genres since New York block party DJ Kool Herc went "Hey! If I just keep looping this drum break, people will keep dancing forever!" in the early 70s. Other hip hop historians trace the roots of hip hop to the spoken-word work of The Last Poets and Gill Scott-Heron in the politically-charged atmosphere of the civil rights movement of the 60s.
Still others trace it back to the groundbreaking work of Vanilla Ice. His 1990 smash ‘Ice Ice Baby' took rap's rich and powerful influence (which was getting dangerously potent, thanks to artists like the politically savvy Public Enemy and the abrasive gangsta rap of NWA and Ice-T that sought to reflect the crime and violence of America's inner cities) and said "just because this is the music of the disenfranchised black experience doesn't mean we can't co-opt it and drain it of all meaning beyond endlessly talking about one's own awesomeness": a lesson learned in full by everyone from fellow whitey Eminem to black artists from Snoop Dogg to Akon.
Hip hop took longer to catch on in Australia, mainly because it took a decade to get used to how weird Australian accents sounded over phat beats (cheers, Hilltop Hoods). In any case, these days most successful rappers seem to prefer to prefix their name with "featuring" and appear on other people's records than go to the bother of releasing their own.
Want more? Listen to:
Run DMC, Raising Hell
Public Enemy, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP
Kayne West, The College Dropout
The Herd, The Sun Never Sets
Also note: metal/dance music
Metal and dance music are like the fundamental particles that make up the universe: just when you think you've got them all quantified, some new force appears and you've suddenly got to rebuild your theories from the ground up. Sure, we can divvy them up into nice, discrete categories (thrash, death, black, speed, hair; house, Hi NRG, trance, drum 'n' bass...), but all of those categories have sub-categories. And those all have sub-categories, and so on ad infinitum. One day every metal and dance act will occupy its own category, and on that day the universe as we understand it will end. Consider yourself warned.