A dense but delightful essay about the ubiquity of music and how we experience it less as social appreciation of high art and more as currency for self-identification and class distinction.
You can see this in the violent intra-genre squabbling that animates indie rock circles…Meanwhile the proliferation of genre names represents an even finer process of social differentiation, each genre’s acolytes determining (as Serge Gainsbourg put it) qui est “in,” qui est “out.” The rise of generic distinctions has lately reached a climax of absurdity, such that we can name off the top of our heads: house, witch house, dub, dustup, hardstep, dancehall, dancefloor, punk, post-punk, noise, “Noise,” new wave, nu wave, no Wave, emo, post-emo, hip-hop, conscious hip-hop, alternative hip-hop, jazz hip-hop, hardcore hip-hop, nerdcore hip-hop, Christian hip-hop, crank, crunkcore, metal, doom metal, black metal, speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, Christian death metal, and, of course, shoegazing, among others. (Meanwhile a thousand years of European art music is filed under “classical.”)
Perhaps fittingly you cannot find this article online! Buy it here or at your local purveyor of hipster books and mags.
