Classifying genre is a linguistic exercise. Art is a flowing continuum, like a river, and the invention of a genre can be conceptualized as the act of taking a snapshot of one section of the river and giving it a name. As more photographs are taken, an organizational system becomes necessary, and so photographs are organized by date, location, equipment used, and so on. As the number of human participants grows, so does the diversity and depth of classification. Some will group photographs by the colour of the water, the curvature of the waves, or perhaps by some indescribable quality that is nonetheless felt to be found in each image. Along with different forms of classification, different people will also have different ideas about what constitutes the river. If you bottle it and sell it, is that product still “the river?” What about cultural practices around the river? Does a boat floating downstream count as an element of the river? This conversation can become more and more esoteric, but the point is, across cultures, the river of art is more than a physical thing; it’s an ideological concept, and the infinitely diverse and fluid manner in which humans can engage with that concept governs how we create the linguistics of categorization.

So, genre is not a concrete structure, but rather a socially constructed system for organizing creative works into groups and subgroups. If genres are made-up, then there exists no “genreless” music, just music that hasn’t been given a label yet. The role that genre plays in the world of music is changing in pretty interesting ways. What was once an ideology governed by a rigid set of boundaries and social customs, is now becoming like so many other things: fluid. Are we becoming a post-genre society that considers the framework of musical categorization to be obsolete? I would disagree, but I do think that the framework is definitely twisting itself into new shapes. Beyond popular social discourse (which often doesn’t reflect the complexity of how real people engage with these ideas), how are young people relating to, and seeing themselves reflected in genre labels, if at all? The focus of this article is on music genre, but I think it could be interesting to look into if, and how, any of the forces affecting music categorization today are also being reflected in other creative fields like fine art or film. And of course I feel obligated to say that this is a massively complex and subjective topic, and so I invite you to treat this piece as a starting point for an exploration of your own relationship with genre.

For a young person living in the second half of the 20th century, the type of music you associated yourself with spoke volumes about your identity and place in society. Rock n’ roll, punk, disco, hip hop, metal, psychedelic, electronic; these weren’t just genres of music, they were signifiers of identity. My dad, a white guy, was a child of the hard/progressive rock culture of the ‘70s. He also played drums in an all-Black christian gospel band called The Revivalaires, in which his inclusion was seen as pretty unusual at the time. Of course it’s not unusual at all for musicians to cross between genres these days, and especially to fuse disparate styles. In the 60s, Bob Dylan was called “Judas” for daring to switch from acoustic to electric guitar. Today, nobody even twitches when mainstream artists have 10 different songs spanning 10 different genres on a single album. In fact, it’s often met with critical praise. It’s relevant to note that a lot of musical divisions, like the idea that a rock stan would never listen to disco (when I asked my dad if he’d ever dipped his toes in disco, he looked at me like I’d accused him of treason), were tightly and uncritically tied up in pervasive ideologies of racism and homophobia, alongside other discriminatory sentiments (some of which continue to linger today). I recommend this article from The New Yorker that covers the history of music genres in much better depth than I’m going to go into here.

In the industrialized western world, the predominant way of conceptualizing art is essentially as a commodity to be distributed and shared. In such a system, genre labels serve a few different functions. On a social level, genre-classificatory language still serves some role in forming music communities, and in helping those communities to define themselves while also encouraging dialogue between groups. To me, these macro-uses still feel somewhat impersonal. On a commercial level, identification of an artist’s “genre” is relevant to A&R for developing marketing strategies, and for cultivating a receptive audience for the artist. We can examine how streaming platforms, like Spotify, organize music into their mass-distributed and mass appeal-oriented playlists. As any amateur or professional playlist curator might tell you, there’s a million ways to group songs together, and the variety of Spotify’s collections are pretty reflective of this. Some playlists are built pretty transparently around recognizable genre labels or sonic qualities like “gentle classical,” “dirty rock,” “rock party,” or “rock hard” (there’s a lot of these). Some focus on nebulous emotional states, like “Get Turnt,” “License To Chill,” or “State of Mind” (???), and so on. Others might extract vague aesthetic properties from these songs that seem to lack any overt musical reference at all, yet there’s still some intangible connection to be sensed between songs. What does “creamy” even sound like? 

I’m frequently recommended a playlist titled “aesthetic”, coupled with a description that reads:  “for those who appreciate a curated mood,” whatever that means. Nevertheless, I do think, however irritatingly nonspecific Spotify may be about it, that aesthetic and mood are perfectly valid ways of organizing music, and users have turned this act of curation into an art in and of itself. Furthermore, I think that the trend of grouping music based not on clear sonic properties, but on more esoteric and personal psychological associations is the first clue to understanding the contemporary relationship between the individual and musical categorization.

When I was a kid, genre was super relevant to the forming of social dynamics and by my early teens, I was already thinking of music as a central part of my identity. One of the ways that this manifested itself was through my self-anointed mission to judge everyone else’s music taste, generally as inferior to my own. Maybe this is instinctual behaviour for anyone who feels strongly about the things that they enjoy, but I just found myself acting unreasonably aggressively hostile towards peers (usually girls) for listening to the likes of Justin Bieber and One Direction. One classmate (who eventually became one of my best friends) was mercilessly mocked by boys in our class for being a “male Directioner,” and for liking bright pop music in general. To us, EDM and dubstep were cool and masculine, and pop music was not. Pop music was girly and shallow, and not to mention unintellectual. In retrospect I’d like to say I don’t know exactly what led me to think Skrillex was “intellectual.” And even before this pop-hating period of my life, I wasn’t always enthusiastic about EDM itself. Before it inadvertently took over my life, I remember belittling electronic music because I thought it was “easier to make” than rock or something, as if that were indicative of artistic value (whether it were even true or not). I think I was also intimidated by electronic music on an aesthetic level, because the deadmau5-adjacent house sound that was popular at the time seemed cold and robotic to me, and dubstep seemed so aggressive and violent. But when I did finally start to embrace more unfamiliar sonic territory, I discovered that I was also allowing myself to learn more about myself.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve wanted to define myself less and less. I prefer to think of things in terms of passing observations, in constant change, rather than attempt to form overarching descriptions. I worry that descriptions become prescriptions, and I never want my identity to be prescribed by anyone, not even by myself. I don’t think I’ve ever really fit comfortably into any particular niche, and I’ve come to embrace that reality. Sometimes not “fitting in” is a choice, and sometimes it’s not, but either way, I think I’ve done okay for myself. I consider myself a pretty critical person, but it took a while for me to learn the difference between being critical and being cynical when encountering  something unfamiliar. I’ve spent much of my life trying to learn to adapt to change, and part of that learning process has been trying to be more receptive to different ways of thinking, and different ways of experiencing emotion. I use music to explore depths of the human experience that I might not otherwise be exposed to. That’s why it seems silly to “genrify my life” (as a friend recently put it), or in other words, to commit myself psychologically to a limited range of music, and thereby defining myself within a limited range. We are more than the words we describe ourselves with, and the world is more than a set of neatly labeled boxes. I don’t want to hold a photograph of the waves, I want to wade in the river.

To cap off this self-indulgent metaphor, here’s a playlist of songs that vaguely remind me of flowing water, amongst some other things. I hope you enjoy:

Header by: Valerie Letts