Post symphonic viking core and the rise of the music micro-genre

I like me some metal. The trouble is, metal isn’t just metal anymore. And the more I look for new bands through which to nostalgically revisit my adolescent angst, the more I am reminded that liking music is just way harder than it used to be. There are too many names jockeying for my attention.

Currently, there are 50 different subgenres of metal. Just metal. And now there are even subgenres of subgenres. How many types of music in all? I don’t know but Wikipedia had to split them into four separate pages to accommodate their girth.

It used to be, there was a handful of tried and true names by which we delineated the obvious differences in the music out there. They were wide, general terms that let music do its thing without worrying too much what to call it, but making sure you didn’t end up with Bach instead of Black Sabbath. And if you wanted to know exactly what kind of jazz you liked or didn’t like, guess what, you were just going to have to listen to it and then make up your own mind. And there was something great about that. You had to meet each artist on their own terms without too much information about exactly what they were doing and who else was doing it.

Now I’m supposed to know the difference between Neue Deutsche Härte, Goregrind, Visual Kei, Melodic Death Metal, Folk Metal, and Crossover Thrash? What happened to just, “Whoa, these guys are good. It’s like, slower.” I miss that. I still think Rock n’ Roll pretty much covers it and all these other names do nothing but try to get me to subscribe to a subculture that I’m not even in. I wear boat shoes for god’s sake.

Not to mention what a bad genre name does for otherwise potentially great musicians. Pornogrind? Unblack Metal? I don’t know what that is and do you think I’m going to try and find out? No, because it just sounds like something young boys wearing trench coats polish their dragon figurines to.

The point is that music ought to just be about a group of folks making what they’re making, not some exercise in taxonomy that ruins the very greatest thing there is about music: that it transcends language. The name doesn’t make the thing and being so anal about everyone fitting into a custom-made genus is how unquantifiable greatness gets overlooked.

I personally wish some of that genre invention energy were more aptly directed at the recent invasive species problem plaguing band names from Canada to the UK. Wolves and Deer are decimating naming biodiversity everywhere, and bringing in a Grizzly every now and then doesn’t seem to be solving the problem.