Is it time to give up on music genres? Hear me out.
[This was my column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
If you’re of a certain vintage, you’ll remember how inflexibly tribal music fans used to be. If you were, say, an alternative kid, you wouldn’t dream of listening to anything the rock kids were. It just wasn’t done.
Admitting you liked the odd Black Sabbath or Van Halen song risked jeopardizing your relationship with the other alt kids. And because you were already known as someone who preferred Joy Division over Judas Priest, the rockers would have nothing to do with you. Might as well go die on an iceberg somewhere.
There are still silos among music fans, but they’re nowhere near as rigidly peer-reviewed and enforced. In fact, I can’t remember ever seeing this much fluidity when it comes to music preferences.
I started to notice this several years ago when I did some guest lecturing on Canadian music history at Toronto’s Humber College. To get a better idea of who I was talking to, I asked all the 20-somethings in the class to recite the last five songs they played on their phones. It was illuminating.
Duke Ellington summed it up best when he said, “There are two types of music. Good music and everything else!”