Genre Roulette
In diving into the murky world of marketing, I discovered that I needed to identify what genre of music Chameleon Red falls under. I quickly ran smack dab into the modern phenomenon of genre proliferation. Take a look at this list and you’ll see how ridiculous things have gotten:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genres.
Look, I understand the need to differentiate between different flavors of music to some degree. But genre distinctions are only useful if they’re reasonably well-known by a significant portion of the population. If you say “Sadcore”, “Shoegaze”, or “Slowcore”, that means nothing to me and a whole lot of other people. In fact, those genres are hotly disputed even among people who do know what they’re supposed to be, so there’s no real agreement on what they really are. It all seems a bit cliquish and elitist to me, this painstaking categorization of bands into these tiny little categories and fighting to say who belongs in and who is out.
It’s this kind of narrow division between different kinds of music that (along with near monopolistic corporate control) has stagnated broadcast radio and satellite radio. As a listener, I am quickly bored by hearing the same old thing all the time. I want to be challenged. I want a wide variety of things to listen to, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t like it all. I’m being exposed to things outside of my comfort zone, which is a good thing. And as a musician, I don’t like to be restricted on what I can and can’t play in order to fit a rigidly defined microgenre.
Inclusion rather than exclusivity. Broad community vs. cliques. Looking for commonality rather than differentiation. In my opinion, that’s what it’s all about. So what’s our genre? Maybe you can put each individual song in a particular category, like folk-rock, hair metal, funk, country-rock, etc., but to me, it all falls under the heading of Rock. And that’s as specific as I want to be.