The Importance of Deconstructing & Subverting Genre
Over the coming posts, I will spend a significant amount of time writing about music. For me, music represents this wide-open frontier that shapes and reflects our collective consciousness (s/o to my Sociology people). We, as creative people, map our society, its wonders and its dysfunction, onto this musical plane. This habit can be a useful tool for analyzing cultural practices, while also serving as a means for actualizing social transformation. With that being said, I really want to talk about why this blog has such diverse subject matter, and I will use the notion of music genre as a vehicle to explain our decision.
Often when we think of music, we think of its categories: R&B, Rap, Rock, Classical, Pop, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Nature Sounds, etc. These categories, or genres, make it easier for us to organize our tastes. Culturally, we have structured entire normative frameworks about how each of these genres should sound, and consequently our evaluations of an artist’s musical talent are heavily influenced by the person’s ability to fit into a recognizable genre.
