As new sounds and styles come in and out of vogue within electronic music, the number of sub-genres used to describe them seems to increase at a mind-boggling rate. The debate continues to simmer about whether it’s healthy to have so many names for what is essentially just music – a few clicks through the comment posts on Wikipedia and Youtube for styles such as Fidget House and Wonky can attest to this. Is it really that useful to catalogue subtle differences within the recent UK Garage renaissance, for instance, when people can’t work out where to place the distinction between the age-old genres of Jungle and Drum ‘n’ Bass (or whether there should be a distinction at all)?
I had a sobering moment a few years back, when after jabbering on about Dubstep, my father said, “it’s just Dub Reggae, isn’t it?” Although he could appreciate there was a heavier emphasis on electronics, he recognised it more as an update of a style that had been around since the late 60′s, rather than a new genre in its own right. It seems many people can’t be bothered with endless names to describe music, when perhaps the overall sound of a given track is close enough to another existing genre. Dubstep has been unusual in that there haven’t been many (if any) sub-genre names that have stuck, but now people are already talking about Post-Dubstep to describe music from Burial to Mount Kimbie.
I must confess that I’ve always had a bit of a strange fondness for the masses of sub-genre names in dance music; I like the comic inventiveness of some of the names, and find their ability to sometimes frustrate to be somewhat amusing. I’ve always thought of sub-genres as loose descriptors rather than discreet categorisations. All music, after all, is one big continuum, and genres just act as vague reference points for knowing roughly where you are within it all. Of course there are going to be tracks that span, say, UK Funky and 2-Step Garage, but at least having those silly genre names allows the geeks like myself to try and describe them. The valid counter-argument, of course, is that the best way to describe music is perhaps NOT with this kind of journo-babble, but with proper adjectives and sentences.
Although you could view sub-genres as loose postcodes within the sprawl of modern music, the reality is probably different. People have often complained that they risk causing the fragmentation of the music into various scenes, with artists trying to pigeonhole themselves, at the expense of musical creativity and vision. While this may be true, it seems that this might be changing somewhat. In Drum ‘n’ Bass (a scene that many complain is stifled by its many sub-genres, and the often rigid adherence to them), recent output by the likes of dBridge and Instra:mental seems to bear similarity only to the parent genre in its tempo (albeit at half-speed). The fact that the Dubstep artist Skream has been collaborating with them is a testament to the blurring of the boundaries. At another part of the spectrum there are artists like Rockwell, who is pushing the boundaries of the scene with his unique, glitched-out brand of minimalism.
Another fairly recent development is the new wave of Dubstep/Garage-inspired sounds, where barriers are beginning to be forgotten. What remains, however, is a shared appreciation for the roots of Dubstep, through Garage, Dub and other forms of electronica. In this fertile environment we have Pangaea’s and Joy Orbison’s Dub-infused Garage nostalgia, Roska’s and Cooly G’s differing interpretations of UK Funky, explorations into Techno by Martyn and Kode9, and the neon lights of Ikonika, L-Vis 1990 and James Blake. Many artists are already mixing up these musical styles; it seems that the realisation that these strains are not so different from each other will mean that artists can forget about fitting into a genre, and foster a more creative climate, where it is simply about making music of high quality.
Jacob Ross
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