Annie Spratt

Music Genres

I find it dumb when people believe that genres are defined entirely by their instrumentation. Genres, in my oh so humble opinion, are defined by the mannerisms and minute details. Here’s why:

The first mannerism separating genres is melody. Let’s take three largely opposing genres as examples: rock/metal, country, and pop. In rock/metal (clean vocals), there are particular melodic patterns in parallel with chordal patterns (which I’ll also get to) that belong to the genre. A perfect example of this is the chord progression of V^3 - i (dominant with a raised third to tonic minor) paired with the melody of 5 - #7 - 1. This whole idea simply belongs to rock/metal and is rarely ever used in other genres because of its quality and affiliations.

The next factor is chord progressions and other functionalities of music. For example, rock/metal is more often than not in a minor key, while country is more often than not in a major one (pop can go either way). Rock/metal is usually faster-paced with a driving drum-line (with exceptions of course), pop has a pace designed for dancing with a pulsing baseline, and country is often (again, with exceptions) less about speed and drive, and even faster songs don’t have such a drive as other genres. Rock/metal (depending on the sub-genre) can range from standard four chord progression to a single chord for most of a song to baroque style harmonic passages, pop usually leans more towards two to four chords (depending on the sub-genre) and country often has a standard four chord progression. There are of course exceptions, but these are defining generalizations.

Another factor is timbre of voice. There is of course a slight difference between the country twang and screaming, but it’s more important than that. In country, artists often focus on vocal prowess (whether alone or in many part harmony), and it shows in the slides, trills, even in the choice of melodic structure. This leads to a focus on the vocal track and clean tone with some stylistic roughness. The “twang” (arguably) comes from the southern accents of the people who created the genre. In pop, there is sometimes a focus on vocal prowess, but there is more of a focus on memorability. This lends to extremely clean vocals (even those with electronic alterations/enhancements are clean). In rock/metal, there is almost no focus on vocal prowess. Throughout this genre, there are many different focuses like clear simple expression of an emotion, poetic significance within the rest of the music, etc.

The final factor that I’ll discuss here is percussion. In my experience, percussion is the single most important part of a piece of music. (The reasoning behind this can be explained with a very simple example: when bands want to make a repetition of a chorus sound more powerful, the drummer simply uses the crash cymbal for quarter notes as opposed to the ride or the high-hat. Everything else, even the rest of what the drummer does, doesn’t change.) In rock/metal, drumming is what drives music forward. A focus of rock/metal can often be percussive prowess (see August Burns Red, Phinehas). Pop’s percussion can be brought down to “boots ‘n cats” or even “boots ‘n boots” (see Cheerleader, Uptown Funk). As for country, I haven’t done enough research or listening to be able to say anything for percussion right now.

So what? Why do I care about this? Because a lot of people don’t get it. Take popular Christian music for example. Often, there is a song that’s public domain that various different groups will make a version of and change only one thing: the instrumentation. Another example is when a band doesn’t know their own genre. If the composer for a group doesn’t write music for that group’s genre, what are they writing for? I am a firm believer in pushing the envelope and challenging the status quo, but some things simply don’t work. There are very few things that irritate me more than ineffective, thoughtlessly written music.