Dave Wirth
This post is part two of a three part series on Genres and Creativity. This post is about what can happen to a band that chooses a genre first, and then creates music to fit it. This post also gives a clear example about what happened to a band that played music first and didn't care how it was received.
I must admit to feeling a bit down when I see bands choose a genre of music they want to sound like first and then create the music for it later. "We will be a garage-rock band because I like garage-rock and I think all the kids like garage-rock music." It makes me want to scream: Why not just play music? Why not do something more personal, more you? Why not use elements of garage rock and not feel limited by it later on?
I will go out on a limb with an idea. I propose that bands who decide to create music that is defined by genre limit themselves drastically, and are setting themselves up for dissapointment. The music they create somehow lacks it's legs, it's timelessness. Why? I'll illustrate this through an example, like producing a dance record just to make people dance. Nothing wrong with this (create anything if you feel like it, I say). A good question to ask however is will this music be embarassing five years later? I've created dance songs that I am absolutely ashamed of that I thought were brilliant at the time.Of course there are exceptions: Caribou's new record Swim is meant to be "dance music that sounds like it's made out of water." That music has legs and beauty to it once listened to in this way. Dan Snaith, who writes all the music, was incredibly thoughtful about it's creation. Other dance music to me is utterly forgettable simply because it was made to make people dance and do nothing else. Caribou took the genre-specific ideas from dance music and created something incredibly potent from it. This is a crucial distiction.
Some bands didn't think about genres at all, but they just thought about doing something. These days, it is rare that a band comes out with something so new and breath-taking that no one knows how to refer to it. This happened to James Brown just as it did to The Ramones. The Ramones were so awesome and revolutionary that the label "Punk Rock" was used to refer to the type of music they molded. The funny thing is that The Ramones probably just wanted to play the music the way they heard it. Somehow, the label got attached, because that was the only way to refer to it. What's the point? It seems that when we (I mean ALL of us) create music, we have options. We can choose to make a genre specific record, and/or we can choose to make a record that is highly influenced by a genre but more of an extension of ourselves. In other words, a person can create a record that conforms to all the standards of a certain genre to stay safely inside expectations, or a person can accept the fact that a certain genre is a huge influence but they want to make sure that their work is safely identified with them and can't be compared to anyone else.
What I am referring to is the dreaded O-Word: Originality. Part III is all about Originality.