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If we were to travel in time back to the early 20th century, the above question would seem ludicrous. Genres were just a natural and simple way of figuring out what sort of vibrations your ears were feasting on. This simplicity, of course, came from the manageable quantity of musical genres and their relative distance from one another. 

Pretty much all music knocking around in the 1940s could be swept under the nets cast by classical, jazz, blues, country and folk classifications. As we moved into the 1950s, we began to hear the term rock and roll emerging from the States alongside names like Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. This perhaps marks the inception of the quandary at hand.

Rock and roll was born from a merging of blues, country and jazz in varying ratios that were invariably met with an energetic performance style, be that Elvis’ shaky knees or Richard’s right leg up on the piano. 

In the early 1960s, a young man named Bob Dylan, a name I’m sure you’ve heard around, shone new light on folk music as a fine canvas to make a poetic point. While he sculpted his early career as a protest singing troubadour, his pre-fame high school career saw a Bobby of a rock persuasion who would stand at his piano and emulate his hero, Little Richard. 

Rock was as much a lifestyle as it was a newborn genre. As we moved into the 1960s, rock was pushed to the frontlines of a cultural revolution that saw the baby boomer generation brandishing vibrations to fight oppression, inequality and unjust overseas military operations. When Dylan famously “went electric” in 1965 amid the release of his folk-rock hybrid album, Bringing It All Back Home, he seemed to have consolidated the merging of folk into the rock fold. This was yet another pure genre alloyed into the increasingly impure yet fantastic world of rock. 

At this point in my fleeting history of genre genetics, I’m sure you’re starting to get the picture. The next big change came with the birth of the synthesiser. By the early 1970s, we had synth-pioneers, like Brian Eno of Roxy Music, popularising the synth-player as a central element of the stage performance. No longer would the synth be some sound regulating machine hidden out of view in a dusty backstage room. 

After a couple of decades of complication and crossbreeding, the punk stars compounded the direction of The Velvet Underground and The Stooges in a rock music overhaul. The punk movement supercharged rock music progression, ironically with their notably crude sound. In the late 1970s, we had prog-rockers pushing the boundaries of complex rock composition. Meanwhile, Sid Vicious was handed a bass guitar with no prior experience. It wouldn’t have surprised me if, on his training day, he sat behind the drum kit and hit a cymbal with the thing. 

Very quickly, this raw new movement was thankfully fine-tuned into the more sonically lustrous post-punk and very quickly crossbred with electronic music moving into the synth-laden ’80s. The Smiths were the first to get bored with this synth craze and pushed the pendulum back toward guitar-based rock music as we headed into the 1990s’ Britpop era. 

For me, the ’90s were the final frontier for truly novel sonic exploration. With the beauty of sampler technology, we arrived at trip-hop from roots in hip-hop, which was born from funk and, earlier, soul. By the end of the 20th century, the gene pool of genres had been just about saturated; we even had the cheek or necessity to venture the title “post-rock”, which is about as ambiguous as you can get. 

Modern pop music seems to have flipped focus toward pastiching successful formulae of yesteryear and giving the sound new structure or artistic direction while, to all intents and purposes, remaining within the same genre confines. Consequently, we find ourselves perpetually compartmentalising sub-genres into ever-narrowing niches. On the other extreme, we sometimes look to maintain loose-fitting legacy labels like “post-punk”. Considering post-punk was an era that ended in the ’80s should there not be enough prefix “posts” to build a picket fence twice encircling Greater London?

Bringing us up to the modern-day, we have well and truly grabbed sound by the scruff of the neck and flung it through a meat grinder. We are left with something decidedly granular as we wade through Spotify’s 5,071 sub-genres, which include titles such as Vaporwave, Deep Filthstep and Charred Death – whatever that is. 

Some streaming platforms have also begun looking into mood-based music classification as a modern alternative. So this begs the question: Should genres go the way of the dodo? 

The way I see it, we could go one of two ways. Firstly, we could continue to dice up genres into increasingly ambiguous or niche titles and create an innavigable quagmire of confusion and dissatisfaction. Or, as I see things panning out, we will get to a point where genres are so diffuse and granular that it will be easier to classify by mood. For example, “Relaxed” will contain ambient music and the very softest dream pop or indie music, while titles like “Morbid” or “Darkness” might swallow up titles like screamo and Charred Death. As we move toward these mood classifications, apical genres like jazz, country, blues, soul and electro might come back to the fore, but now only as descriptors.

Finally, I leave you with an example of Charred Death music to quench any lingering curiosity.

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