Who The Fuck Listens To Mood Playlists? (Part 1 of 3)

Are Music Genres Still Relevant?

Caveat — THIS ARTICLE IS FULL OF CONTRADICTION, DIGRESSION AND NASCENT OPINION.

According to one major streaming service, if you’re talking about genres you’re ‘out of touch’.

This statement, coming from a company which has been accused of being out of touch of with the reality of 99% of the artists that comprise those genres, is interesting.

Out of touch with who or what anyway? The ‘kids’? The streaming service itself? People who listen to mood playlists?

Nearly three quarters of the people who use Leaf Music are aged between 13–34 and we chat to hundreds of them daily in the app. Many of them refer to genres in order to communicate what kind of music they like when requesting song or playlist recommendations. A lot of them also ask us for happy songs and sad songs too. There’s no denying that mood playlists and their associated terminologies have become a new way for music consumers to discover, talk about and identify with music. This blog trilogy will explore what effect mood playlists are having on mainstream music culture and what the future holds for music discovery and consumption.

Suspended In Language

In a recent interview in a popular music magazine, a well known band said “…people don’t really care about genre any more. It’s not a thing.” This statement came after describing their album as a “weird, mad, alternative pop record”. See the contradiction there? It’s not their fault. We need language and general terms of reference for describing music, and genre terminology still provides a solid foundation for doing so — genres are still a ‘thing’. Unfortunately, as the great 19th century physicist Niels Bohr so eloquently expressed, we’re “suspended in language”. The language of the human species is simply inadequate for describing music and the way it makes us feel. No matter how evolutionary and malleable the language, the rate of change, complexity and innovation in music and the means of producing music, far outstrips it.

As musical genres become ever more intertwined and artists’ musical identities become increasingly amorphous, the very language we use to describe them is struggling to keep up. How do you accurately describe an artist like Flying Lotus, or even Radiohead’s new album, without possessing a highly sophisticated knowledge of music and mentioning a ridiculous number of genres? It starts to get slightly ludicrous.

With previously disparate cultures colliding and exploding in new artistic manifestations, musical boundaries are being realigned and reimagined. The furthest reaches of musical expression are now more schizophrenic than ever, past the event horizon of genre, where all known forms dissipate and cease to make sense, completely beyond logical description.

I heard somebody describing their music as ‘pagan gospel’ recently, which is brilliantly evocative but completely and utterly useless to the average music listener. I mean, what the fuck is that? I actually listened to it and I kind of ‘got it’ (its dark and gospelly) but still, you catch my drift. The ambivalent background music consumer probably finds this ‘exclusivity of language’ for describing music and the ‘sound’ of a band or artist a bit off-putting, pretentious and competitive.

I’m sure lots of people struggle to answer the following question — what type of music do you like? I’m equally sure they probably give the same kind of curt non-specific answer as me — all sorts really. It’s not that you don’t know, or that genres are no longer relevant to the answer, it’s just that you like too many different genres to be able to remember or name them all. But you don’t like all of them. Chances are that most people struggle to articulate exactly what type of music they like. It’s probably easier for them to name a generic mood. Everybody has their favourite broad types of genre and most people generally identify with the artists/bands behind the music and usually name a few of those, but surely you couldn’t just say something as lame as “I like happy music”…could you?

Mood terminology appears to be simplifying and democratising the language used to describe music and this ‘dumbing down’ of language is in-step with The Information Age. These conversations are no longer just the preserve of sophisticated aficionados or musicologists. In an age of at-your-finger-tips access to what feels like the entire catalogue of every piece of music ever recorded, mood playlists and terminology are helping the masses understand what kind of music they like, when they might like to listen to it and how it can help them to ‘feel’.

In an anxious, uncertain and digitised world of overwhelming choice and complexity, this new language may be acting as a kind of linguistic Feng Shui for the masses - helping them to articulate and deal with unconscious existential dilemma.

Now you can simply say “I like to listen to music whilst I’m running, something upbeat and happy” and that’s ok, it’s contextual, people can relate, you’re talking their language. Most people won’t ask, “yeah, but what genre of music do you like?”. They probably assume you like the same kind of music as they do — something fairly mainstream, not too heavy and not too random (generic term for something slightly out of the ordinary, moderately philosophical, or divergent from something the majority of people would say, do or consume).

Certain genres and sounds are typically associated with certain moods and can elicit or compliment those moods. In describing a piece of music, both the mood and the genre are part of the overall tapestry of description and give each other context — ‘dark and gospelly’ or ‘happy rock’ for example, give us a clearer sonic picture of what something sounds like than just ‘rock’ or ‘happy’. Mood and genre are symbiotic, they’re twins, conjoined twins that finish each others’ sentences.

Artists have never been fond of being pigeonholed and it’s true that the confines of old-guard genres have been smashed to bits over the past few decades. In their place exist myriads of shapeshifting sub-genres; genres such as rock or pop have morphed so far beyond their original incarnations they’re almost unrecognisable to the eras that gave birth to them. However, I believe that genres are still highly relevant for the more sophisticated music obsessives (however pretentious that sounds) and genre terminology remains crucial for describing, discovering and ultimately informing the creation of new forms of music.