Fluidity Across Genres is Possible
by Mehmet Vurkaç
For listeners, genre labels serve as shortcuts for disclosing our musical tastes or our impressions of an artist’s work. It is much easier to say “progressive metalcore” than “soft ballad sections alternating with death-metal growls, with many tempo and meter changes” or to say “post-punk” than “disaffected vocals over a reverby bassline and jangly, brooding guitar.”
Genre labels also enable companies to market music effectively.
But labels can constrain artistic expression (through the expectations of fans) and artistic exploration (through categorization by the media and distributors). And although all artists experience these restrictions to some degree, the limits placed on Black artists, and even Black fans, are much tighter.
Since the 1880s, the music industry has functioned through the false dichotomy that Black people perform Black music and white people perform white music. When Black artists make “white music” such as punk, metal, and country, they typically don’t get the same level of record-company support and rarely achieve the same popularity as race–genre-aligned artists: Compare the longevity of Living Coloür and Bad Brains with that of Metallica and Green Day.
The irony is that country and bluegrass have African roots and rock music came out of the innovations of Black musicians like Rosetta Tharpe, Illinois Jacquet, Big Jay McNeely, Willie Kizart, and Louis Jordan. When the phonograph was invented, a variety of music was sung, played, listened to, and danced to by both white and Black people. Early American music belonged to all, but academics and the phonograph and sheet-music industries imposed a racial framework (pop vs. folk, blues vs. country) on a complex and dynamic culture.
Rolling Stone–NPR journalist Ward starts The History of Rock & Roll by revealing that late-19th-century American music was defined more by its social functions than by race or region. This fluidity of who sang and played, and who paid to listen, suited neither sheet-music publishers competing with piano manufacturers for the disposable income of well-to-do whites nor academicians establishing new fields of study by segmenting and defining music by race and region. Contemporary scholars have chronicled numerous instances of mostly northern academicians seeking to essentialize southern listeners and musicians by downplaying the intermingling of southern vs. northern and Black vs. white music. Similarly, early-20th-century song collectors cherry-picked repertoires to exaggerate “the sharp contrast between [B]lack and white music” so as to go along with “theories about separate racial cultures and cranial capacities.” These century-long projects to segregate music have been so successful that race-aligned notions of genre are still mostly unquestioned.
It’s no surprise, then, that neither the acclaimed excursions of Lionel Richie, Pointer Sisters, and Ray Charles into country music nor the popularity of, for instance, Charley Pride, Darius Rucker, Mickey Guyton, and Brittney Spencer have been enough to prepare America for recent country-crossover successes of Black non-country artists.
Reactions to Jon Batiste’s classical Grammy suggest we have not come far since the days of separate charts and separate stores for race music — a term an Okeh Records executive coined circa 1921 “because we were afraid to advertise Negro records.” This term was used to denote music made by or for African Americans throughout the 1920s, ’30s, and ‘40s.
The imposition of racial genre labels is not only historically inaccurate; it’s artistically stifling. The musical tastes of musicians tend to be omnivorous. Musicians, furthermore, have always learned from, influenced, and even copied each other across racial, temporal, and national boundaries. For these reasons, it’s not unusual for genre labels to cause discomfort among musicians who see their music as uncategorizable. (Robert Smith has long maintained that the Cure was not a goth band. Lemmy insisted Motörhead did not play heavy metal.) Famous or not, musicians tend to dislike mutually exclusive genre labels: Riot-grrrl can’t also be electro. If it’s soul, it can’t be country.
Style, on the other hand, thrives in diversity. The difference between style and genre is exemplified by the terms “rap” and “hip hop.” The genre of hip hop includes such stylistic elements as rapping, scratching, sampling, and funk beats. Many of those elements have been used in genres such as metal, jazz, and contemporary classical.
The blues, on the other hand, is both a style and a genre. While many rock and jazz tunes follow the 12-bar-blues style, there is also the genre ‘blues’, whose stylistic elements include dominant chords, the blues scale, and the shuffle beat. Yet, all of these show up prominently in country, funk, alternative rock, and jazz. The blues flows freely across race and space. Limits make it into a genre.
Another Black American form, funk, is also a style and a genre. Funk drumming forms the basis of jazz–rock, pop, hip hop, trip hop, house, and most rock. There is also the genre ‘funk’, exemplified by the music of Funkadelic, James Brown, early Commodores, and the Meters, to name a few, with staccato Clavinets, ineffable drumbeats, and tight horn arrangements.
Stylistic elements can be as obvious as a Latin percussion section in thrash metal and as subtle as the articulation of a single note. Tigran Hamasyan’s syntheses of dubstep, metal, and Armenian music in his piano work are excellent examples of stylistic fluidity. Having originated in particular places and times, stylistic elements are available to all musicians who want to infuse essences from those places and times into their music. Thus we see that styles, emerging naturally from the interactions of individuals, cultures, and genres, lend themselves to quoting, interpreting, interpolating, and fusing because they carry the essences of the many ways musicians shape sound. Genres, on the other hand, are more likely to be assigned by critics, fans, or record companies, imposing limits on musical expression by labeling whole careers.
Janet Jackson’s Black Cat and nearly every track on OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below are examples of genre-crossing brilliance. Nonetheless, it’s usually white bands who get away with challenging “the white rock establishment” by stepping far outside of genre boundaries. Queen, for example, ran the gamut from waltzes and skiffle to metal and psychedelia on their early albums to constant abuse from the music press, but somehow found lasting commercial success. Fluidity across genres without commercial suicide is possible, but far less accessible to Black artists. Fishbone virtuosically fused metal with funk, ska, and soul for decades, yet never became a household name. Similarly, bands like Death (the three Black brothers who played punk before the Sex Pistols did), SOUL GLO, 24/7 Spyz, Subject to Change, and Family Stand, who reject racial segregation of music have been under-promoted for decades.
Artists have been fighting this battle since the racialization of American music began. Due to their unrelenting work and perhaps to the democratizing influence of internet and audio technologies, genre-crossing is no longer a certain ticket to obscurity. Lil Nas X, Shaboozey, and Beyoncé’s country hits are not outliers. We are experiencing nationwide willingness to just listen and enjoy rather than worry about genres and races. If we continue recognizing artists for all they can do, we will find greater creativity unleashed and broad freedom across genres.
Mehmet Vurkaç is an Istanbul-born semi-professional samba, funk, and taiko drummer, aspiring bassist, and student of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian music. He is also an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Seattle University.
