When I hear the word genre, I think of old books and stories or black and white movies. I never understood why this was, I just simply accepted it. After reading Devit's article, it does make a bit more sense why I associate genre with old things. This is because each genre as we know it, is like a pillar. There is a non-fiction pillar, a fantasy pillar, one for horror, one for drama, the list goes on and on. These pillars are made up of individual works of literature or film that provide the cement, or marble, or clay, or whatever you want these pillars to be made of....even cheese if thats your sorta thing. I prefer parmesan. Not sure if anyone can tell, but I'm hungry.
Sorry for the sidetrack, but any time a new piece is written, recorded, filmed, or constructed in any other way, it is labeled by some critics or the creators themselves as a certain genre. Therefore, we are constantly maintaining what Devit calls "existing power structures and dynamics" and providing them with what they need for the continuation of these labels. Something about that bothers me. I think it's wrong for someone to determine what category your work can or cannot fall into. Why do we need labels anyway, all its done throughout history is kept us apart and segregated.
One last thing I'd like to comment on is music. I would to give music of the past 10 years a round of applause. This may be the only category of artistic creativity that has defied the rules and regulations for genres. In fact, in the past 10 years, we have established an entirely new kind of music that falls into no previously existing category...EDM, or electric dance music. Other than EDM, all you have to do is turn on the radio and you can hear all sorts of music that you would have trouble categorizing. You've got rappers spitting flows over guitars and drums, Justin Beibers voice over edm, you even have Kanye West singing beautiful hooks to songs while letting loose all his ignorance over the following verse... I LOVE IT
ReplyDeleteHello Nick, yeah it’s crazy to think that there are so many genres, each consisting of very detailed and exclusive material. Divett’s article elaborates the meaning and importance of each genre. Over time, I have noticed that sources, whether its music, movies, books etc, have expanded the amount of genres they offer over time which I found was ridiculous. For example to me, hip hop, rap and trap music WAS (months/years ago) pretty much all the same type of music to me not too long ago. So I asked myself, this sounds like the same type of music. Why create different genres? It will only complicate everything and make it harder to look for music. But now I have grown into the reality behind the expenditure of genres and their significant meaning. The reason why I spoke about music was because I really took interest in what you said about music and I definitely agree. It’s great to have the type of genres we have now.
- Orlando Galan
Hello I also enjoy the musical genres....But I guess I'll comment on the written genres that Divett talks about. I too never gave written genres much thought. The only real genres I could originally think of were book reports or just a research paper. The more I thought about, I realized I didn't know much about what a genre really is beyond just a pillar! I find your point really interesting when you question why we have to categorize all writings. I think if we didn't have labels for different types of writings, then us as readers would be more open to interrupt it without any expectations.
ReplyDeleteNow music genres are amazing to look at. Even beneath each big genre of music there are plenty of smaller sub-genres. Its interesting to try and look at music genres the way Divett looks at written genres. Like why do rap songs all have a similar beat or why some instruments show up in some genres but not others.
-Nick Thompson