Genre labels are endlessly frustrating. In most contexts, mentioning genre is innocuous at best and inane at worst; but when it comes to writing about media, genre is one of many aspects of language that so many writers get hung up on they stop themselves from having interesting conversations. I don’t think it can be fixed by complaining about it, though; I think it can only be fixed by showing you how to do it right.
The least-useful way to use genre is as a means of describing a piece of media.
Calling a story “fantasy,” for instance, at worst is going to create a very specific stereotypical image in the minds of audiences, and at best is going to broadly suggest that the story doesn’t totally conform to the rules of reality (which, unless the story is non-fiction, can also be defined differently by different audiences. I, for instance, have the phrase “this is fantasy” run through my head when I’m in the kitchen while my granddad is watching the incredibly-unrealistic live-action cop show, Rizzoli and Isles).
The most-useful way to use genre is as a means of describing lineage and intent.
For instance: even though the popular 90s alternative rock bands Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam all sound fairly different from one-another, all four of them came from Seattle and rose to prominence in the early-90s, sharing approaches to their image and sound which made them more comparable to one-another than to anything else which had existed in popular music at the time. All of these bands would play on the same radio networks and inspire many of the same musicians around the world to start making music in the same style immediately; and this new explosion of stuff that sounded kind-of in the vein of those four bands would be called “grunge;” and would play on the even more broadly-labeled “alternative rock” radio stations; which also jammed funk-rock like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith no More and hip-hop fusion like the Beastie Boys and Beck alongside these bands.
No matter how much something might sound like grunge in 2024, it wouldn’t mean anything to call a band “grunge” in the modern day because the genre was never meant to describe a sound as much as it was a cultural idea that existed in a specific place and time.
100gecs from St. Louis moved to LA in 2022 and made references to every conceivable alternative rock band and genre on their 10,000gecs album that dropped last year–creating music that sounds enough like grunge, nu-metal, funk rock, and everything else that’s been popular in alt-rock within the lifetimes of the musical duo, that you can definitely call it a part of the lineage of those genres; but ultimately, 100gecs is considered culturally as a part of the “hyperpop” genre, because of their similarity to other artists of the time, who also created collages from all of musical history into hyperactive music, made popular thru internet sharing.
Calling 100gecs “hyperpop” tells you absolutely nothing about how the group sounds; it only tells you about the place and time in which they came up. When hyperpop was at peak cultural relevance circa 2020, the playlists Spotify would put together never gave me anything which actually sounded enough like 100gecs that I could get into it because, broadly, they weren’t really that similar-sounding. It was more so the approach to sound–the sonic palettes drawn from, rather than the personality of individual artists or the songwriting styles and structures, which defined hyperpop as an aesthetic.
Sometimes a genre can be more specifically defined by its sound; but it’s only because the sound was an integral part of that genre’s cultural moment.
When swing was huge, it meant hundreds and hundreds of songs borrowing very similar structural elements to create the same vibe; and so the swing sound feels more easily identifiable and imitable; but it also means that it’s basically impossible to create a truly “new” swing song. A genre like this, which is so specific and so momentarily massive, is inevitably exhausted inside of a year, and then copies itself forever because the formula works. A few small tweaks can make enough difference to fans of a genre that it’s not quite like listening to the same song a billion times; but it will never have the same impact with general audiences that it did in its moment because another thing will inevitably come along to get most of them excited all over again.
Hype cycles and pop media exist because most things are not really FOR most people. A lot of stuff seems like it might be for you–and you can flirt, dance, date or fuck with it for a while, but you might eventually lose intrigue. It takes a lot to maintain even an up-close relationship–and so the inherently distant, conceptual relationships of art and audience are that much harder to stabilize. You’ll always remember your first, and so on (metaphors, I hope you get the point).
For the last 100 years the most easily-accessible thing seems to be cute animal characters like Hello Kitty, Snoopy, Pokemon, Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, and so on (anything Paranoia Agent was made to parody). These are such iconic pop art attractions because they are so easy both to care about and to dismiss. They have a frivolity that allows you to put them away, which you can’t do with your pets, friends, family and job; but also an immediacy to their attraction that lets you get excited to see them over and over again with small changes. The difference, though, is of noticing your girlfriend did something with her hair and thinking it looks good vs. a board of directors and artists working tirelessly round-the-clock designing hair ornaments cute enough to justify churning 100,000 plushies out of a sweatshop somewhere.
Most of these times, the characters and creations are not predictably successful. It’s almost impossible to engineer pop without a pop sensibility. People make fun of pop stars that have five writers and ten producers in the studio on their songs, but it’s always the same five writers and ten producers who can actually make something successful. You need to have an innate pop sensibility in order to successfully create pop art consistently.
Pop is identifiable immediately, because it’s defined by its inability to be missed. If you have to look for it, it’s not pop. It’s pop because it popped up in front of you one day. When you follow a trusted source for media recommendations like me, you aren’t looking for pop: you’re looking for something too deep to find with the time and energy at your disposal. You find someone with good taste and a lot of time on their hands like me who can dig all day in the tunnels of the artistic underground and bring things to the surface for you.
It’s not impossible that something pops up in a bigger way after the seal of the Earth above it has been disrupted; but that’s when we get to the topic of boogiepop, and the meat of the matter of this writing.