Music Genres and Innovations

I spent last week at the Free State Festival in Lawrence, Kansas, my week-long summer camp. The festival started as a film festival, but now includes films, art, ideas, and music—a great event that helps make Lawrence a special place. The films, concerts, talks, and exhibits I attended have given me lots to talk about in future blog posts, and I’ll comment more on films and music and ideas from lectures in future weeks.
 
This week I want just to note how genres are named in music. I think it may be different from genre labels in text—and may be revealing about genres and individual instantiations of genres.
 
You’ve noticed, I’m sure, the proliferation of labels for different genres of music. So here are descriptions from the Free State Festival website of the featured band for each night. (If you link to the Festival’s description of each, which I’ve linked on their name, you’ll find a video of each group in addition to the ones I include below)
 

• Kris Kristofferson : “chart-topping hits,” “country”

Kristofferson is pretty simply labeled as country, multiple times. Of course, he’s been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. But the description notes that his songs “helped redefine country songwriting.”

• Blind Boy (Jerron) Paxton has no genre label in his description except for being a “multi-instrumentalist” who plays music from the 1920s. 

But if you search him on Apple Music he is labeled simply as “blues,” and his own website quotes reviews, all of which categorize him in acoustic blues. His performance was linked to a showing of the film American Epic, which traces recordings from the 1920s of “folk, blues, country and ethnic songs,” so that may have influenced the way the website describes him, but Paxton’s performance itself matched his website’s description of his work as the blues.

• ​JD McPherson “vintage-sounding rock with nods to ‘40s R&B, blues, and ‘50s rockabilly."

JD McPherson is an interesting (and I thought great) singer/songwriter and probably the most difficult to classify. His show displayed all of the description and more, with an incredibly talented and innovative band to go with his songs. A review quoted on the Festival website agrees, calling his first album “a rockin', bluesy, forward-thinking gold mine that subtly breaks the conventions of most vintage rock projects.” See what you think of the genres in these two songs by JD McPherson (you can probably tell that this was my favorite discovery of the week)

The outdoor show on Friday night included five different bands. It featured

• The Americans, who “perform original rock & roll with deep roots in traditional American music.”
  

(They also played the first dance at Reese Witherspoon’s wedding—an interesting genre in itself?) Hearing their show, I wasn’t so sure that they innovated as much as T Bone Burnett claims in putting The Americans as part of “genius twenty-first century musicians that are reinventing American heritage music for this century.”  But rock & roll with some traditional American vibe, yeah.

And then there was

• Public Enemy "hip-hop"
  

Yes, Public Enemy. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Public Enemy. They topped off another street show Saturday night. According to the Festival website, Public Enemy has been “transforming hip-hop music,” but the description and included quotes from reviews also reference rap, a distinction music critics would argue about at length.

Can you believe what I got to experience at the Free State Festival? And that was just the featured music. I haven't even begun to rave about Wes Urbaniak or Molly Gene One Whoaman Band

I’m no music critic—to overstate my expertise—but I listen to a wide range of genres (and loved each of these shows). I can’t say I listen to every genre of music, because the genres and labels keep changing. Individual bands and musicians sometimes claim unique labels (another topic for another time).  
 
But it’s interesting how this festival’s website, designed to attract as many audience members as possible, classified even these most innovative artists. Every artist merits both a genre label and a claim for innovation in that genre. Public Enemy may have transformed their genre, but they are hip-hop. Blind Boy Paxton gets a time label—1920s music—so perhaps that is his innovation. Kristofferson gets a clear country label, but that’s a genre he helped to redefine. The rock and roll bands get perhaps the most complex labels, putting together rock and roll with different time periods of “American” music, and each claimed strong innovative credit.
 
So maybe we want our music to be both clearly categorized in a genre and innovative within that genre. Certainly musicians, like writers, often resist genre labels. But the innovations here come out of the category they’re innovating within. I’ve argued before (more in Chapter 5 Creative Boundaries in my book on Writing Genres) that creativity requires constraint, that composers need the defined territory for us to notice and be able to interpret their variations from that territory. I guess I’ve written myself into another repetition of that claim. Genre is interesting for both how it creates commonalities and how it allows differences. A productive tension.
 
Do your favorite musicians resist their genre labels? Do you?
And don't you want to come to the Free State Festival next June? I'll be there.