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Friday 24 June 2011

The Worst Genre Ever, Pt 1

This is a new segment, in which i will be comparing genres of awful music in a March Madness style tournament to see which one is the worst of all. The genres are as follows:

Black Metal
Twee Pop
Crunkcore
Flyover Rock
pop-country
Digital Hardcore
BEP-core
Bro Tunes


Here goes nothing. 

Round 1: Black Metal vs. Twee pop

Black Metal

What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say black metal? If you said a bunch of Norwegian dudes in makeup burning churches, worshiping Satan, and taking Polaroids of their lead singers gory suicides, you're on the right track. Aesthetically speaking, black metal is without a doubt the stupidest genre of music (and possibly facet of humanity) to ever exist. Essentially, the whole thing is a game of D&D gone waaaaaaay too fucking far. Much like your average North American D&D geek, these Scandinavian metal gods get together to dress up all scary, pretend to summon the occult, and speculate about how ridiculously cool it would be to rape and pillage the shores of middle-earth. However, the main difference between the D&D enthusiast and the black metal enthusiast is that D&D players have some kind of “off” switch, which gives them the ability to separate their role-played character from their actual lives. Black metal musicians on the other hand, have been known to burn down churches, kill each other, and do a whole bunch of other shit too weird to get into detail about. And while the vast majority of black metal kids don't have the balls (or sociopath tendencies) to perpetrate this shit, they seem to think it's all pretty cool. That, and a lot of them seem to openly embrace racism and misogyny.

Black metal gets way more attention for it's aesthetic than it's music. In fact, a lot of people don't even know what black metal really sounds like. However, this is most likely because musically, black metal is really nothing to talk about. So what are it's musical traits? Well, picture five of the dudes I just described writing music together. You're pretty much spot on. Think 3 Inches of Blood meets Anal Cunt – shrieked, incoherent vocals praising Satan and worshiping rune magic, over top of sloppy, tremolo picked viking riffs and unrelenting blast beats. Essentially, nothing anyone without severe brain damage would enjoy listening to.

Twee-Pop

Do you know who Calvin Johnson is? No, not the dope-ass receiver for the Detroit Lions – Calvin Johnson the musician. In Olympia, WA's late 80's- early 90's music scene, Calvin Johnson was essentially the coolest dude around. He and his band Beat Happening made all the rules in that town, and to be “in”, you needed to be a fan of lo-fi, DIY indie pop with no redeemable commercial value whatsoever. Beat Happening was far too cool for record labels, band managers, recording their shit properly, or writing anything remotely resembling a song. Yet, oddly enough, there were a whole lot of bands envious of Beat Happening at the time. One of these jealous poseur bands featured a scraggly young weirdo by the name of Kurt Cobain. It's safe to say that in Olympia in '88, Cobain was a barely visible shitstain on the underpants of cool that was Beat Happening. But when you compare the music that this scrawny dork poseur Cobain wrote to the work of the artistically championed Calvin Johnson, you can only come to one conclusion – there must have been some really good heroin floating around Olympia from 87-92.

However, it would be foolish to judge a genre on one band. As big as Beat Happening was in the world of Twee pop, they are arguably one of the shittiest bands in the genre (or ever). Their ilk, however, aren't a whole lot better. Most of these bands sound like a musical manifestation of whatever the hell was going on in Bryan Wilson's head for the better part of the 70's. Essentially, most twee-pop sounds like the Mama's and the Papa's being recorded in a roller rink bathroom, live from the floor, with two input tracks and poorly tuned instruments. For the record, most of these bands knew they sounded like complete shit, which in their heads meant that their bands were avant-garde and chocked full of artistic integrity. However to most normal people, this is the most pretentious notion of all time, and only makes these bands seem even more like self-conscious, talent-less attention-whores than they already were.

So, which genre is worse? Unfortunately (because Beat Happening really, really sucks), I'm going to have to go with black metal. It goes without saying that you can score a point for twee on the aesthetics. Also, when twee was combined with shoegaze, 80's hardcore, and other slightly more competent genres of music, some pretty good bands emerged (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Meat Puppets), while the only bands influenced by black metal are arguably worse than black metal bands themselves. Finally, you have to understand that twee musicians purposely wrote structure-less, poorly recorded songs. So while twee musicians were extremely pretentious (and perhaps covering up a lack of talent), one can assume that they had to have a basic idea of what makes a good song in order to consciously ignore it. Black metal musicians, on the other hand, are either incapable of processing that idea, or too busy doing their makeup and drinking goat's blood to care.

2 comments:

  1. Lots of good black metal influenced hardcore.

    ReplyDelete
  2. HAHA...True..Panda makeup clowns dancing in the forests in tights...
    Anyone can make BM music.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1P2HN7aXrU&feature=relmfu

    ReplyDelete