screamo indie concrete crunk housecore

i'll no doubt show my age with the following rant, but remember when there were, like, i don't know -- seven classifications of pop music? "rock" covered pretty much everything from bananarama to bob marley to zappa. then you had "soul", which included r&b, gospel, funk, beach music, and early rock'n'roll. "country" covered anything that had too much twang to be "rock" or "soul". "jazz", "classical" and "soundtracks" were satellites off in their own little music galaxies. the classifications didn't always make sense, but at least you had a limited number of places you had to look in order to find something. (yes, kids, there used to be brick and mortar "record stores" with bins and bins of recordings in various tangible formats, like "cassette tapes", "compact discs", and "vinyl". no google search. no mp3 clips. no digital catalogues of releases. and we felt lucky to have that analog existence. we knew the value of a limited 7" pressing, let me tell you.)

at some point, the catch-all supercategories began to be overshadowed by subclassifications, which was cool... broadening the musical horizons of the music-buying public and perhaps inspiring artists to explore new music frontiers as well. the subcategories were manageable by and, for the most part, actually made sense to consumers. for a time, they actually *helped* you find what you wanted and browse new stuff you might like. there were some weird subcats sometimes, but most of the time they preceded a genre which was about to blow up and go mainstream (or at least lucratively culty).

i was able to ride the subcat train for a long time. no prob. the more i drifted away from commercial radio and toward independently owned stores and college playlists, the more bold new musical genres i discovered. all good.

i'm not sure exactly when i got off the train and was left at the station, but the subcat train is long gone. the now-dead local annual sleazefest helped me get a pretty good grip on various subsets of modern punk and rockabilly. (nothing illustrates "psychobilly" like a performance involving a redneck guitarist wearing nothing but a dixie cup.)

but i knew i was in trouble when i started coming across terms like "twee" and "emo". and as i peruse the available musical genres on myspace, i know i am a clueless old-school dork. some of these have got to be totally made-up: concrete, electroacoustic (how can something be electro *and* acoustic?), hyphy (hyphy? what?), emotronic, shoegaze (wait, i think i ran into some leftover shoegaze fans before the sxsw japan showcase. i thought they were emo at the time.), visual (i think someone's getting their senses confused)... my favorite one is "screamo". (i hope somewhere out there is a band named "screamin' emo".) i like that they have a category for "melodramatic popular song". 'cause you want to find those bands. and apparently anyone can make a new genre by just adding "-core" to an existing genre. myspace also has a status emoticon for "crunk". i didn't think crunk was a state of mind. drink it, yes. be it? hmmm. then again, i didn't think "architect" was a verb. what do i know?

you can also choose "pirate" as your mood. so i guess if you are working with a mood spectrum that includes pirate and jedi as well as "exanimate", nothing is impossible.