Ian King - Appetite for Definition: An A-Z Guide to Rock Genres

For Jessica and Elliott

Contents

A young boy and his parents stand quietly before three stage costumes once worn by David Bowie that bookend his creative prime. On the left is a glinting red bodysuit with the silver and blue lightning bolt down the back designed by Freddie Burretti for the 1972 tour for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. On the right, a mannequin wears the grey one-button suit with a crescent moon breast pocket that Peter Hall crafted for the Serious Moonlight tour in 1983. In between is another memento from the Ziggy Stardust tour, a flowing yellow, red, and purple top both new-agey and out of this world. The tweenager turns to his mother and asks, Are all musicians really small?

It is a Saturday morning in late March at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The day before was an unseasonably warm seventy-three degrees and the only clouds in the sky were contrails, but todays weather is closer to what one would expect in Cleveland this time of year. I. M. Peis black glass pyramid rests starkly against a grey sky and a grey Lake Erie. The ring of engraved paving bricks in front of the entrance is filled with hundreds of tributes, sentiments and shout-outs: WHO ARE THE BRAIN POLICE?, ONLY UFO CAN ROCK ME!, SLADE, SWEET, T REX THE BEST, SKYNYRDS IN THE HOUSE!, and well over a dozen various puns on Pink Floyds Another Brick in the Wall. Every short rock-and-roll slogan you could come up with has been immortalized here by fans and charter members. There is a real, heartening affection emanating from the ground.

Patti Smiths Gloria begins to play over the outside PA, the quiet piano chords leaning in the wind gusting in off the water, and even after forty years the opening line, Jesus died for somebodys sins but not mine, still feels a bit risqu at this volume in a public setting. Inside, the escalator leads down to the ticket lines, which are already filling with people wearing old band T-shirts, except for the Pittsburghers who all identify themselves with black-and-yellow football and hockey jerseys. Given the nature of a pyramids shape, the most square-footage is of course found at the bottom, so the history of rock and roll lies in the basement of King Tuts spaceship.

Stepping through the first door, Rock and roll is a form of popular music are practically the first words you read. The origins are laid out in detail. There are the first uses of rock in song titles: Trixie Smiths My Daddy Rocks Me, where the term was first used as slang for sex, as well as Duke Ellingtons Rockin in Rhythm and Wynonie Harris Good Rockin Tonight. Muddy Waters guitar, nicknamed the Hoss, is encased in glass with other legendary axes. The blues, gospel, and country music are all given their due for contributing to the genesis of rock and roll.

Then comes a hallway with a ramp that leads down to four separate booths with touchscreen displays where visitors can search through the big, basic rock and pop music categories, jumping from the roots to The Beat Goes On with no moment in between where it all crystallized into one rock n roll. The sequence of exhibits seems to be almost an admission that a single definition is too difficult and elusive. However, at the end of the Dont Knock the Rock hallway, which is lined with stories about moral outrage directed toward early rock-and-roll music that illustrate how far the line has been pushed forward since the 1950s, comes a unifying answer in big red capital letters: ELVIS. Elvis is the undisputed king of rockn roll states the wall placard near the screen showing a short film about his life. However you personally feel about this assertion, as general rock wisdom it is likely only to get more ingrained with the passage of time.

The lesson turns to geography in the Cities exhibit that comes next, leading visitors through the scenes in places like Memphis, Detroit, London and Liverpool (lumped together, surely to the mild dismay of visitors from both), San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The section is not without a few somewhat morbid artifacts: pieces of the plane Otis Redding died in, a copy of Kurt Cobains death certificate. The mood lightens up in the next room over, where visitors can take a gander at bric-a-brac such as those David Bowie outfits, Jimi Hendrixs family couch, Paul Wellers punk-rock trading card, Liz Phairs Tascam recorder, a relatively modest Flavor Flav neck clock, and a nondescript hat worn by a guy from the indie rock band Cloud Nothings.

From recordings of old blues singles to bits of apparel worn by modern pop stars, it is an admirably curated stroll through a chaotic story written simultaneously by thousands of people in hundreds of places. Keeping the chronology safe and tidy behind glass cases gives the Hall an impression of authority over what was once the sound of youthful rebellion. The truth, however, is more unsettling. No one is really in charge. Those at the top of the music industry ladder can and will keep honoring their own, but theyll always have to deal with widespread griping every time they continue to pass up the Smiths, Iron Maiden, King Crimson, and probably one of your personal favorites. They may have control over the coronations, but the conversation is well out of their hands.

When rock and roll grew from fringe youth interest to mainstream commercial and cultural force in the 1950s, it was essentially one straightforward, if also new and therefore vaguely defined, style of music. In the 1960s, different branches would sprout and shoot off in myriad directions: towards folk music, back through the blues, into psychedelic sounds, and the roots of heavy metal. It only became more complicated from there. The 1970s saw the rise of not just more new genres but reactionary genres: the prog-rock poison and the punk antidote.

Ten years later, genres multiplied as artists came up with more ways to reconfigure their tastes, influences, wardrobes and hairstyles. Music writers and fans alike were also becoming increasingly creative as they strove to discover and classify every new trend. Genres were often a combination of organic creative growth and music-press manufacturing.

Today, dozens upon dozens of genres, some with more to substantiate them than others, have worked their way into the rock dialogue. There are scores of music websites and blogsand even some print magazines leftfueled by trend-seeking writers who delight in coming up with new names for new sounds or new names for old sounds, if they decide that history didnt get it right the first time.

Some of these labels merely linger as passing fads while others become recognized as genuine movementseven if those movements might last for only a summer or are carried out by just a few like-minded bands. Other genres are tied less to a time and place and carry on even today. The names they have been given (or stuck with) can sometimes be maddeningly vague, or oddly specific. Some subcategories have their own subcategories. More kinds of metal exist than you can shake a skull at.

Theres obviously purists with every genre, says Brandon Stosuy, editor in chief at Kickstarters The Creative Independent and a music curator. But I feel with metal theres a real splitting of hairs that goes beyond maybe other genres, where people will say, Yeah, this is black metal, or this is black-into-death metal, or this is crust punk or crusty doom or whatever. Stosuy understands how a listener could be into classic doom metal but not any other metal genre, though at the same time feels that the micro-level of niche that metal taxonomy reaches can get a little ridiculous. Before the Internet, maybe youd get your copy of Maximum Rocknroll or MetalEdge, then next month youd get another one, but it wasnt a daily update. Now you can update things daily, its just such a quicker moving thing, and I think thats really a huge part of why there are so many genre divisions now. Sometimes people will even say something offhandedly and then it gets coined a new subgenre.