I admit it. I’m horrible at making playlists. I’ve never quite been able to capture “the vibe”, so instead, I resort to titling my playlists after the genre of the songs in them. “Rock” is a ten hour hodgepodge of everything from Pink Floyd to Modest Mouse, “indie folk” consists solely of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Mountain Goats and “indie pop” is an indulgent collection of TikTok audios.
I’m a culprit of thinking of music strictly in terms of genre. I’m not the most open-minded (I tell people I only listen to genres that use guitars, which is not entirely an exaggeration). And part of me feels what music critic Simon Reynolds coins “retromania” — an indescribable nostalgia for a musical past that I was born too late to experience. I love old music, because I understand it. If I’m in the mood for disco, I put on a ’70s playlist. If I’m in a bad mood, I’ll play ’90s music for Britpop. I have my airpods in? I’m probably listening to ’80s new wave.
But what exactly is the music of the 2000s?
Pop? Hip hop? R&B? Maybe pop-punk, which fell quickly out of fashion in the early 2010s? A case could be made for any of these genres, but, regardless, all of them are iterations of genres created in earlier decades — even pop-punk seems to have just been a spin on new wave. But even since the early 2000s, music has evolved as a more fluid concept. From the late 2010s and up to current day, a new cultural phenomenon has emerged: Genre-blurring has become a popular sound. This is not to say that genre-bending did not occur in early decades of music. Prince stands as one of the most successful genre-benders in music history — traversing through the realms of rock, pop, hip hop, R&B, soul and funk with ease — but regardless, the 1980s was not itself a culture of genre-bent music. Though artists like Prince were experimental, the ’80s still had an identity rooted in genre. This cannot be said about the 2000s.
Sure, this might mean that the 2000s doesn’t quite use music as a cultural zeitgeist in the same way that the ’70s used disco to capture the decade’s cultural liberation or the way the ’80s used new wave to define its spirit of bold self-expression. But perhaps the emergence of this “post-genre” can encapsulate the spirit of the decade in a way that strict genre-conformity can’t: from post-genre comes innovative spirit, collective individuality and a sense of musical globality.
To define post-genre, we should first understand what a genre is at all. Sociologically, “genre” seems to be a fluid concept, influenced just as much by the characteristics of a creative piece as it is by people’s aesthetic expectations. We expect that the guy with the cowboy hat and acoustic guitar is going to be a country singer just as much as we expect the book with the haunted house cover to be a horror novel. In the past, these expectations were inextricable from race; white music and black music were specific, tangible categorizations. This kind of profiling still exists and is still intertwined with the modern music scene. Upon winning Best Rap Album for the emotionally-wrought, genre-bending album Igor in 2020, Tyler the Creator explained his disdain for the title of “urban,” saying, “On one side, I’m very grateful that what I made could just be acknowledged in a world like this. But also, it sucks that whenever we, and I mean guys that look like me, do anything that’s genre-bending, they always put it in a ‘rap’ or ‘urban’ category. … I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. To me, it’s just a politically correct way to say the N-word. Why can’t we just be in pop?”
Perhaps, then, the problem is with how we see genre. To place music into rigid boxes not only limits expression but also perpetuates stereotypes. We are no longer in the era of record shops. It’s time to stop pretending that genre exists in the same way it did in the past. With the advent of streaming services, music has become much less genre-based and much more vibe-based. My playlists are objectively bad because they do not take into account vibe in the same way that “hot girl gym pump” or “italian summer romance” or “a moody autumn at your elite boarding school” do.
Post-genre frees music from the limits of genre and also creates a culture of experimentation. Cross-cultural musical inspiration is not only common but encouraged, with artists like Tyla introducing South African influences to Western pop music. Streaming services, digital music platforms and, more recently, TikTok have revolutionized how we are able to consume music. As music globalizes, its role in society expands as well; music no longer stands as a cultural landmark but as an intercultural bridge. And that — not the invention of a genre but the melding of them — is what defines modern music.
Yaelin Hough is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected].