What kind of music do you play? A seemingly innocent question, but is really loaded with complications and pitfalls. I know I’m not alone when I have trouble answering this one. Many musicians find themselves torn between giving the simple answer or the complex one. It is rare that one would enjoy, and be influenced by, one type of music to the exclusion of all others.
I understand the need for people to compartmentalise as a shortcut to making sense of their world, but this need is at odds with our need to be understood. Sure we could rattle off the closest genre, jazz, hip-hop, punk, world beat, though we’ll be left with the unsettling feeling that the questioner doesn’t have the full story. We’ll often add, “… but I have a lot of Rockabilly influences” or “… with a Latin twist.” or “but with a lot of Frank Zappa mixed in.” As for myself, I was raised on Folk music, taught Classical on the piano, and Blues on the guitar. I got caught up in the Grunge and Alternative movement during my teens, and later turned more to Worldbeat, Garage Revival, and Anti-folk. Yet this still doesn’t include everything that has contributed to my musical being, and frankly I still don’t know what to call the music I produce. Rock may be a catch-all but as I mentioned above, it’s not quite the full picture.
A list of known genres is huge and splintered, as encompassing descriptions are riven and riven again to describe a style with ever increasing accuracy. Let’s say that you produce electronica music. Now what kind? Synthpop, Glitch, Chiptune? Something else? How about Metal? Black, Speed, Doom? It soon becomes an exercise in distinguishing subtle taxonomic shifts in tempo, or lyrical content, or any other characteristic. Sometimes the variants are so finely divided that only those thoroughly steeped in the subculture would be aware of the differences. There’s the sticking point. By giving an name to the thing we allow ourselves to form community. The music now has a stable identification that can be defined, related to, discussed, altered, and displayed. It becomes a banner that unites a ragtag group of fans and musicians signifying their belonging. Such a growth can be seen in the example of Filk music.
When someone asks what music do you play they hope to gain a better understanding of what flag you fly. Which really speaks to how much we use music as an identity signpost. Not to sound obvious but music is a form of expression. What you express and how you express it tells the world about you as a person. Music is a well understood and recognised shorthand for categorising types of people in this modern social landscape. Which may be why I don’t like answering the question. I don’t want to give someone the Coles notes version of me. I’m afraid something will be lost or misunderstood in the transaction. As musicians we all have that need to express ourselves. We try to do this fully yet succinctly in the brief time that a song lasts. I’m not surprised that we’d rather not a label be stuck to what we do so that we can be summed up in even less time, thought, and accuracy.
There is no easy answer to the question. No one is ever as simple as the box you put them in, and everyone is resistant to being boxed. When pressed to answer the query “What kind of music do you play?” the best answer I can give is “My own.”
