I’ve been listening to Shelved by Genre and was talking to my wife about my autistic interest in musical genre and i had i think a minor breakthrough about the way i relate to genre? ‘cause i am highly invested in and influenced by what would be considered avant-garde art and thought around art in various forms, and avant-garde in its effort to move outside of Boxes and Expectations tends to want to separate itself from the conception of genre. Which has never quite sat right with me.
The usual line is that genre is a descriptive category to easily describe a thing and what it has in common with other things. This is true, but it also doesn’t quite capture why I care about genre so deeply. Because genre is history.
I am a deeply referential creator, which reflects both my interest in collagist forms of art and the way my autistic brain works. And to me genre is important because it gives a lineage to the way we think about art, a history of influence and conversation. I am not particularly interested in defining post-punk by its musical tones and patterns. Instead I am interested in defining post-punk as arising out a historical moment, of being in conversation with first-wave punk, of conversing forward to indie rock, etc. Genre is a discursive history to me.
This is important! Yes in part because I am a referential writer, I love to be the angel of history, to write and read works that talk through and explore the pile-up of history and the way we relate to it. But also because remembering and working through our history is how we keep moving, how we continue to explore, and how we resist the deadening nature of art under capitalism.
Yes, we should be skeptical of clean narratives and easy monocultural answers. However we also need to be skeptical of the response being to remove ourselves from history and context entirely. At best this results in isolated and hollow art and at worst it results in the kind of alienation Benjamin discusses in his thesis on the philosophy of history, giving up our own history to the hegemon’s control.
So I do care deeply about genre. And I love the avant-garde. And these things do and must deeply inform each other. Genre is not just a package of traits to allow us to sell our art, neither is it just a descriptive tool. Genre is a reminder of where we’ve been and where we’re going. Genre is the ability to look at the people who have gone before me and relate to them, to look ahead to the future and consider how people might relate to me. Genre is Thomas Pynchon’s ‘great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep’.
Genre is one of the ways we tell stories about ourselves and we must value it as such.