Genre busting: the origin of music categories

Where did the terms retro-nuevo and skronk originate? Or hip-hop? Michaelangelo Matos runs through an exhaustive catalogue of music’s phrasemakers and trendsetters Music comes from everywhere, and so do the names we call it by. There’s a longstanding cliche that only the music business needs genre names – everyone else either likes it or they don’t. That is, of course, bunk, as anyone who’s heard enough people trot out lines such as “I like all music except for rap and country” is aware. Not least because quite a lot of those genre names come from the artists themselves. Gospel, for example, was more or less invented by Rev Thomas A Dorsey . As Georgia Tom , Dorsey played jazz and blues piano before turning to the Bible for inspiration in 1932 and selling songs such as Precious Lord, Take My Hand to churches in Chicago, then across America. His group’s name was the University Gospel Singers. Similarly, bluegrass originates from the name of the country singer-mandolinist Bill Monroe ‘s backing band from 1938 to his 1996 death: the Blue Grass Boys. They were named after Monroe’s native Kentucky, “the Blue Grass State”. Glitter rock – a synonym for glam – comes from Gary Glitter, about which the less said, the better. More often, a genre name will come from a musician’s works. Free jazz comes from Ornette Coleman ‘s 1960 album of the same name; ditto blue-eyed soul, from the Righteous Brothers’ 1963 LP. The mid-60s Jamaican boogie dubbed rocksteady is named for an 1966 Alton Ellis single , while reggae followed it into Jamaican dancehalls on the heels of the Maytals’ Do the Reggay in 1968. Soca is a condensation of Trinidadian artist Lord Shorty ‘s Soul of Calypso, from 1974, while acid house, originally from Phuture’s 1987 single Acid Tracks , has come to mean anything

Posted by on August 26, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.