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.”

Tags: Genres, Musical Styles, Performance, Playing

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 5:26 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.