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Dog 3000
Dog 3000
4611 posts

Genre bugaboo - what is "rock"?
Jul 11, 2004, 17:19
And Scott Walker's music has very little to do with "rock n roll" either . . . . Jacques Brel ain't a rocker, sorry.

I've always felt there's 2 definition of "rocknroll":

The SPECIFIC definition, which means boogie-woogie r&b music derived directly from the 50's pioneers (Berry, Holly, Presley, Perkins, Penniman, et al.) So the Beatles & Stones are clearly "rocknroll" because they followed in the immediate footsteps of the originals (covered their songs, etc.) -- but by the time you get to stuff like Faust and ELP (let alone Scott Walker or KRS-ONE or Ornette Coleman or King Tubby) I think you've wandered OUT of "rocknroll, narrowly defined" and into some other genre (like prog, easy listening, hiphop or jazz.)

On the other hand the BROAD definition of rocknroll is basically a synonym for "contemporary popular music" -- it includes all those subgenres like prog, hiphop, reggae, disco, etc. Though it wouldn't include most jazz, classical, etc. as that's not really "popular" music (at least in the "contemporary" time period.)

Vis-a-vis "Unsung" I always thought we were using the broadest definition. Though there's some jazz & classical records reviewed as well. Do those need to be deleted now too? I hope not.

Nothing more useless than getting hung up on ill-defined genre boundaries . . . no one listens to genres anyway (which are nothing but labels and categories) . . . people listen to MUSIC . . . .
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