Music Genre Taxonomy

I am attempting to catalog my music collection to a more granular level, especially in terms of genre. This page will serve as the reference list of official elbuzzard musical genres. The main resource for the list is allmusic.com.

• Avant-garde – Avant-Garde is taken from the French for “vanguard,” which is the part of the armed forces that always stands at the front of the rest of the army. In the case of music, the avant-garde are those individuals who take music to the next step in development or at least take music on a divergent path. The term was first applied only after World War II. In popular idioms it is a term used to describe or refer to free jazz movements but the meaning remains the same: techniques of expression that are new, innovative and radically different from the tradition or the mainstream. Wagner and Debussy can easily be classified as avant-garde relevant to their time but the term did not enter familiar usage until the advent of Stockhausen.
• Blues – Blues is about tradition and personal expression. At its core, the blues has remained the same since its inception. Most blues feature simple, usually three-chord, progressions and have simple structures that are open to endless improvisations, both lyrical and musical. The blues grew out of African spirituals and worksongs. In the late 1800s, southern African-Americans passed the songs down orally, and they collided with American folk and country from the Appalachians. New hybrids appeared by each region, but all of the recorded blues from the early 1900s are distinguished by simple, rural acoustic guitars and pianos. After World War II, the blues began to fragment, with some musicians holding on to acoustic traditions and others taking it to jazzier territory. However, most bluesmen followed Muddy Waters’ lead and played the blues on electric instruments. From that point on, the blues continued to develop in new directions — particularly on electric instruments — or it has been preserved as an acoustic tradition.
• Classical
• Country – Country music is about tradition, yet its simple form lends itself to endless variations on similar themes. Like blues — the two genres often shared themes, melodies and songs — country is a simple music at its core. Most of its songs are built around three chords and a plain melody, but these forms are so basic, they allow for many different styles, from the gritty sounds of honky tonk to the jazzy improvisations of Western Swing. Country music grew out of American Southern folk music, both Appalachian and blues, and old-time country was simple and folky, with just guitars and fiddles. As the genre progressed, old time music evolved into the rhythmic guitar-and-fiddle driven traditional country that became the foundation of modern country music, from honky tonk and Western Swing to the pop-oriented Countrypolitan and rock-inflected Bakersfield Sound.
• Easy Listening – Easy Listening music is instrumental music that was designed to be soothing and relaxing. Unlike jazz, which demands your utmost attention, easy listening slips into the background, which is the very reason many critics and listeners dismissed the music as nothing more than disposible fluff. Although some records certainly fall into that category, there were a number of inventive arrangers and conductors working in the genre, such as Martin Denny, Les Baxter and Esquivel, who distinguished themselves with unpredictable instrumentation and idiosyncratic arrangements. Still, the primary characteristic of easy listening, from Ray Conniff’s lush wordless vocals to the Latin flourishes of Herb Alpert, is that it’s pleasant and easy on the ears.
• Electronica – Reaching back to grab the grooves of ’70s disco/funk and the gadgets of electronic composition, Electronica soon became a whole new entity in and of itself, spinning off new sounds and subgenres with no end in sight two decades down the pike. Its beginnings came in the post-disco environment of Chicago/New York and Detroit, the cities who spawned house and techno (respectively) during the 1980s. Later that decade, club-goers in Britain latched onto the fusion of mechanical and sensual, and returned the favor to hungry Americans with new styles like jungle/drum’n’bass and trip-hop. Though most all early electronica was danceable, by the beginning of the ’90s, producers were also making music for the headphones and chill-out areas as well, resulting in dozens of stylistic fusions like ambient-house, experimental techno, tech-house, electro-techno, etc. Typical for the many styles gathered under the umbrella was a focus on danceable grooves, very loose song structure (if any), and, in many producers, a relentless desire to find a new sound no matter how tepid the results.
  • Dance
  • Electronica
• Folk – Each country has their own folk music, but the genre usually refers to American and British music that has been passed through the generations by oral tradition. It’s simple, acoustic-based music that spins everyday events and common people into mythic status. Many traditional folksongs have no known author, they have simply evolved over the years. Most of the earliest recorded folk music was of this nature, but with Woody Guthrie, topical folk began making its way to record. Still, many artists, including the Weavers and Pete Seeger, chose to mix traditional songs with newer material, either written by the artists themselves or other contemporary musicians. Initially, Bob Dylan functioned in that style, but by his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he began relying entirely on original material, thereby ushering the modern era of folk, where most performers sang their own (usually personally and introspective) material, and only occasionally throwing in covers.
• Gospel – Gospel essentially breaks down into three separate categories. For many listeners, the word “gospel” conjures the sound of large African-American Southern gospel choirs, singing joyous songs of celebration. These grew out of traditional spirituals and would later evolve into close-knit, small combos that were the blueprint for doo-wop groups. Another style of gospel was country gospel, which sounded like traditional country with lyrics about God. These two forms — along with blues gospel, which was never quite as widespread as country gospel — provided part of the foundation of contemporary gospel and CCM (Contemporary Christian Music), which came into existence in the late ’70s. The other part of CCM was soft rock and mainstream pop, which provided the sound of the genre. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, CCM was the most popular style of gospel, since it sounded like mainstream pop, only with religious lyrics.
• Jazz – Jazz has been called America’s classical music, and for good reason. Along with the blues, its forefather, it is one of the first truly indigenous musics to develop in America, yet its unpredictable, risky ventures into improvisation gave it critical cache with scholars that the blues lacked. At the outset, jazz was dance music, performed by swinging big bands. Soon, the dance elements faded into the background and improvisation became the key element of the music. As the genre evolved, the music split into a number of different styles, from the speedy, hard-hitting rhythms of be-bop and the laid-back, mellow harmonies of cool jazz to the jittery, atonal forays of free jazz and the earthy grooves of soul jazz. What tied it all together was a foundation in the blues, a reliance on group interplay and unpredictable improvisation. Throughout the years, and in all the different styles, those are the qualities that defined jazz.
  • Big Band
    • Swing
    • Jive
  • Bop
  • Fusion
  • Latin Jazz
  • New Orleans Jazz
    • Brass Bands
    • Ragtime
    • Dixieland
• New Age – Born from an aesthetic that aims to induce a sense of inner calm, new age music emerged from the meditational and holistic fields. Generally, these are harmonious and nonthreatening albums that are allied with new age philosophies encouraging spiritual transcendence and physical healing. Some of these albums are artistically satisfying as well as therapeutic. Lesser musicians, however, often make ridiculous claims in the liner notes as to their ability to catapult listeners into advanced spiritual states through specially designed sonic vibrations and “immaculately conceived” musical ideas.
• R&B – Evolving out of jump blues in the late ’40s, R&B laid the groundwork for rock & roll. R&B kept the tempo and the drive of jump blues, but its instrumentation was sparer and the emphasis was on the song, not improvisation. It was blues chord changes played with an insistent backbeat. During the ’50s, R&B was dominated by vocalists like Ray Charles and Ruth Brown, as well as vocal groups like the Drifters and the Coasters. Eventually, R&B metamorphosed into soul, which was funkier and looser than the pile-driving rhythms of R&B. Soul came to describe a number of R&B-based music styles. From the bouncy, catchy acts at Motown to the horn-driven, gritty soul of Stax/Volt, there was an immense amount of diversity within soul. During the first part of the ’60s, soul music remained close to its R&B roots. However, musicians pushed the music in different directions; usually, different regions of America produced different kinds of soul. In urban centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the music concentrated on vocal interplay and smooth productions. In Detroit, Motown concentrated on creating a pop-oriented sound that was informed equally by gospel, R&B, and rock & roll. In the South, the music became harder and tougher, relying on syncopated rhythms, raw vocals, and blaring horns. All of these styles formed soul, which ruled the black music charts throughout the ’60s and also frequently crossed over into the pop charts. During the ’60s and ’70s, soul began to splinter apart — artists like James Brown and Sly Stone developed funk; Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff initiated Philly soul with the O’Jays and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes; and later in the decade, danceable R&B became a mass phenomenon with the brief disco fad. During the ’80s and ’90s, the polished, less earthy sound of urban and quiet storm ruled the airwaves, but even then, R&B began adding stylistic components of hip-hop until — by the end of the millennium — there were hundreds of artists who featured both rapping and singing on their records.
  • Soul
  • Funk
  • Disco
  • Doo-Wop
  • Motown
  • New Orleans R&B
  • Philly Soul
• Rap – Rap’s germination is sometimes attributed to the righteous street poetry of the Last Poets and the Watts Prophets, but it didn’t begin to take full shape — and earn its tag — until after the Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. Since then, rap spread from its New York epicenter throughout the remainder of the U.S. (with each region taking on its own specific flavor) and then to countless countries. Rap’s core components are beats and rhymes, but that simplicity belies the wide range of sounds that have sprung from them. Instrumentalists, a sampled breakbeat, or a drum machine can form the backbone of a track, while an arrangement can be spaciously spare or chaotically dense, and a chorus can range from atonal shouting to a sweet melody. Detractors were still calling rap a fad in 1985, when LL Cool J released his first single. They were doing the same thing when, roughly 20 years later, the same MC released his tenth album, and they’ll probably continue to do so as long as the genre exists.
  • Hip-Hop – In the terminology of rap music, Hip-Hop usually refers to the culture — graffiti-spraying, breakdancing, and turntablism in addition to rapping itself — surrounding the music. As a style however, hip-hop refers to music created with those values in mind. Once rap had been around long enough to actually have a history, hip-hop groups began looking back to old-school figures including MCs like Kurtis Blow and Whodini, and DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. In fact, the latter’s Zulu Nation collective sprang up in the late ’80s around two of the most notable hip-hop artists, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. With rap music’s mainstream breakout during the ’90s, dozens of hip-hop artists pointed the way back to the old school, including underground rappers like Mos Def and Pharoahe Monch.
  • Gangsta
  • Old-school
  • Turntablism
  • Dirty South
• Rock
  • Punk
    • Ska
    • Punk-pop
  • Hard Rock
    • Southern Rock
    • Metal
    • Glam Rock
    • NuMetal
  • New Wave
  • Soft Rock
    • Folk Rock
    • Singer-songwriter
  • Psychedelic/Acid Rock
  • Pop
    • Girl Group
    • Bubblegum
    • Teen Idol
  • Rock & Roll
    • Surf Rock
    • Rockabilly
    • Tex-Mex
    • Swamp Pop – Swamp Pop is a brand of rock & roll that emerged from Louisiana. It was a hybrid of rock & roll, pop, and Louisiana blues and R&B. It had a dirty, gritty, funky feel that sounded like the swamps that surrounded Louisiana.
  • Alternative/Indie
    • Industrial
    • Garage
    • Grunge
    • Post-rock
    • Emo
  • • Chamber pop – Drawing heavily from the lush, orchestrated work of performers including Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach, and Lee Hazlewood, Chamber Pop arose largely as a reaction to the lo-fi aesthetic dominant throughout much of the 1990s alternative music community. Inspired in part by the lounge-music revival but with a complete absence of irony or kitsch, chamber pop placed a renewed emphasis on melody and production, as artists layered their baroque, ornate songs with richly textured orchestral strings and horns, all the while virtually denying the very existence of grunge, electronica, and other concurrent musical movements.
    • Lo-Fi – During the late ’80s and early ’90s, lo fidelity became not only a description of the recording quality of a particular album, but it also became a genre onto itself. Throughout rock & roll’s history, recordings were made cheaply and quickly, often on substandard equipment. In that sense, the earliest rock & roll records, most of the garage rock of the ’60s, and much of the punk rock of the late ’70s could be tagged as Lo-Fi. However, the term came to refer to a breed of underground indie rockers that recorded their material at home on four-track machines. Most of this music grew out of the American underground of the ’80s, including bands like R.E.M., as well as a handful of British post-punk bands and New Zealand bands like the Chills and the Clean. Often, these lo-fi bands fluctuated from simple pop and rock songs to free-form song structures to pure noise and arty experimentalism. Even when the groups kept the songs relatively straightforward, the thin quality of the recordings, the layers of tape distortion and hiss, as well as the tendency toward abstract, obtuse lyrics made the music sound different and left of center. Initially, lo-fi recordings were traded on homemade tapes, but several indie labels — most notably K Records, which was run by Calvin Johnson, who led the lo-fi band Beat Happening — released albums on vinyl. Several groups in the late ’80s, like Pussy Galore, Beat Happening, and Royal Trux earned small cult followings within the American underground. By 1992, groups like Sebadoh and Pavement had become popular cult acts in America and Britain with their willfully noisy, chaotic recordings. A few years later, Liz Phair and Beck helped break the lo-fi aesthetic into the mainstream, albeit in a more streamlined fashion.
• World
  • Latin – Latin music is a catch-all term for a number of diverse styles from different regions and countries in Latin America. Often, the term refers to Latin pop — either dance-based or pop oriented-music sung in Spanish or Tejano. Tejano has a number of different styles, from romantic ballads to the narrative nortenos, and they’re usually performed by large groups with acoustic instruments and horns. In the ’80s and ’90s, Tejano has also adopted smooth production techniques from American pop-rock and soft rock. Latin America is also known for such dance music as salsas and sambas, which have layers of percussion, blaring horns and an infectious sense of style. A related style to salsa is the bossa nova, a cool, laid-back style that crossed dance music with jazz. With the exception of tejano and mariachi, which is folk and pop based, most Latin music is defined by its strong rhythms.
  • Reggae
• Classical

This is beyond difficult.