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to you, what is the best music genre

in your opinion, what is the best music genre

  • commercial, you listen a bit of everything, as long as it plays on MTV or other mainstream media

    Votes: 2 4.3%
  • punk, excluding everything that fits on the previous category

    Votes: 1 2.2%
  • hip hop and RnB, you probably know what it means

    Votes: 1 2.2%
  • mainstream eletronic, including house, trance, DnB, etc.

    Votes: 6 13.0%
  • other eletronic, including the more hardcore, obscure or experimental genres, from braindance to spe

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • rock and guitar blues, including hardrock, billy, rock n' roll, southern rock...

    Votes: 7 15.2%
  • jazz and classic blues, including beebop, big band, etc.

    Votes: 3 6.5%
  • "old" metal, including classic heavy and NWBHM, thrash, black, classic death...

    Votes: 9 19.6%
  • "new" metal, including nu metal, melodeath, metalcore...

    Votes: 1 2.2%
  • folk and world music, including celtic, country, gypsy, native american, jewish klezmer, african...

    Votes: 1 2.2%
  • classical, opera, etc. by the old barroque and romantic composers

    Votes: 3 6.5%
  • contemporary classical, from the last 100 years

    Votes: 2 4.3%
  • alternative and weird, including anything that doesn't fit at all in any of the previous categories

    Votes: 10 21.7%

  • Total voters
    46
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Level 13
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Wait where's pop? Isn't that also a genre?
edit: Unless you listed that as 'commercial', because that's rather weird, makes me feel like a gay jersey shore fan when you mentioned MTV in the same sentence.

i generally have a hard time picturing pop as a genre by itself, i tend to see songs described as pop as a lighter flavor of rock, folk, electronic, or anything really. but if i see the demand for that option is high, i'll add another option. can i add another option to a running poll in this forum? let's see...

E: damn, it appears i can't edit the poll, and i wanted to add an option for the eclectic who appreciate non-mainstream music of many/all genres
 
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Genre has no impact on the quality of music.

Why?

Good musicians don't set out to produce music of x genre; rather, they make their music, and the genre is applied to the finished product later by critics. If you do it the other way around, chances are genre will just be a limitation, and your music will be unoriginal and generic.

So "what's the best genre" is a question with no valid answers.
 
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Level 13
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Genre has no impact on the quality of music.

Why?

Good musicians don't set out to produce music of x genre; rather, they make their music, and the genre is applied to the finished product later by critics. If you do it the other way around, chances are genre will just be a limitation, and your music will be unoriginal and generic.

So "what's the best genre" is a question with no valid answers.

I'd argue that music isn't this magic thing that, if it's good, everybody will love it, it is a subjective aesthetic creation, it's also something people learn to enjoy. It tendentially obeys formulas, and when it doesn't it subverts them, but it's always conscious of those, there is no way of making music without taking genre in consideration.

not that i think that there is a superior genre, an i'll believe you if you say you have no favourite genre, but i'm pretty sure you hold some in greater esteem than others
 

fladdermasken

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It tendentially obeys formulas, and when it doesn't it subverts them, but it's always conscious of those, there is no way of making music without taking genre in consideration.
The number of times formulas can be subverted is interminable. The number of times formulas have been subverted and tailored their own genre is accountable.
Furthermore;
there is no way of making music without taking genre in consideration.
What if you incorporate chance into the process? There are several aleatoric forms that only interrelate at the level of their disarrangement.
 
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Deleted member 157129

D

Deleted member 157129

I don't have a favourite genre per se, but the majority of the music I listen to, or have the most CDs of which falls under roughly the same genre, is thrash metal, quickly followed by gothic/symphonic metal and black metal. Hence I voted "old" metal, including classic heavy and NWBHM, thrash, black, classic death...
However, newer breeds of metal can be interesting as well. Furthermore, I listen to a lot of jazz and folk music, too. And a bit of rock, blues, classical and electronica as well. Not to mention a lot of which could easily be called weird.

I'll have to agree with ~Void~ here, though, good music is good regardless of what genre it is categorized as. And genre is often redefined or invented as a means to accommodate music that doesn't exactly fit an existing genre. Artists do of course have idols and some reference as to what they want to sound like, but I think it's more in terms of the actual sound more than what genre it is. How would we have anything else than classical music if people didn't try to make music that didn't necessarily sound like anything else (ie aim for a genre)?
 
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I DON'T agree with Void, in the way that bands do know what they wish to sound like, weither they name it in their heads or not, they're looking for a specific style, also known as genres. Genre is just another name to put similarities in music together. It doesn't mean they're limited though; they can do whatever with genre, they can fuse them (fusion), bastardize them (metalcore), etc. I know I couldn't be less clear, but I just think that bands do know what they're playing and what they want to play.

I agree about the part that there is no 'right' answer to this and that genres don't directly affect the quality of music.
 

fladdermasken

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Hubcool said:
they're looking for a specific style, also known as genres.
It was a style before it was a genre.
Genre is just another name to put similarities in music together.
In some cases it's just a collective for odd ones out.
It doesn't mean they're limited though; they can do whatever with genre
If grenres don't have parameters, what's their purpose?
the quality of music.
There's that again. In all my years of composing, I still haven't been able to fully reason how that is measurable. It's made out to be objective, or at least intersubjective. Over the years we all weave our impressions into fabric, but there appears to be more to it than that.

I move that "The Quality of Music; An Intersubjective Notion?" be the official sub-topic tenet of this thread.
 
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It was a style before it was a genre.

In some cases it's just a collective for odd ones out.

If grenres don't have parameters, what's their purpose?

There's that again. In all my years of composing, I still haven't been able to fully reason how that is measurable. It's made out to be objective, or at least intersubjective. Over the years we all weave our impressions into fabric, but there appears to be more to it than that.

I move that "The Quality of Music; An Intersubjective Notion?" be the official sub-topic tenet of this thread.

Style and genres are synonyms to me, I only meant that for genres, genres put together typical sounds and harmonies, techniques, etc. I think a sound is just genre dependant, it's easy to see as as soon as you're looking for something similar to what you like (wether you're looking for similar moods, emotions, instruments and even lyrics), you'll end up looking for other artists of the same genre. Sound and genre go together, when limiting yourself to a sound, you limit yourself to a genre, possibly without knowing. Experiencing with many sounds is the same as experiencing with genres. It's just that it came out like if choosing a genre was a bad thing, when it's probably natural.

You're right about some genres just being there to group oddities together, but they're similar as in they're all oddities sooo :p

And genres have parameters, that's why they create new genre names all the time to describe music that's always going outside the 'known' parameters

Oh and defining 'good' and 'quality' definitely is as subjective as it gets.

[EDIT] tl;dr, nothing bad with choosing a genre, it's natural and you usually progress from there, and it's far to be what makes a band 'quality or not'.
 
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To me it's classical. I like mostly the famous composers like Vivaldi, Beethoven and Mozart but i have an entire collection from all the classical composers and it's really nice... i can find any type of moods in those songs. So i can amplify my feelings in a moment whether they are relaxation, happiness, sadness, action-expectation, etc...
 
House and Trance For The Win! :D
Tecktonik and Electro are Epic too!

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where is the prog rock, as Jethro Tull, King Crimson, etc?

where is the glam rock, David Bowie, Roxy Music, etc?

and the grunge genre? Alice in Chains, Nirvana etc

and the psychedelic? as pink floyd first albums, some of The Doors, and stuff



also... this poll should be multiple choice. I like contemporary classical, jazz, blues, folk, world music and these above... shouldn't I be able to check all of them?
 
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I DON'T agree with Void, in the way that bands do know what they wish to sound like, weither they name it in their heads or not, they're looking for a specific style, also known as genres. Genre is just another name to put similarities in music together. It doesn't mean they're limited though; they can do whatever with genre, they can fuse them (fusion), bastardize them (metalcore), etc. I know I couldn't be less clear, but I just think that bands do know what they're playing and what they want to play.

I agree about the part that there is no 'right' answer to this and that genres don't directly affect the quality of music.

No, that's not what genre is. A genre is a relatively loose categorization of necessarily multiple pieces of music/art/etc with similar attributes. It's a construct whose definition is arbitrary. Because it relies on many samples simply to exist, it is thus necessarily applied to music after its composition.

So you can make music with influence from a genre, but you can't create music directly within a genre without it sounding contrived and unoriginal. You'll notice that just like in any other categorization of anything, there is no one defining model for any genre, because all music is different.

Really though, what I want to stress is the arbitrariness of any genre. Go on /mu/ and you'll see people arguing for hours about what genre a particular band is, and they never really come up with a perfect answer, just because it's impossible to do so.

Also, there is good metalcore out there. At the Drive-In is post-hardcore, but the bands they influenced are mostly metalcore/screamo and some of them are not bad at all.
 
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No, that's not what genre is. A genre is a relatively loose categorization of necessarily multiple pieces of music/art/etc with similar attributes. It's a construct whose definition is arbitrary. Because it relies on many samples simply to exist, it is thus necessarily applied to music after its composition.

So you can make music with influence from a genre, but you can't create music directly within a genre without it sounding contrived and unoriginal. You'll notice that just like in any other categorization of anything, there is no one defining model for any genre, because all music is different.

Really though, what I want to stress is the arbitrariness of any genre. Go on /mu/ and you'll see people arguing for hours about what genre a particular band is, and they never really come up with a perfect answer, just because it's impossible to do so.

Also, there is good metalcore out there. At the Drive-In is post-hardcore, but the bands they influenced are mostly metalcore/screamo and some of them are not bad at all.

Arbitrary, not sure, some bands being really hard to put into genres, I agree. I know retards on /mu/, youtube, last.fm, etc, will argue about genres but I don't think these guys are sane if they're arguing over such futilities instead of actually enjoying the music :p It's also needed to have some kind of 'knowledge' in music to categorize it somewhat fairly, which is a thing most people arguing seem to lack.

But yeah, all in all, I do see your point, makes sense, but I still see it a little differently. Oh and At the Drive-In ARE pretty good, but they're post-hardcore, like you pointed out, so I don't see what it has to do with good metalcore :p By bastardizing, it probably sounded perjorative but I didn't mean it that way lol, I know there are some good bands out there. But you said it yourself, bands that decided to play ATDI influenced music are put into hardcore subgenres, and it is no coincidence, by having a mere influence, they indirectly 'chose' the genre of music they'd play, and it doesn't mean those bands came out unoriginal. Don't know if you see what I mean?

The difference is really small, but it still makes me disagree about the unoriginality. You even say that there is no defining model for genres, so even if a band would choose to impose themselves limits (which I think most bands don't do, they only choose a genre as a starting point), they wouldn't know where to put said limits, and if they have any songwriting abilities, they'd definitely end up expanding their sound anyway.

[EDIT]It's weird that no one voted for punk or hip hop, no love for urban music anymore?
 
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[EDIT]It's weird that no one voted for punk or hip hop, no love for urban music anymore?
there was a stated vote for punk in the first page, but i guess the guy doesn't care much for polls... fight the system!

where is the prog rock, as Jethro Tull, King Crimson, etc?

where is the glam rock, David Bowie, Roxy Music, etc?

and the grunge genre? Alice in Chains, Nirvana etc

and the psychedelic? as pink floyd first albums, some of The Doors, and stuff

i didn't put up genres, i put umbrella terms, and the genres i gave are just examples. those fit perfectly in rock

also... this poll should be multiple choice. I like contemporary classical, jazz, blues, folk, world music and these above... shouldn't I be able to check all of them?

you're right, i myself am very eclectic with my musical tastes, i should have remembered to put an option for people like us

You put up only old and new metal genres, that's already a weird way to split it...
Just put metal overall. The point is, you forgot both symphotic and gothic metal.

My favroite genres are symphotic and gothic metal and rock comes as third.

unless you know something i don't, it's symphonic not symphotic. those are old metal, i guess.
i separated "old" and "new" metal because there are often conflicts between those who listen to either. that's how i made the groups, most people i know listen to several similar genres of music, i chose the most common combinations. for example, i grouped guitar blues with rock, and old blues with jazz, because usually people who enjoy rock and roll, billy and hard rock also enjoy guitar blues, while not caring much for trumpet jazz, and metal-heads usually are very choosy with the genres they want to be grouped with, but you're generally safe if you keep "oldschool" separated from nu-metal and the "cores"
 
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unless you know something i don't, it's symphonic not symphotic. those are old metal, i guess.
i separated "old" and "new" metal because there are often conflicts between those who listen to either. that's how i made the groups, most people i know listen to several similar genres of music, i chose the most common combinations. for example, i grouped guitar blues with rock, and old blues with jazz, because usually people who enjoy rock and roll, billy and hard rock also enjoy guitar blues, while not caring much for trumpet jazz, and metal-heads usually are very choosy with the genres they want to be grouped with, but you're generally safe if you keep "oldschool" separated from nu-metal and the "cores"

Oh alright then.
 
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Mine isn't either. I listen to many types of music, but not necessarily commercial music. I listen to a lot of non-commercial music and I dislike new rock. Thus I choose to abstain from voting.

Anyway topic is irrelevant as previous mentioned, since "the best genre" cannot exist.
 
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