Musical genres have always been a necessary evil, and the more specific they get, the more annoying they become. You want to label something “folk”? Fine, it’s nice to understand, in a broad sense, what category a band or song or fits into. “Freak folk”? Okay, that’s a little obnoxious, but maybe for people deep into the scene, it’s also useful.
But “ectofolk”? Now you can go straight to hell, genre inventors, because I don’t know what that means, and I bet you don’t, either.
The best thing you can do when confronted with these highly specific classifications that, paradoxically, tell you very little about quality, is to change your perspective. Instead of getting frustrated, recognize the absurdity and laugh at it. Be like the Fuds Menu of the music world.
That’s how we recommend you treat the 50 strangest genre names from our friends at Spotify. Before we get into the good stuff, here’s their methodology for inventing these endless sub-types:
Spotify’s genres react to changes in music as they happen. Our music intelligence platform reads everything written about music on the web and listens to millions of new songs all the time to identify unique acoustic attributes. To create dynamic genres, we identify salient terms used to describe music (e.g., “math rock,” “IDM”, etc.), just as they start to appear. We then model genres as dynamic music clusters – groupings of artists and songs that share common descriptors, and similar acoustic and cultural attributes. When a new genre forms, we know about it, so you can discover it right away, too.
Some of the explanations vaguely make sense, some are totally esoteric, and some, like “gauze pop,” are just hilarious:
gauze pop: A descriptive name for a subtly distinct cluster of indie pop, which needed a name
“Uhhh, it needed a name and my friend Bill had a bunch of gauze on his thumb, so we came up with ‘gauze pop.’”
Here are some other favorites, with Spotify’s interpretation in bold, and ours after:
nerdcore: Nerdcore is hip hop music catered to nerds. Lyrical subject matter may include science fiction and computer games. Most nerdcore features DIY production and uncleared samples.
nerdcore: A desperate attempt by white people to make hip hop lame.