Exactly! Though I would argue that even the original dubstep scene is still alive, perhaps bit marginalized. But as I see it, Deep Medi Musik is the "haven" of that culture and it still persists, even evolves.cron wrote: That's a very interesting point. I often find that genre names don't so much refer to the sonics, but more the culture surrounding them. Take EDM for instance: while there are obvious sonic pointers like heavy side chaining compression and the like, it could just as easily be taken to mean 'dance music made for stadium sized playback gigs with a huge light show'.
The early days of dubstep gave us a similar thing, before the sonics became codified into what used to be derogatorily called 'brostep'. In the mid-00s, all you really knew you'd be getting with the dubstep tag was minimally adorned music which ran at 140bpm and had lashings of sub bass optimised for the extraordinary sound system at FWD (the club around which the scene originally revolved). After brostep became the new dubstep and the original sound had splintered into a million new sounds, the term 'bass music' appeared as a genre. Of course bass music didn't refer to a sound, it was simply code for 'what the dubstep scene did next'.
Another example that I love and which is fairly simple is witch house. A bizzare genre that got really popular in the shadows of internet. Sonically it can seriously mean just about anything, from the sort of bassmusic with trap beats such as Ic3peak to bizzare synthladen blackmetal sort of thing such as ∆AIMON to whateveer Balam Acab is to sort of nostalgic synthpop such as oOoOO. Really, hard to tell what it is sonically speaking. But the themes are common. And once it hit to Russia, that's where the themes just found their "perfect home". https://thump.vice.com/en_au/article/te ... -in-russia
Unfortunately though, I've found that the cultural aspect of genres is really hard to understand in many cases. I think IDM is a great example of this. What it really is? Dance music that doesn't want to associate with more popular dance music? But you can't really dance to most of IDM. Yet some of the artists are tagged "Outsider House", which literally means house music for the weirder people. What does it really mean then? The artists themselves didn't really decide the IDM genre, it was the audience. So are we talking about bunch of elitist people who just like electronic quasi-dancemusic and feel that they are intellectually or culturally (or something) superior to EDM scene?
Yet, usually when I meet someone who listens to IDM as well, I get well along with him or her. We share the musical taste, they feel open minded about music (except about EDM, but same can be said about me as well!).
Rough world really. But I think genres shouldn't yet be put off shelves. I do think they might have a place in future as a way of cultural identification.
