Witch House and "Genres"; a perhaps controversial essay

[TakeshiAndTheKid]

I'm not quite sure where people stand on whether "Witch House" "Actually Exists" or not here, and how deep the tongue is nestled in your collective cheeks, but there is a certain degree of irony of people shunning the label and then citing their gothic influences, when previously in the 80s anyone associated with that label had much the same reaction to those . Meanwhile that scene that didn't exist went on to produce some utterly fantastic and musically diverse acts and went on to influence everything from 90s alternative rock to trip hop.

I think that a lot of these labels are amusing and I'm enjoying the joke to some degree, but I also think that people have entirely the wrong focus complaining about Pitchfork trying to label everything like some autistic child trying to make sense of his first trip to the big city, and exactly why it is that popular music, and a lot of supposedly alternative music, has become an intellectual and creative wasteland.

A lot of people think "But this is always the way it's been!", and they'd be right to some extent. However, there's also a problem in that they're not right, and have just a short memory as people who think everything that came out of the 80s was pure gold. If you actually look at the charts throughout earlier eras, such as the 90s, you will still see an unmitigated amount of toss, but occasionally you will get what are in retrospect considered "alternative" artists like for example, Curve, punching their way into the Top Ten.

This is a lot rarer nowadays, and while you do get the occasional Seminal popular act like Gorillaz, and, well I can't really think of much more than that, we tend to have lost a lot of the musical culture that was there before, or it's been driven further underground.

As someone points out, a lot of these music scenes are no longer "local" but "International". Which is a good thing on one level, as it means I can still be a part of a "goth" scene in theory while living in country with about as many goths as the staff of Butlins, but it doesn't always work that way. First off, there's hardly any online community for goths anymore as most of them were run into the ground alternatingly either by those who think Slipknot are musical geniuses and have no idea what "goth" actually is, who apparently live in Hot Topic, or by snotty circlejerks, largely populated by the forums own moderators, the kind you tend to get ruining most forums, except these ones are particularly well suited for being dickheads since they're largely american goths thinking that goth means being some mildly offensive stereotype of a stuck up middle-to-upper class British twonk, with more "Bats" and less "Banter".

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at here is that local scenes are important, as online scenes can be a hot-bed for douchebaggery. After these scenes we're remembering do become international pretty quickly, but they're still largely supported by people putting on local gigs and actually attending them, which has been a bit of a problem with our local music scene lately. Without a local goth scene too, it's a lot harder for me to find a pleasingly chubby bleached blonde artsy goth girl to enact my sapphic fantasies on.

Most people seem quite determined to get rid of all labels past "Rock" and "Electronic", but I'm not convinced. People seem to have this idea that suddenly if you just Tipp-ex out these horribly restrictive genres we suddenly unleash some kind of glorious musical infinity; but in practice it really doesn't work like that. When I was in college, I was horribly disappointed about how "The Young Ones" no longer seemed to be relative. When I transferred colleges in the hope of remedying this, I had a chat with a couple of other transfer students and the subject happened to come up. The younger one said that it's better we don't have these different groups, but the older one who actually remembered them said that getting rid of them didn't unleash the boundaries of individuality, it just meant everyone ended up in the same melting pot.

Whereas before you'd get people taking up "goth", "punk", or "hippie" and running with the idea to make it their own, now you just get people who make no effort to be anything, especially themselves. Losing points of reference to define ourselves by means we can't bend and break the rules of them either.

Part of the problem is that when you try to get rid of these labels, you're getting rid of alternative culture. And I think it's this breaking down of genres that's lead and what worries me so much about the reaction to "Witch House", regardless of whether or not it does exist. I always point out that you can go dressed perfectly normal into most goth clubs, and nobody will bat an eyelid(pardon the pun), but if you go into regular pub dressed it's going to be hard to avoid being molested by bears or something. While some alternative types as we've established can be horribly elitist, on average as long as you rule out the dickheads you will find most alternative culture much less elitist and much more accepting.

Once you rub out the idea of "goth", you're not freeing up these people to be whatever they want, since largely, a lot of them were doing that anyway. People always assume that people hear the word "goth" and then suddenly grow black cloaks and facepaints as an evolutionary mechanism to fit in, rather than than already having thought about that sort of clothing and that sort of music and getting involved with other people who, shock horror, shame the same interests or worldview as you.

And this is what's happening with Witch-House - you're seeing a lot of people with common interests come together making similar music. In a sense we may actually be getting to see a real scene forming, albeit one with a silly name, not that "Punk" doesn't sound like the noise a dwarf makes when he drags you down to the ground and knees you in the face, and we can actually see that a lot of the prominent artists aren't just bandwagoning but already has a lot of similar ideas in the first place.

Of course a lot of people will decide they like that and want to emulate it, and in a sense that's not really that bad idea, after all when David Bowie does it nobody complains much. Everyone can be inspired by new things and bring their own touch to it. I think people are just too ashamed of being labelled in with hipsters, but are ultimately just whoring themselves off to a much worse brand of hipster; the annoying post-modern ones who think they're being clever by defying genres when chances are the reason they're so scared of them is that if they were applied to them; they'd get a label like "Nothing fucking original".

And this is the problem; people are scared of genres. Here locally there's a bit of an active metal scene, would it make sense to go in and tell these people to stop labelling themselves? Would it suddenly mean some of them would take up the saxophone? No! While some of them are always going to be posers joining in on the bandwagon those are obviously not the ones who are going to be creative anyway so you'll just end up annoying people who have a genuine love for that kind of music. I'm not going to like everything that's "trip hop" or "Metal" just because I like those genres, and I may like things outside of that - but exploring new genres is what should be encouraged, rather than getting rid of them. It's rare I hear an act and think "I never want to hear anything else remotely similar to this, ever". I like to hear people taking a concept and evolving it.

Just because you play in a rock band doesn't mean you have to be stuck playing Foo Fighters covers. If you're really creative, you can take "Rock" in a new direction while still remaining recognisably "Rock", and nobody's stopping you from /ing it with other genres like "Funk" or "Electronic Polka". Much like when people label a fuss over being labelled a "goth", they're somewhat missing the point in that words like this can be used as general descriptors rather than absolutes. Some people just seem to not want to be able to describe things in the hope it'll make them or their music look more interesting since we no longer have words to describe how boring they are.

I genuinely have a lot of trouble finding a genre to lump my music into, though that could largely be down to a lack of focus. I'm not going to be offended when people find a label that actually makes sense though. I am a little bothered that I already seem to be weighed down as a "chiptune" artist even though I don't make many chiptunes, but at the end of the day a lot of my more original output is just as appreciated. It's fear of the genres themselves that can cause them to become restrictive.

I read a recent interview with a couple of "Witch House" artists saying to stop worrying about labels and just listen to the music - but that goes double for those obsessing over them in a negative light. Also, if it wasn't for these labels to begin with I might not have even heard of your music, so we're stuck in a bit of a paradox here and I wish people would put a bit more thought into it. Being able to find similar music to what I like is a virtue and one a lot of online services seem to spend a lot of time focusing on, yet the music scene seems to reject the idea, again, foolishly believing that getting rid of these distinctions will suddenly get pop-punk fans listening to Battles.

I think for similar reasons too - I like the idea of there always been some popular artists up there as a frame of references, I don't want everything to entirely go either local or just finding what you like on Soundcloud, as it'll be too hard to get outsiders in that way, and that's what you need to support a scene.

I think there can be a problem here with people restricting themselves to one scene, but people are going about it in entirely the wrong way. Having many healthy music scenes that get along well is going to be a good base for new musical ventures; if you look at the origins of Techno and other electronic genres, you'll see this pretty plainly. All these new styles of music, whether you accept the validity of their label or not, are coming from the rather racey crossbreeding of what often starts off as local scenes with distinct labels, the absolute nemesis of your average post modern twat who spends all his day blogging about how dubstep is just electronic reggae for people who also need an aural laxative in the form of bowel-shaking bass frequencies.

Instead what you have now in some areas is a lack of any new scenes, so people just stick with the tried of tested pub rock or metal. And is metal going to go away any time soon? No, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it does show how some things just seem to appeal to a certain corner of the human condition, though I'm not quite sure what part of the human condition requires you to scream things about rats over a guitar that sounds like a chainsaw cutting up a burning building filled with baby elephants, it's obviously pretty primal to some people.

Again, I think regardless of whether "Witch House", "Drag", "Screwgaze", "Lovestep" exists or not, there are a lot of good artists out there with a similar sound and at the very least this could result in a nice little revival of the diminishing goth scene that these artists are inspired by. Which is, interestingly, what I like most about this whole thing.

I think what we should be doing is actually having some damn fun and enjoying what we can make out of it, if coming up with confusing names for things is part of that fun, and it is for some people, then let's do it and stop constantly second guessing ourselves. It's not these labels that are obliterating the fun but these swampy attitudes.

Actually putting in the work to make something of these creative ventures and building up local scenes around a new sound could result in yet more great artists coming out of the woodwork, but unfortunately unlike bitching about how people keep coming up with words to describe things, it actually takes some fucking effort.

Thanks for listening!

[WIK/\N]

"But in the process, they've been the true renegades. And the true rebels always walk alone anyway..."

Derrick May (1995)

[cutups]

Was this in response to something specific?

I do agree that people shouldn't *worry* about labels, either way.
For most people, they're simply functional. I'm more than fine with labels, genres and vivid descriptions
in terms of helping find other music I like. They're less necessary now because it's much,
much easier to just check stuff out yourself, rather than rely on words.

That said, some people like to use labels as "limiters" to what they're allowed to do or be.
I don't identify with that kind of thinking. So I can understand why some artists who
feel the same way would want to avoid being overly classified.

I don't think there's much they can do about it though, really.

[TakeshiAndTheKid]

Was this in response to something specific?

I do agree that people shouldn't *worry* about labels, either way.
For most people, they're simply functional. I'm more than fine with labels, genres and vivid descriptions
in terms of helping find other music I like. They're less necessary now because it's much,
much easier to just check stuff out yourself, rather than rely on words.

That said, some people like to use labels as "limiters" to what they're allowed to do or be.
I don't identify with that kind of thinking. So I can understand why some artists who
feel the same way would want to avoid being overly classified.

I don't think there's much they can do about it though, really.

Pretty much exactly how I feel about it.

It was in response to a couple of things;

http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville ... itch-house

This aritcle and ones like it mainly.

http://www.nypress.com/article-21562-br ... house.html

This to an extent, but obviously I'm not going to lump those artists in with everyone else - like I suggest, they're not making a big fuss about the label either way, which is healthy. I think this is largely aimed at me thinking again about the "goth" scene and how awkward it can be with these things.

[Anton Maiof]

personally it doesn't bother me if the press want to label everything, after all isn't that their job?

worrying about it would get in the way of making the actual music.

and if people want to backlash, let them, everyone always said my taste in music sucked anyway...

[GOSTS]

stop thinking

[Pe† Ceme†ery]

Whut Gosts said ^

Thinking is for idiots.