Column: 'Whatever Happened to Genre?'

I've started a column I'll be writing every two weeks for Dummy with a short essay entitled 'Whatever Happened to Genre?' (click here to read):

Over the past decade, slowly but surely, it has become deeply unfashionable to talk of new genres in underground pop music...

The growing reluctance to differentiate the musical landscape of the 00s by describing new genres meant that few people challenged the ones that already existed, and as a result the term ‘dubstep’ came to represent a bizarrely swollen category. Many people decry contemporary genres for being absurdly small, too small to really take seriously (note the proliferation of the term ‘microgenres’), but dubstep, by being ‘too big’, shows that in other places the reverse scenario can be perceived...

Something changed in the 00s that made the traditional modes of genrefication, and maybe the notion genrefication itself, untenable...

If all these sounds had genre names that were used regularly enough, would we be so quick to conclude that nothing much of any significance is going on in underground pop, that nothing was unifying it and giving it substance? Perhaps not...

Genre is a democratic music-making project that many hands (musicians and listeners) build and change dynamically. It also plays an important part of the way the language of music discourse evolves and better represents its specific elements...

I'll be posting news of the column entries on this blog and Twitter shortly after they go up. I'm looking forward to using it to peer into some of the issues of the day.