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| Founder/Curator |
Genre is dying.
Time was, you listened to jazz or rock, read mysteries or romances, majored in English lit. or anthropology, craved Chinese or Italian. You stuffed your likes into compartments.
Now you can listen to Japanese jazz or Afro-Celtic rock, read a literary mystery that is half cozy and half thriller, eat a kimchi quesadilla or roll sushi ingredients into a burrito.***
“The idea of identity as a fixed and narrow concept, and of taste as inherently cloistered, feels bizarre, punitive, and regressive,” Amanda Petrusich wrote last month in the New Yorker. “Genre feels increasingly irrelevant to the way we think about, create, and consume art.”
It is entirely relevant, however, to the way we market art. The few remaining bookstores need to figure out where, on what shelf, in what section, a book belongs. Librarians need to catalog that book. Publicists need to hype a new book to readers who already love books like this one. Awards shows need categories.
So even as genre loses sway, it continues to organize our cultural marketplace—and we continue to glue on the wrong labels. Petrusich mentioned Justin Bieber’s distress to have his R&B album nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album—which, sure, was a more prestigious category, but the album was R&B. Tyler, the Creator objected to winning Best Rap Album because “whenever we, and I mean guys that look like me, do anything that’s genre-bending, they always put it in a rap or urban category…. Why can’t we just be in pop?”
Genre’s demise should pop champagne corks all over the world. Too much has fallen between the compartments and landed in obscurity simply because an artist refused to conform to a formula. But can we wipe out the old categories altogether? Even the savviest curator might flounder. Can technology help us? I once copied out recipes from batter-stained index cards. Now, if I have extra buttermilk or a sack of ripe peaches, I search online for recipes with those ingredients. Spotify finds me all sorts of cool music. Books, though, are problematic: If I ask Google to suggest what I should read next after loving Abraham Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone, it will suggest books about doctors, nonfiction by Verghese, and books that take place in Ethiopia. These are not the reasons I loved Cutting for Stone.
The difference? Spotify has algorithms, but it also has human curators for its playlists. And human curators understand subjective qualities—vibe, tone, depth, candor. “Curate” was such a trendy verb a decade ago that I vowed to stop using the word, but now I see why it emerged with such fanfare: Discernment is the skill that will keep the rest of us sane.
Those of us who have shunned science fiction in favor of nonfiction social commentary will see how often they are one and the same. Realizing that what is said and why matters far more than when, where, or how, we might be less likely to snap our mind shut and avoid entire categories. Publicists will have to get more creative, selling something because of how it makes us feel, opens our minds, explores certain ideas. Artists and thinkers will feel freer to roam.
If we pull this off, will we learn to think outside all the other boxes, too—race, class, gender, religion? Because there have always been blends, mixtures, influences, examples that shatter the compartments. We just need more graceful ways to acknowledge them.
excerpted from "The Death of Genre" - Janet Cooperman
*** Editor's Note: those of us who grew up in Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s would have long crossed into this post-genre world, especially with music
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