A commenter (Commentor? Commentator? One of these things), BykerSink, said this:

There are only two types of music. Good music and bad music.
The genre is not important.

It’s very glib to say genre doesn’t matter, of course. It’s one of those “I love everyone” sort of statements that makes the speaker sound very open-minded and above it all. Hell, I say stuff like that all the time. But the truth is, as truth usually is, much more complicated.

Labels are tools. And like any tool, misused, they harm or hurt. The hammer drives the nail, but also hurts the finger.

So sticking with musical genre for a moment; I rarely, very rarely, say to myself “I want music”. I say “I want this genre music. I’m in the mood, just now, for some jazz. And not just jazz, but cool jazz, or maybe bossa nova, or maybe I want some swing right now. And I’ll go look for that. or I’ll want heavy metal or funk. Because the genre implies a feel and mood. And I’m seeking music to fit a mood, sometimes.

This is why a record store will group by style. Because I don’t want to look through country/western today, I want Classical.

Obviously, it’s useful. I don’t put my shorts away with my flannel shirts. I don’t put my pans with my silverware. I don’t put my rat poison with my toothpaste.

But there’s the other side. The dark side of the force, if you will.

Since people tend to listen by genre, listeners, buyers, will say “I don’t like that kind of music.” They reject based on type. And we all do it. People who claim they don’t are lying to themselves. “Yeah, I love all music, but not those boy bands”. “I like all kinds of music other than reggae”. Because there’s always a bias. Always. It’s just a question of how the bias is laid out. BykerSink says there are two kinds, good and bad. So it’s simply binary, BykerSink don’t like a genre called bad music.

People cut themselves off from a lot of music with genres, sure. And bands suffer; when I was a local music scene person, I was surrounded by bands that didn’t fit a genre. My favorite, Dot3, were kind of funk but kind of afro-tribal and kind of prog-rock and kind of punk/pop. And yes, they were good, incredibly good. But promoters didn’t know what the hell to do with them. Another band that came out of the ashes after Dot3 broke up, Tongue Tied, used to get lumped in with hard rock bands because they were dark and heavy, but they were not at all a hard rock band. They had trouble getting to the right audiences because they’d been mis-labeled.

Labels are useful. All the more so with a modern collection of music on Mp3; I can’t find the right stuff from my collection without a genre label, there’s too much to wade through unless I’m seeking a particular song or album or artist. But they screw me up because some artists are so badly mis-labled (rock bands in ‘alternative‘? Punk bands in ‘hard rock‘? Let’s just call them all ‘rock‘ ok?). Worse for me is that ‘Disco‘ and ‘Soul‘ and ‘R&B‘ and ‘Funk‘ and ‘hip-hop‘ all tend to get crammed together in a blob; so when I’m trying to find funk collections, more often than not what I get are collections that are mostly disco or hip-hop, and not true 70’s funk at all. Not that I have an issue with those genres, but KC and the Sunshine Band != Funkadelic.

So BykerSink, I say – yeah, there are genres called good music and bad music, but for us to have a conversation about music, we need something a little more agreed upon. So the labels, the genres, are important, even if they are also a frustrating impediment to enjoyment in some cases.

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Everything I ever said bad about rap and hip-hop?

I take it all back. Just, you know, for the record.

Ok. It was a long time ago the first time this white boy said ‘you know, this rap stuff might not suck’. I bought a Heavy D album and a De La Soul album (oh, hell, I don’t know how long ago, but first albums for both, when they were first released). And I liked ’em ok, but didn’t really play them.

A while later, I heard NWA and Ice-T and thought, y’know, I kinda like these gansta guys, even thought they’re sorta fuckheads. But I didn’t go buy ’em. Didn’t feel compelled.

And yeah, that was a while ago. I’ve heard things I liked since, sure. Tupac, Jurassic 5, Eminem, Kid Rock. You can’t avoid the rap and hip-hop these days even if you want to. But I never really felt, again, the need to own.

Then — well, I blame Jeff. It’s all his damned fault. Not that this is the first time Jeff ever talked me into anything, but I’m just sayin’.

Jeff’s a whole topic of his own – but let’s set that aside. Let’s just do this – Jeff’s my boss. Jeff’s just finished his full body suit tattoo (I mean just – like two days ago). Jeff’s been my friend as long as Austin Ray, but only my boss for about four years.

So Jeff – Radio Jeff – Jeff who owns more music than almost anyone I’ve ever known (Willy Keats may have him beat still, but I bet it’s close); Jeff has been telling me for a couple years now, ‘rock is dead‘. He’s been trying to get me to listen to hip-hop for a long time. Keeps handing me CD’s, bringing me his iPod, saying “Listen to this”.

But there’s one thing he said that finally clicked. ‘It’s all about the DJ’s.’

It’s about the DJ’s. It’s not about the rappers. The MC’s.

You have to think about that a little, if you’re not familiar with hip-hop. because when when people say hip-hop, you think rap; you think Snoop Dog or Tupac or Ice-T. You think about the MC. But rap != hip-hop. Rap is part of hip hop. So you have to step back a little and see that whatever that guy up front is doing, stalking the stage, posturing and rockin’ the microphone, the origin of it all, the beat, the backbone, it’s all the DJ. Or that’s where it started anyway, even if a lot of rap is now done on a computer, not by a live guy with two turn tables and a microphone.

So Jeff said to me — It’s all about the DJ’s. “It’s like Jazz,” he said. “Because they are improvising, and they’re just doing it for themselves.”

He said it a while back. But it didn’t sink in. he’s been playing me cuts for a while, talking about artists, DJ’s. He loaned me a DVD of Scratch, which I mentioned before. But I’d been sitting on it, hadn’t watched it. But then one day, in his office, he was playing a cut from something and I said ‘man, you should make a compilation disk of the hip-hop you really, really dig’.

So he did. he called it ‘Bounce, Dammit’,

I listened to this once. And didn’t like it much. And then I listened again – this time turned up loud, in my car. And loved it. And played it over and over. And loved it more each time. And it was like a light went on in my head. ‘Christ.’ I thought. ‘It’s about the fucking DJ’s‘.

I suddenly got it. I came home and watched Scratch. And it was like I discovered an instrument I’d never heard before. These guys are musicians. They’re artists. They’re insane. Cut Chemist, DJ QBert, a ton of others. Amazing people. And then I went back and started listening again. And the more I listened, the more I was amazed.

And then I started buying stuff. Eminem first, though he’s not a pure hip-hop guy, but I wanted to hear the albums again. Then Prozack Turner who’s a local boy, and is truly amazing (run, don’t walk, and buy Death, Taxes and Prozack, trust me on that one, this white kid from Campbell can rap.

But still, it’s the DJ’s. And I don’t even have a list of albums and artists for this, but the Return of the DJ series is a goddamned good start. I just listened to them, and they’re top of my ‘to buy’ stack right now. Then there’s Cut Chemist meets Shortkut. This is hard to find I think, but from my limited exposure, Cut is my favorite of the DJs. He’s amazing; he’s also the turntablist behind a lot of Juassic 5.

They are – as Jeff said – like jazz. And once you’ve actually seen these cats working, and then listen with that mental image, it’s frankly incredibly. It’s not just whicka-whicka-whicka scratching, though that, you start to see, has it’s own music. But it’s also whole new songs built from the old. I’ve only begun to explore this, but like my discovery of jazz a few years ago, I can feel a gateway opening to a universe of music I knew little about. These are the moments I live for; new experience come unexpected and bringing with it amazing rewards. You know, some of you, what I’m talking about. Out of nowhere.

…And I still wanna go buy those 1200’s and a mixer, call myself Dj Freaky E, and start scratching.

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Now Playing: Jurass Finish First from the album Bounce, Dammit!

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