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Since I had at least a stab at trying to explain different sorts of classical music... could somebody help me with the reverse?

Now, I know, I know, pop music genre categorisation can get fractal and contentious. But I'm not looking for tiny dividing lines or controversial pedantries between subsubsubsubgenres. I'm just looking for some big-picture guidelines. Because I've realised that most categories, I'm not sure how to tell them apart.

So, if you could, could you point out a few of the most obvious characteristics that decide what genre something falls into?

Let's just start with Grammy top-level categories.

Question 1: what is "pop"?.

Question 2: what is "traditional pop", and how does it relate to pop? (recent nominees include Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Willie Nelson, Andrea Boccelli (!?), and Seth MacFarlane (who I didn't even know was a pop star, but he's been nominated at least four times))).

Question 3: what is "contemporary instrumental"? I don't think of pop as being about instruments. What makes it different from dance, electronica (the grammies conflate "dance/electronica", which surprised me), or indeed classical?

Question 4: what are the lines between "R&B", "traditional R&B", "urban contemporary", and "rap"? It seems as though many of the same people get nominated for all these categories.
b) Meanwhile, what's the difference between "R&B" and "pop" (a bunch of people have been nominated for both), and between "traditional R&B" and "traditional pop" (CeeLo Green, for instance, has been nominated for both).
c) What's the connexion between "R&B" and what used to be called rhythm and blues?
d) What's the difference between "R&B" and "dance"?

Question 5: what's the difference between "rock" and "pop" (or "traditional pop")? Is "rock" just old pop that Tony Bennet isn't involved in?

Question 6: what's the difference between "rock" and "metal"? Is it just the use of raspy/breathy phonation by the singers?
b) the category's been removed, but where does hard rock fit in?

Question 7: what's "alternative" music? How does it differ from "rock" and "pop"? The rubric says that it must "exist outside of the mainstream", which suggests Weird Stuff... but nominees include Lady Gaga, Coldplay, Radiohead, Sinead O'Connor, The Arctic Monkeys, Gnarls Barkley and David Bowie (i.e. many of the bestselling popstars?)

b) it's not a Grammy category, but a genre people seem to talk about: what's "indie"? how is it distinguished from pop, rock, or alternative?

Question 8: what is the difference between: country; bluegrass; american roots; americana; folk; regional roots? I'm kind of surprised to see that country is considered a different top-level genre from the one comprising all those other things.

Question 9: I'm also kind of surprised to see "blues" included with folk and americana, rather than with, say, jazz. what are the differences between "blues", "traditional blues", "traditional R&B" and "jazz"? And it's not a category, but where does soul fit in?

Question 10: "Latin". Is it just a racial/ethnic genre? Is it a linguistic genre (lyrics not in english)? Or is there some sort of musical distinction? In particular, is "tropical Latin" just a political place-of-birth distinction, or an actual stylistic genre? Why is "latin jazz" considered a type of jazz, while "latin pop" isn't considered a type of "pop"?

Question 11: Is there any clear definition of "world music"? I was thinking it would be things outside the european tradition, but nominees have included Irish, French, and even American music. Why is reggae, for instance, not considered world music? Are Latin songs automatically excluded? Somehow, Yo-Yo Ma IS included, though...




Thanks for your help...

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

I'm not really a Music Guy, but maybe some impressionistic answers will be a start.

A very general answer, of course, is "marketing". If you're submitting a song for the Grammys awards, you try if possible to pick the category where you think you'll win.

To me, pop is lighter than rock. Or: it's rock that doesn't really offend anyone-- you and your mother can both enjoy it. More vocals, less drums, more danceable, arguably kind of insipid. Broadly and kind of unfairly, the Beatles are pop, the Rolling Stones are rock. Female singers, and male singers that teen girls love, are more likely to be classified as pop.

Whatever exactly you add to pop to get rock... if you add a lot more of that, you get hard rock. Louder, more banging drums, the singer sounds angrier, you can't play it for Mom at all. Add even more and you get metal, usually accompanied by raspy delivery and a whole lot of attitude.

R&B is rhythm & blues, but it's a broad term that changes over time. Early rock was an offshoot. These days it's mixed in elements of pop, gospel, hip hop, and soul.

Alternative is, well, good stuff that doesn't hit the top of the charts. Your geekier or artier stuff; played on college radio stations; thinks it's better than mere rock n roll.

Indie is supposed to be artists who aren't signed to a major label. As a Grammy category, I have no idea what it's supposed to mean.

I can't tell you musicologically how country / bluegrass / folk differ, but I could probably classify a song just by hearing a few bars. It's instrumentation, mainly. E.g. bluegrass relies heavily on the banjo and other acoustic string instruments. Folk is prototypically acoustic (preferably guitar or violin); it's supposed to resemble 1900s American music but obviously people compose new stuff in that style.

The "traditional" ones are probably referring to whether people actually try to make the song sound like it came from the 1920s (or whatever). So Ma Rainey was a blues singer, but if you try to sing exactly like her today it's "traditional blues". Regular "blues" would be more open to newer methods and influences. Jazz is kind of the intellectual, instrument-oriented development of blues, and if you tone it down for the mass market you get big band.

Latin is originally anything from Latin America... a huge mixed bag-- salsa, tango, merengue, rumba, rancheros, cumbia, samba, etc, etc. My parents' generation always listened to a bit of this. These days it's basically "stuff Latinos buy". My impression is that it's moved quite a bit toward pop. (There is a genre of Latin Pop, even if the Grammys don't call it that.) (Bossa nova was basically Latin music mixed with jazz.)

As I say, Americans knew some Latin American music existed, and of course European. But we were surprised to learn in about 1985 that the rest of the world produced music too. "World music" is basically everything we discovered after that time-- mostly African. Modern Brazilian music (i.e., post-bossa-nova) can be included. So basically, reggae isn't included because people already knew about it. There's a huge world of East Asian pop-- if Americans know it at all, it's probably thrown into world music, or into pop.

For almost all the American music, and some of the Latin, you could probably get most of the classifications by asking three historical questions: when did black people invent it? when did white people take it up? and do black people still listen to it? That'd make an interesting chart, in fact...

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Never mind, I'll let it stand. Here are some more ramblings.

Perhaps it might be useful to consider a genre, or style, of music to be a collection of specific tropes. Then it's easier and probably more useful to describe the differences between genres in terms of the presence or absence of said tropes and to establish archetypes, which is probably what I was trying to do there.

Much of the problem is due to the fact that "popular music" (as a general cover-term) is, perhaps more than any other art-form, an expression of the multifaceted entity that is popular culture, and attempts to describe or delineate genres and sub-genres within it are bound to be affected by one's own biases as well as a variety of social, cultural, political, racial, and sexual factors. Not to mention that Grammy categories are bound to be somewhat arbitrary anyway; Jethro Tull, the inventor of the seed drill, once won a Grammy in the "Hard Rock Or Metal" category despite fitting very few people's idea of what either comprised.

Nonetheless, there is value in recognising that much of, say, Michael's work fits the definition of "pop", while Led Zeppelin's first two albums qualify as pretty much the definition of "hard rock" and Iron Maiden meet most people's criteria of "heavy metal". The fun part, of course, is establishing what those criteria actually are.

They're from Canada's South?

I tend to find folk music of any kind highly underrated in the US, but maybe that's just me. That being said, I also think Celtic Woman (if that's the sort of thing you mean by "Irish Folk") is overrated, just in general. My favorite Irish folk music is probably sean-nós.

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What do you see in the night?

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_________________
Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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It's at least true that people classify music intuitively through tropes and prototypes. If you are asked if a band or a piece of music counts as pop or rock, the typical way to answer the question is to compare it to other bands that are accepted to fall into these genres and see if it sounds similar enough. What counts as "similar enough" isn't very well defined at all but can be approximated by questions like "Would you accept these bands playing at the same festival one after the other?" The result of this type of classification is that there are groups that draw major inspiration from so many different genres, or just have a particularly unique sound, that it's not clear what's the best fit genre label for their music. , for example, is typically classified as pop and while I struggle finding a better simple genre label for it, that's not a terribly satisfactory one either.

Regarding folk and world music, these are both wide labels and their difference is to an extent artificial. I'd say that you can put any music under "folk" if it continues an old local musical tradition. When it comes to the modern developments like , the music may borrow a lot in style and instrumentation from other genres, but it still fits under this definition of folk. Living traditions have anyway always borrowed from their neighbours, so this shouldn't be a surprise. World music is then any music that you group together based on the fact that it's exotic. This means that it'll naturally cover a different selection of music based on where in the world you happen to be. It's a category that helps the discovery of new music since many world music records could otherwise be challenging to classify. Typically what you find under "world music" is folk from far away places and in the brick and mortar record shops you'd find "folk" and "world" side by side and blending into each other. You can also see that there are genre labels like blues or Latin that could be fit under folk or world. The easiest explanation for why they typically aren't is that they are both already recognised well enough as their own things so there's no reason for grouping them under further high level categories.

Also, doesn't Mexican music count as "world music"? Is Mexico a faraway place? (And by whose standards? It sure isn't for me!).

I'm not sure "continues local traditions" really makes sense as a definition of either 'world' or 'folk'. After all, everything everywhere continues traditions, and by definition those traditions are local to wherever they are. On the other hand, 'folk music' in the usual sense is mostly a mid-20th-century tradition, derived more from contemporary popular music than from genuinely old European traditions (eg the tonality is taken from art music, with the odd blue note added, rather than from the traditional modes).

To answer a question earlier about Irish music: both the Chieftains and Celtic Woman have been nominated for the "world music" grammies, so... maybe it just means "from non-anglophone, non-hispanophone nations"?


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I think the general gist here is that genres primarily denote the ethnicity and class of the performers and/or the perceived audience.

But, suppose I heard a piece of music and I knew nothing about the performer - where they came from, what race they were, which publishing label they were signed to, etc - how would I tell what genre the piece probably was? Are there any indicators in terms of orchestration, melody, harmony, structure, etc?


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And pointed out above, another term: what is hip-hop? How is it distinguished from R&B and/or rap?



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Another question inspired by the above, though largely irrelevent to the thread topic: Irish music.
Irish music on youtube seems largely to belong to one of three categories:
- webcam footage of amateurs having a go, or camcorder footage of people singing at pubs, competitions, etc. All very well, but sound qualitiy tends to be poor. Ditto staticky records of old men recorded in 1920.

- people aiming for the "loud, drunken guys in a pub" aesthetic. Of course, loud drunken guys singing in pubs are a part of Irish musical tradition, but to be honest it's not my favourite style (and is less distinctive musically).

- (usually) women singing with so much artificial reverb that it sounds like they're sitting inside a bell, with an accompaniment of new age-y "relaxing" instruments, presumably produced as a fetishistic exercise for Americans. The word 'Celtic' usually appears on the cover somewhere.

Does anyone have any recommendations for traditional (not necessarily sean nós, but not contemporary in style) Irish music that isn't such a pantomime?

_________________
Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Sean nós is probably the only traditional Irish music I ever bother with tbh. Everything else I know in Irish is...not folk because I once had an Irish colleague and was desperately trying to find Irish songs that were not the kinds of folk songs she thought all Irish music was. I think most of what I ended up finding was Irish-language covers of American pop songs.

EDIT: Somehow, I managed to forget about Eurovision's one Irish-language nomination. I have no idea how good or bad the Irish in it is, though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M46Xf2Eik4

I also just ran across , , and . And heck, here's some sean nós, too, because why not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHa4jv7uOLo (video is slightly lower quality than the version that was taken down from YouTube, sorry). Nell Ní Chróinín seems to be a good sean nós singer in general. There's another clip of her I'm looking for (but I think that was taken down, too).