109 Obscure Musical Genres
Redgrass posterboy Arlo Guthrie, redgrassing out.
At a pop music moment when genre mash-ups like Girl Talk, M.I.A., Gnarls Barkley, and Kanye West’s new album 808s and Heartbreak abound, categories like rap, soul/r&b, rock/pop, etc. may have finally exhausted their use. Molly Lambert of This Recording, that tireless ethnographer of online music culture, offers a list of obscure genres to revitalize our tired music categories. Some highlights:
- Truck Driving Country: a mix of country rock and honky tonk whose songs, says Wikipedia, “often deal with trucks, and love.”
- Shanson: despite its soft name and ballad-like tunes, this Russian urban crime genre deals in vodka bars, bodies dumped in icy rivers, gangland violence and bloody romance.
- Redgrass: not quite Republican bluegrass, this genre uses that musical style to voice political opinions and address social issues.
- Fungi: this traditional style from the British Virgin Islands isn’t played while tripping on mushrooms or even using mushrooms as music instruments. Instead, it blends the islands’ European and African heritages into a unique style.
If these seem too obscure for use, check out some more relevant categories with examples after the jump.
Combining not only genres, but media too, Filk (sci-fi folk) puts fantastic and science-fiction narratives to folk and singer/songwriter styles. Traditionally, this genre thrived especially at sci-fi conferences, but has since spilled over into online forums. For an example we turn to Filk’s most famous practitioner, William Shatner:
Another obscure genre stemming, in part, from a love of technology, is Chiptune. Pioneered in the early 80s by using the primitive microchips of the newest video game systems, Chiptune had its origins in nerd-dom and has remained a thriving scene in the digital age. Examples can be found on artist Nullsleep’s site – he’s one of Chiptune’s biggest stars. And here I was thinking this is Chiptune music:
Come on. I don’t think I’d call Filk an obscure genre. Chiptune, sure. But who among us hasn’t blissed out to a great remix of Where Have All The Ender’s Gone by the Duniacs.
[...] time ago we mentioned, in a listicle about obscure musical genres, our developing taste for Chiptune: music made with the primitive chips used in the first [...]
[...] been listening to a lot of chiptune lately – you know, that genre of music created using video game audio technology from the 80s [...]