Genre baiting

Screamo, for the uninitiated, involves a person screaming repeatedly, as if they're about to be killed or do some killing of their own, while a guitar is played as loudly and badly as possible. The other component, crunk, thoughtlessly fuses hip-hop, pitch correction software, dreadful spelling and a man with a microphone vomiting repeatedly. This deranged marriage, pop music's answer to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, resulted in Freaxxx, the debut single by American crunkcore offenders Brokencyde. The critic who argued that Freaxxx represents the fall of Western culture was being generous. Watch it on YouTube and cry.

Crunkcore may be the worst offender, but it's merely one of 50 or more unlistenable genres to have kicked, punched and spat at our fragile cochlea in recent years. Gabba, electroclash, crabcore, donk, schaffel, powerviolence, sludge metal, spazzcore, hyphy - one by one the 'next big things' in music have come, gone, and left us with nothing but tinnitus and silly haircuts.

These new genres then go on to spawn thousands of preposterous sub-genres, bacteria-like lifeforms that only exist due to an endless process of fanatical categorisation deemed necessary by people with marginally different silly haircuts so they can differentiate themselves from people who listen to guitars or keyboards being played with marginally different chord structures. This is why the dustbin of music history overspills with such faddish nonsense as handbag-trance, nu-folk, blog-house, wonky-pop and chipmunk-beat*, to shame but a few. For every half-original idea we're seeing at least 150 hyphens.

So who's to blame? Have musicians realised that everything's been done before and invented ludicrous sub-genres to cover up their lack of ideas? Have music journalists realised that writing about music is indeed like dancing about architecture and coined ridiculous terms to compensate for their lack of vocabulary? Has the rise of MP3 players, which require us to tag all tracks by genre, made us hastily manufacture new terms so our music collections appear artificially bigger when we scroll down our i-Pods? Or is it simply that young people tend to define themselves by the music they listen to, and are inventing new trends to remain ten minutes cooler than their friends?

While most attempts at genuinely new forms of music are nothing more than disposable rehashes, occasionally something original appears. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases these new breeds turn out to be sworn enemies of the human ear. In our desperation to innovate we're creating monsters. Whether it’s a dodgy remix or an illicit mash-up, or Metallica collaborating with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra - it all sounds terrible.

Every over-hyped new genre, sub-genre or sub-subgenre blends two or more pre-existing styles, which are almost always incompatible. I'm all in favour of a bit of experimentation, but just because Heston Blumenthal can make bacon and egg ice cream taste good, it doesn't mean a producer in Germany should have the right to make a Gregorian chanting version of Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven. In every murky corner of every obscure genre, incompatible sounds are inbreeding, crossbreeding and half-aborting, and tomorrow's teachers, soldiers and world leaders are injecting these malformed sounds straight into their heads. Freaxxx by Brokencyde is irrefutable proof that the madness has to end before something unthinkable happens.

It's time to take action. For the sake of our collective sanity, I propose we limit all popular music to five genres: pop, rock, jazz, classical, electronic (possibly incorporating hip-hop) and world (everything else). If there's still any doubt about the correct classification of a new piece of music, the musician has to get written permission from me first.

* I made this one up

To be published in Esquire Middle East