Writer Jake explores the good, the bad, and the great aspects of generic music
By: JAKE HEIDBRINK
Staff Writer
Here is a question: What exactly is generic music? The word is used all the time when talking about what makes a song bad, but are those two words really synonymous? My opinion is that both of these questions depend largely upon how familiar the song seems to the listener.
Whenever I happen to be listening to a song by some mainstream rock group like Nickelback, the thing that irritates me the most is how similar it seems to another group in the same genre. When something comes off as being familiar to the point where I feel like I have heard it before, I begin to lose interest. In order for a song to be interesting, it has to do something that I have never heard before. But when a song has the same verse-chorus-verse structure with the same essential melody, it becomes repetitive to me, and I get bored.
Now this is not to say that just because a song is not generic automatically makes it good. Any music requires some amount of familiarity in order for it to be understood. If something seems alien to the point where I can find no way to compare it to anything I have ever heard before, like the bizarre “Metal Machine Music” by Lou Reed, I generally become bored or unimpressed. It is hard to appreciate a song that is hard to compare to anything else because there really is no way to know for sure if it will stand the tests of time. If there is no reference point, I feel like I am just praising the music for being original, and it is dishonest to praise certain music for sheer originality, especially when you are assuming how it will fare in the future. If we have no idea how to comprehend something in the present, how can we know that we will be able to comprehend it in the future? So just because a song completely avoids any notions of a pop music formula, does not necessarily mean that it is any more impressive than a song that strictly follows the formula.
It is ultimately through a balance between familiarity and individuality that sets apart music that is labeled as good, bad or great. Bad musicians follow a formula too strictly to be taken seriously. Good musicians separate themselves from the formula but are too unique to be understood by a mainstream audience, while great musicians utilize a familiar formula, but work with it in such a way that sets themselves apart from any other group. It is not wrong to be generic in some way, but an artist who brings nothin
