A Burnt Out Case

Something all music geeks have to deal with at one time or another is burnout. Listening to music almost every waking hour for enough weeks on end will inevitably tire a person out on music, but then again, not listening to music almost every waking hour isn’t really an option (go and find the hyperbole in that last clause - but you get my drift). Since burnout happens to everybody at least once - you listen as much as you do, there’s something that’s going to be the primary cause for your little death - and since the recovery from burnout actually is close to 100%, what I will suggest is a way to reduce and/or minimize the dreaded burnout.

Out of all the ways I personally burnout, the one that annoys me the most deals with what I’m going to call the Genre Fallacy. An example to illustrate this Genre Fallacy: remember trip hop? You know, the style of music that Portishead popularized with the disgusting yuppie hipster set (a style, which, incidentally, morphed into the dead-end of a genre, electro-lounge). Portishead and the other first-generation trip hop acts (Massive Attack, Tricky, DJ Shadow) are necessary to any genuine music-lovers collection, but the later generation trip hoppers are almost exclusively without broad interest (exceptions: the first two Lamb albums, the first Archive album, and the first Sneaker Pimps album - yes, the Sneaker Pimps - and then that’s it). While a hardcore trip hop-head may appreciate the lyrical-poetical offerings of Crustation, or the soul-infused brand of trip hop from Morcheeba, or the organic rawness of DJ Krush, any sane or sober listener will get dead-tired from these mere exercises in form. And thus, the Genre Fallacy: the mistaken belief that a given genre is categorically awesome, where only the top-tier artists have any lasting appeal or worth.

Of course, I’ve fallen into this trap more than once - after all, only someone who actually bought into trip hop could name the Clifford Gilberto Rhythm Combination, Monk & Canatella, Kruder & Dorfmeister, or Thievery Corporation and why each of them suck. (To avoid dealing with past trauma - which of course dooms me to the repetition of making the same mistake again and again - I think I’ll skip explaining why Kruder & Dorfmeister are a mind-numbingly punchable pair of Deutsch-talking guys.)

The second time I made the mistake of trying to get into a genre was IDM. If you don’t know what the letters stand for, then you’re not smart enough to listen to intelligent dance music. Again, outside of the front-line Warp roster of the Aphex Twin, Autechre, the Black Dog/Plaid and Boards of Canada, there’s nothing else worth mentioning that doesn’t merely amount to genre-exercise, AKA generic wank. And, as far as I’m concerned, the final upshot of genre-exercise is that I end up feeling worn-out from these genres, and in music in general.

The more well-known artists from given genres are well-known for a reason: they can offer something that is appealing on a generally musical level. But on the other hand, those bands whom some certain people like to namedrop in that pointless game of out-obscuring others would at best be, within the context of the genre, interesting (“interesting,” mind you, is actually polite code for “different, but fundamentally uninteresting”). “Within the context of the genre” is the key phrase here; you have to situate yourself in the conventions of the genre before you can appreciate, and that’s one level of remove from, you know, just digging on the tunes.

The upshot: there’s no shame in scratching only the surface of a genre, because in my estimation, that’s where the talent usually lies. There’s a reason why Nirvana are so famous in terms of grunge, after all.