(Credits: Far Out / Sai Harish / CAR GIRL)
Fri Nov 22, 2024 8:00 PM, UK
Genre is a concept that is steadily becoming outdated. In the past, a genre was important so that people knew what kind of music they identified with. It made it easy to know which albums to buy when music was less accessible, and it served as a form of identity. The clear differences between heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath and pop acts like Madonna were important, but that’s not so much the case these days.
As music becomes more accessible and we can listen to songs in the palm of our hands rather than investing in a record before actually playing anything, genres have begun to overlap and become difficult to separate. That’s a good thing, because it makes music more unpredictable for the listener and gives the artist many more creative options.
It took us a while to get here though, and even with this modern approach to the genre there are still some terrible songs. That said, some genres of music stand out as more terrible than others. Some styles of music are so terrible that we would have done better never to listen to them in the first place. Their existence did not contribute anything to that important musical evolution; instead, they stand alone as terrible blips in history.
Here are five of the worst music genres that we should erase from history.
Genres that should be removed from history:
Dubstep
In the same way we look back at the two Topman T-shirts for £10 and those sunglasses made up of plastic lines: what on earth were we thinking? There was a period where you couldn’t go to a bar or a house party without coming across songs like ‘Bangarang’ and ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’, and for some reason we loved it.
Looking back now, the rise of Dubstep was likely the result of a misguided rebellion. The noise, image, and cringe-worthy nature of the genre was enough to make people willing to delve into what seemed like a whole new style of music. In retrospect, it’s clear that the genre had never been done before because it was terrible. The further we can distance ourselves from that bleak period in music history, the better.
Scream
Genres overlap a lot in modern society and no longer represent an individual’s sense of identity as well as they used to. When they did, the look that accompanied Screamo music was perhaps the worst and most unbearable of all time. The image of ‘no one understands me, I’m so individual’ was adopted by half the world, and followed closely by some of the worst music ever written.
There’s nothing like having a thirty-year-old man sing about how hard it is to be a teenager, but that’s the basis of it. V-neck T-shirts, neck tattoos and fringes covering half the face occupy this terrible stain in music history. Let’s just forget about it.
Folk rap
When Ed Sheeran took the stage, banged his guitar and rapped the lyrics to “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You,” the world lost its mind. It was as if rap music hadn’t been around for over thirty years, with audiences responding to the fast-paced lyrics as if it were downright mind-blowing. The truth is that Sheeran’s image was so far removed that of hip hoppeople misinterpreted what he did as something groundbreaking rather than just an acoustic cover of rap. It led to some of the worst music ever made.
Skinny teenagers from all over the UK figured out how to hit their guitars and keep playing them. They wrote bad lyrics with no specific flow, and it also became cool to make slowed-down acoustic covers of rap songs. It was a strange time in music and a time that we need to move on from.
Parody music
A line must be drawn between comedy music and parody songs. While most comedy music is also pretty bad, there are some exceptions that slip through the cracks. However, there are no exceptions when it comes to songs that are outright parodies of other songs; everything is terrible and everything must be destroyed.
It’s hard to get into the mindset of people who hear classic rock songs and think it would be a good idea to rewrite the lyrics but make them about Marks and Spencer’s clothing line; it is most likely a mentality similar to the Zodiac killers and people writing to Radio 1 telling them to “keep the music coming”. There are people we are not supposed to understand, and it is better to leave the unanswered questions as just that.
Hair metal
Hair metal is a tricky one. On the one hand, it is a genre of music that can be a lot of fun to listen to. The guitars are distorted, the choruses are catchy, and overall the songs feel pretty good. However, when you peel away the surface, you see these songs for what they really are, and once you do, you realize that it’s a genre that needs to be addressed. removed from history.
Hair metal is a lazy branch of glam rock that musically steals from it, simplifies it and strips it of any form of substance. Songs start from a chorus and work backwards, trying to create hits without any meaning. Not to mention that many of these songs have a deep-seated misogyny that only adds to the sonic insult.
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