“Salvador Dalí's Still Dying” by The Watch Children
"As long as I remember I don't think that I've ever been able to listen to the radio It always sound phony, like they're selling macaroni And listening to commercials gives me vertigo
And sometimes in a while my fingers find the dial And I turn it on and I listen for a minute or so Whenever I do they're still lying And Salvador Dalí is still dying"
Part of my never-ending effort to understand the universe is gaining at least a small amount of knowledge of every single music genre that ever existed. Being the kid who grew up listening to K-Earth Oldies, Arrow Classic Rock, and The Beatles albums, this mostly means guitar-oriented rock and pop genres from roughly 1950 to 1990.
After a while, you start to notice that these sub-genres and sub-sub-sub-genres starts to drift into one another as they selectively emphasize and/or subtract elements of music that existed before. Once you get deeply into it, it all becomes a blur, and the shared elements of surf rock, psychedelic, and black metal become apparent and you start to question if the subdivisions are entirely necessary.
This is especially apparent in the punk/alternative spectrum. I notice that there are over a dozen subgenres that essentially are all one iteration or another of revitalizing rock and pop music from about 1965 to 1970 with a subtly different leaning:
I don’t dare claim that these “labels” are completely meaningless, since learning about them is exciting and interesting to me, but making a conscious effort to create music that fits their defintion exactly is a fruitless effort since their defintion is hazy to begin with.
