When I was first learning guitar (around 13 years old), I was enamored with the wild reckless noise and feedback that Jimi Hendrix and other psychedelic guitarists were doing, as well as the avant-garde weirdness of The Beatles' "Revolution 9" and even John Lennon's Live Peace in Toronto 1969 to a certain extent, which I had on DVD around that time. And I noticed with some frustration that most mainstream rock and even metal music in the early 2000s wasn't really doing that anymore- and my guitar teacher was a bit snobby, and didn't think it was important, more or less concurring with other guitarists at the time that making wacky noises didn't take any "real skill", although those weren't his words. (Not that I had a large enough amp or any pedals to make that sort of noise, although I managed some things on a guitar with microphonic pickups and some found objects.)

It's really only been very recently that I've found rock bands from the '80s and '90s that scratch that itch. Noise rock/pop and alternative bands like Sonic Youth (of course), Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The White Stripes and several other more obscure bands, including ones from the '60s and '70s, are filling that void and making me feel sorta vindicated. Evidently the screeches and wails of Hendrix didn't live on so much in classic rock and mainstream metal, but found it's way into alternative.

Not for the faint of heart. The first track is like proto black metal.

Music genres get blurry

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.