We love to categorise things. We just cannot help ourselves. If things exist then we need to know precisely what they are. This is especially true with music. From the most tedious of reviews to the most off-hand conversations in the pub, the music we write and talk about seems to beg for description with any number of ridiculous genre tags. This is, in a sense, a problem that has got out of control. We have fanned the flames enough to propagate a world in which descriptors such as “brostep” and “witch house” not only exist but are a necessary part of any serious music fan’s vocabulary.
One form of genre tag is, of course, more popular than any other. The addition of “post” as a prefix to pretty much any style of music ever (I can’t wait for the rise of “post-brostep” personally) is now pretty much second nature. This isn’t completely ludicrous. After all, we cannot help but compare new things to past experiences. The problem comes when new sounds seem to be beyond what our previous realm of musical experience. There are recognisable elements of sounds we know all too well, but there is something else there, something we are less familiar with. Does it not make sense, therefore, to make use of the “post” prefix? Whilst it has prompted the rise of everything from the vaguely sensible (“post-rock”) to the laughable (“post-noise”), its usefulness surely cannot have been completely negated... can it?
Mogwai: one of the original, and best known, proponents of "post-rock"
Well the danger with the use of the “post” prefix is that it does rather imply that whatever it’s being used to describe is more than just a little bit special. It’s like what putting the word “progressive” in front of things used to mean before everyone realised that “progressive rock” had come to equal “doing the same thing as King Crimson or Yes did decades ago but with half the originality and less than half the line-up changes”. When the term “post-rock” was first coined it was used to describe a group of bands who were genuinely doing something new by pushing rock music closer to the worlds of classicism and/or jazz than ever before. Whether the same is true of most other “post” genres is very much debatable.
Take one of the most popular trends of late; “post-black metal”. Bands like Alcest, Deafheaven and Wolves in the Throne Room have supposedly acted radically enough to merit the creation of such a subgenre but, in reality, all three have just collated their origins in extreme metal’s most notorious stylistic category with elements of decidedly non-kvlt musical mannerisms (most obviously the aforementioned “post-rock” and that bastion of ridiculous genre names “shoegaze”). Unlike “post-rock”, which, at least initially, carried with it some worthy indication of the determination of its progenitors to steer clear of the clichés of “rock and roll”, “post-black metal” is almost completely meaningless. Its sole purpose is to inform us that black metal has, in the hands of several artists, developed beyond its origins into something more interesting and varied than it originally was.
Deafheaven's newest LP, 'Sunbather', has gained widespread praise, but does its place in the "post-black metal" scene belittle the accomplishments of its creators?
You may well be asking why any of this matters? Well, at first I thought it didn’t. I use silly “post-genres” in my reviews all the time. It’s a simple way of gently informing readers roughly what something sounds like. However I’ve come to realise the worst impact of the “post” plague. With a genre like black metal, which, for all the dubious events in its history, does actually stand for something (by which I generally mean individuality not all that church burning satanic nonsense), we risk diluting the deep meaning behind the style by using the “post” prefix. Are Wolves in the Throne Room any less a part of black metal’s lineage because they incorporate other styles into their sound? To me, they seem to be carrying on the original powerful messages of the genre far more effectively than more traditional sounding bands like 1349 and Watain. The same could be seen to be true of hardcore. Post-hardcore bands like Fugazi and Refused have produced music a good deal more challenging and interesting than anything but the earliest of hardcore bands. Do they deserve to have their hardcore punk credentials, intentionally or not, questioned with the “post” prefix?
We live in an age where there is so much music out there that it seems implausible not to utilise effectively meaningless terms to describe some of it, but we must be careful not to go too far. We may not be “post-everything” yet. There may be new sounds waiting to be discovered, but in describing them maybe we should choose to focus more on the evolution of already well-established musical styles in our descriptions. Perhaps it is just a little too simplistic to resort to utilising terminology that unhelpfully infers both distance from and, depending on your viewpoint, arguable inferiority or superiority to, musical forms that actually remain a highly significant part of our sonic landscape.
