I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t insecure about my prospects for success doing music and audio professional full-time. There’s a lot in that sentence to unpack, which I will do down the road. But writing the post about what Big Stitch’s genre is (or genres are?) got me reflecting on genre (yet again). Simply put, thinking about genre makes me think I won’t be able to find an audience and will not be able to build a community and connect with individuals who enjoy my music or my music-making process.

Why? Well, as is my nature, I’ve done a lot of reading to help me transition away from my prior career and into professional art (with a stopover in audio journalism). Several authors write about how critical genre is for success. Seth Godin is one well-known art (and business?!) guru whose entreaties to emphasize genre to find success as an artist have fed my insecurity.

In Seth Godin’s book “The Practice”, a pretty great book, he hammers on the importance of genre, pleading that artists “write about the trade-offs, the industry, and your genre.” The primary reason he urges is that this writing puts you on the hook with that genre’s audience to deliver on your promise.

“If you tell us that this is a reggae record, we’re going to compare you to Bob Marley,” Godin points out. He is pessimistic about artists who eschew genre or unrecognizable mashup genres, which he confusingly calls “generic.” He says this is selfish because it doesn’t provide value to an audience. It’s a path of poor growth because of the lack of accountability and feedback from people who give a shit. He gets that artists want to be creative and innovative. But he thinks that starts with genre. A genre is a box with an existing audience that artists must know inside out and out to leverage that box’s audience. He agrees that an artist can’t hang out constantly in the middle of that box (that would be a craftsperson–an exploiter of genre for the sole purpose of money). Even so, Godin insists that creativity and idiosyncrasy should come from bending the accepted boundaries–like musical tropes. He sums up his advice on genre with, “Begin with genre. Understand it. Master it. Then change it.”

For a brief time, I took electronic music lessons with a music producer who’d been releasing and spinning electronic music genres since the 1990s. I have no idea if he’d read Godin’s “The Practice”. But he insisted that I needed to learn and master every electronic music genre (subgenre, whatever) so I could find and grow an audience before carrying them over to my vision for electronic music, which he clearly thought was weird. We didn’t work together for very long.

But of course, Godin and my former electronic music teacher are correct that focusing on genre optimizes finding and building a large audience. (How else will I make $45,000 a year from a billion streams on Spotify, like Snoop Dogg?) Plus, releasing music in a clear genre will spark critical reactions from genre experts and superfans. Critique that can be used to get better at that genre and increase appeal to that genre’s fans.

In short, Godin and my former electronic music teacher totally feed my anxiety (on the topic of genre, anyway). Anxiety is not a foundation for growth.

So yeah, the connection between genre and audience worries me a bit. After all, I want to find an audience, foster a community connected to my music, and connect personally with people moved by my art. And, yes, I want to generate income from music. Sure, it’s not possible to make much income from selling recorded music, but your music or musicality still has to have to appeal to connect with people. Right?

So maybe I’m screwed right out of the gate with Big Stitch.

But Darren Hemming’s offers me some comfort, writing about genre in his newsletter [Network Notes](https://networknotes.motiveunknown.com/p/we-need-subcultures-and-scenes-back). He points out that “genres [exist] because of movements in which many people coalesced around the same passions and interests [that] … began with some kind of central nucleus, which grew and in time took over the world.” The practical advice Hemming extract from this observation is the need for musicians to “seek out like minds, and look not to the world at large via the internet, but instead to your own back yard… Build that groundswell of interest, knowing that journalists, writers, influencers (wince), and their ilk will all take more interest in a collective happening than an individual doing their own thing.”

In other words, don’t “Begin with genre. Understand it. Master it.” as Godin pleads. Instead, begin with one person, then a group, then a community, and maybe a movement.

That’s a path I can walk. It’s a path I’m excited to walk. It does bring up some anxiety for me surrounding my ability to connect with people and find community. But I value and want those things. That ability is worth working on to share my art and music, which I am really passionate about. At the same time, I don’t value the sanctity of genre much at all.

I personally think music is more interesting to listen to, create, and play when you mash up genres. The seeds for this thread of my music were planted in 1986 because of two events. The first event was MTV’s first Monkees Marathon. Because of how the Monkees were formed–individual musicians who didn’t know each other and played or were influenced by very different genres were brought together to create a band for a TV show. I have no idea what made me watch so many of the Monkees episodes, but the diversity of music was enough to make me go on to buy all of their albums on vinyl, including a couple of original releases, and attend shows (either the Monkees themselves or individual artists). The appeal was absolutely their genre-agnostic approach to music.

The other seed was Paul Simon’s release of Graceland or, more specifically, my dad buying Graceland and playing it for me. I liked it so much that we wound up with four copies of the album in our house at one point: two CDs, vinyl, and cassette. It led me down the Paul Simon rabbit hole. And again, I just loved the genre-agnostic approach to music. I love learning about different genres while hearing both the interpretation of that genre through the aesthetic of a group of artists, as well as the chipping away of that genre because of various additions or subtractions to the performance, recording, production, and marketing of the music–sure, you could call that appropriation.

My deconstruction of the genre was probably completed after joining a Grateful Dead cover band in 1992. I hadn’t listened to the Dead before a WSU dorm-mate asked if I wanted to play bass in his newly forming Dead cover band. I also hadn’t touched a bass guitar before that point. (Yes, I literally bought a bass to join that band.) In trying to learn bass, I bought Bass Player magazine and listened to the many bassists they profiled. The bassist that stood out to me (and many bassists) the most was Victor Wooten, who played with Bela Fleck as one of the Flecktones. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones was by far the most genre-less band I’d ever heard, and I loved it. As a result, I went down a rabbit hole of discovery, starting with each band member, who came from very different musical backgrounds and influences. I’d been scornful of bluegrass at that point in my life (associating it with my dad) and never had reason to explore blues. (Jazz I was well versed in because of years in high school jazz choir.)

I think genre gets in the way of the art of music. It gets in the way of its evolution and innovation. It gets in the way of the aesthetic growth of musical artists (including producers, mix engineers etc.). And it gets in the way of the enjoyment of listeners. Genre today is primarily purported as a means of discovery. While it certainly can help discovery within genres, it very much reduces discovery across music overall. This effect is worsened with today’s focus on algorithmic playlisting.

A great example of how genre limits discovery is how it even constrained my musical discoveries. For someone with as genre-agnostic (or inter-genre) tastes as me, I wound up completely dismissive of electronic music–even genres like synth-pop that relied on electronic instrumentation. Why? Social identity. My sister loved synth wave and electronic music when I was young. And my best friend at the time was a die-hard metalhead (yup, I listened to lots of metal, too). For some reason–can I blame MTV?–he pitted metal against electronic music genres in creating his metal-heavy personal brand. So, to be his friend and hang with his metalhead cohort, I took on that hatred as a way of fitting in. (And to be clear, my friend didn’t hate all other genres. Our friendship started in elementary school by realizing we both loved the Stray Cats.)

All this is to say (to myself) that life is too short. I’m too old. I have spent too much time in my life not doing music. I have too many ideas. Boxes–concerns about genres–keep me out of flow. Flow is what facilitates abundant creativity–for me, at least. And the world needs more creativity right now.