Have we discovered all of the music genres?

Sometimes it feels that way. When I listen to a lot of newly released popular music, it feels like I’ve heard it all before. Not the songs themselves, of course, they’re only a few days old, but the styles. This one fits right into a 1985 synth-wave station. That one doesn’t sound out of place at a 2005 pop-punk concert. It’s almost as if we’ve reached a point where all of the genres waiting to be discovered have already been discovered, all the final frontiers have now been closed, and now we’re just cycling and recycling through them. As if the sound of the 2030s, of the 2080s, &c., will just turn out to be something we already know. Where’s the music that would make middle-aged people say, “You call that music? That’s just noise!”

It feels like some sort of cultural stagnation, a stasis. All the previous decades had a musical character to them—the rockabilly guitar of the 1950s, the electric pianos of the 1980s. Even the 2010s had that dubstep-wobbly thing and that boomy trappy thing which might feel out of place in a 2000s period piece. What do we have that would sound out of place in the 2010s? Are there still genres yet to be created?

Here are some counterarguments I can think of.

Outside view. If you think we’ve discovered all of the music genres, that’s a bit arrogant. You’re a bit like the physicists in the late 1800s who proclaimed, “We now know all there is to know about physics,” shortly before Einstein and friends messed everything up. Very few people in 1950 would conceive of what music would end up sounding like in 1975. Maybe they’d think, “Well, their jazz will be like our jazz now, but jazzier?” and completely miss all the rock and funk and soul that actually happened. What’s so special about our era that we could think we’ve discovered all the music genres?

(But, well, we can sculpt sound-waves now! Two centuries ago we didn’t even have a complete understanding of wave mechanics, so of course Beethoven would probably not conceive of dubstep. EDM and such were yet to be “unlocked”, so to speak. But now that we can create any waveform we want, isn’t that equivalent to having unlocked all the genres? I don’t know. Maybe there’s more physics to be discovered, and then even more presently inconceivable forms of music will ensue.)

Too provincial. Who is “we”? Doesn’t this question depend on who’s asking it? And what is “discovered”? That’s a pretty somebody-centric question.

(Okay, but we can route around that objection. How about a similar question: Do all of the music genres that will ever exist already exist today? That is, for any possible music genre X, is there at least one community, or even one person, for which X has been already unlocked?)

Need time to pass. Our time period doesn’t have a “character” yet because it’s still too young. Give it fifteen years or so, and 2037 people will hear a 2022 song and think, “that’s such a 2022-sounding song! Can you imagine hearing this on the radio to-day?”

(Okay, but this doesn’t explain why we are making songs that sound like they could be from 2007. Where are our styles you wouldn’t hear in 2019? And sometimes a song or a story or a fashion can become “instantly dated” because the surrounding culture changes so quickly. Where are our “instantly dated” 2020 or 2021 songs?)

Categories are fluid. Genre is an arbitrary scheme of categorisation. It’s practically meaningless. In the future we may have different genre labels for things. Existing genres may coalesce, or more likely, fracture. So two songs that we might just call “noise” to-day may in 2037 be re-categorised as two different genres.

(Hmm, that’s true. I’ve read a lot of articles about the “Death of Genre” and how reducing everything to the traditional set of labels gives you a very skewed view of the world. I see a lot of artist biographies describing them as multi-genre or transcending genre or uncategorized. Maybe this has to do with that. Maybe our artists fall into the genre post-genre. Wait.)