This is what genres do really well, for good and for ill: They make large amounts of music easier to talk about (and, by extension, sell). Most often, genres do not stand up to scrutiny, yet they’re a fundamental part not only of music discussions online and off, but of any conversations we have about culture more generally. Particularly with the infinite online options for music access and conversation, pithy and memorable genre names can make it easier (if not necessarily accurate) to classify, discuss, and compare music. Genres arise out of tastes, and are often institutionalized (I wrote about one such example here), though online there’s infinitely more space to create, market, sort and search by micro-genres. (Remember "witch house"?) People have lengthy, years-long arguments using genres as combatants. If nothing else, genres make music easier to fight about.
These online pathways are what fueled the "rise" of "PBR&B." The tendency is to say that the term "went viral," but that metaphor disguises more than it reveals. "Viral" metaphorically describes the manner in which online communication proliferates like spreading a cold: We pass something to others simply by virtue of coming into contact with (or "being infected by") something. But links aren’t sneezes. Things get passed around online because people have specific reasons to do so—whether citing them and adding to the conversation, fiercely disagreeing with them, and so on. The numerous citations of "PBR&B" I cited earlier, not to mention the numerous others listed on the Wikipedia page, were replying to something someone else had said, and then adding something (positive and negative) to the conversation. Writers chuckled at the coinage while using it. Editors added the term to headlines of articles, perhaps for search-engine optimization purposes. Others on message boards, blogs, and other online publications critiqued it. We call things "viral" for the same reason we use pithy genres, actually—because it’s shorthand for something we’re too busy to dig deeper and investigate.
"PBR&B" spread because lots of people were talking about these particular artists, but the artists themselves were left out of such conversations. That's how it usually happens: Their work is left to be sorted like cereal boxes, independent of their own agency. Artists are sometimes asked by fans and inexperienced journalists to describe the "type of music" they make, and they’re often rightfully itchy about making these distinctions themselves. It’s not so much that there’s a right or wrong to genres, but it’s more the case that genres are power moves, able to define music far beyond any artist’s own wishes. This point was made very well in 2009 by Das Racist’s Victor Vasquez, in a smart response to Sasha Frere-Jones’ claim that rap as a genre was "dead." Genres, Vasquez argued (through the lens of literary theory), "are only useful to the extent to which they can help organize texts. The point at which they actually serve to define texts is when they can enter a lens of scrutiny so intense as to render them meaningless." Meaningless, but still powerful. This is what bothers me so much about "PBR&B," this stupid thing I spawned two and a half years ago. I started a joke, but I’m still worried about who is affected by the punchline.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4