I dunno. I dabbled in a great many tribes back in the 70s and 80s. Didn’t seem like a big deal to switch from one thing to another. But what I liked is that you tended to have a basic understanding for where one group fit in relation to another. The band Yes? Progressive. King Crimson? Also Progressive. Sex Pistols? Punk. Blondie? New Wave. Donna Summer? Disco.
Today, the stuff on the radio just seems like “radio music”.
Today, whenever I hear any current music, unless it is salsa music at the Mexican grocery store, it sounds either like whining or cats fighting.
I should also say I was at the Stones concert in Zilker Park in Austin when after the break they came out and in honor of “Mick’s good friend Waylon Jennings” played the song “Let’s go to Lukenback Texas”. What made it even funnier was it appeared like everyone on stage was drunk.
Country Singer Glenn Campbell did studio work on the guitar for his friend Alice Cooper. CCM guitarist Phil Keggy is friends with Paul McCarty.
So genre blending as been going on a long time.
I didn’t move outside of those albums until I went to Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas 9/2019. I heard the Tedeschi Trucks band for the first time…wow!
That's because there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. There is good and bad music in all genres except rap which just universal ear poison and really isn't music at all.
You mean Blondie ain’t punk? (Think songs like “Detroit 442”)
Of course then you get the problems of the bands not agreeing. Fripp hates the idea of King Crimson being considered prog. Tony Iommi always says Sabbath was never heavy metal. Then of course there’s the long running bands that change, like Rush, prog metal, just metal, pop metal, hard rock.
As I rant from time to time, there IS great new music. I go to Bandcamp to find new music. What the Sony et al want us to think is good, sucks bigly. Bandcamp has a searchable front end where you can find quality, unsigned new music in whatever genre you want.
Going further, commerce works. Get off yer assez, go out to a bar/club, plunk down $10 for a cover charge and hear 4 bands play their guts out. Two bands will suck. One will be ok. But then you'll find that one band that blows your socks off, and renews your hope in youth and humanity...you just then buy their merch because capitalism.
All of, in some way, is a nod to what Zappa said in 1988:
Q: Do you think that's a reason why guitar is becoming less of a prominent instrument in pop today? Do you think other people are experiencing what you're experiencing?
FZ: Well, pop music is not the end of the world. There's a whole substructure of what they call pop music which is heavy metal, in which the guitar rules. And that's never going to change. That's a style that's probably going to be with us until hell freezes over, to use a rock and roll term. But if you're talking about Whitney Houston, that other kind of pop music, they try to keep those blasphemous elements out of it. There's nothing AOR or MOR about a fuzz-tone guitar. They try to make the orchestration on those songs as neutral and comfortable as possible. And I think the listening public is, to a certain extent, deceived by what is broadcast. Because what is broadcast is not necessarily an accurate indication of what people are writing or recording. Now, what usually goes on the radio is the most banal product that every record company can manage to put together. In the United States, radio truly is a cultural embarrassment. The only creative radio you can listen to is what they call shock radio, where people are talking and making things up. There's a little spark of creativity there. But most of the music that's broadcast is harmful to your mental health.