Sunday, March 06, 2022

"All of That Has Been Shattered"

"I graduated from high school at the end of the nineteen-nineties, and I've often wondered whether I was part of the final cohort to think of unwavering genre fealty as an expression of integrity: you picked a style and vigorously defended its superiority. As a teen-ager, I lived in near-constant fear of being called a poser—an incoherent tenderfoot who simply drifted toward whatever was popular. Now the idea of identity as a fixed and narrow concept, and of taste as inherently cloistered, feels bizarre, punitive, and regressive. Taste is still a way of broadcasting a social identity and indulging in a kind of instinctive tribalism, but the boundaries are no longer quite so circumscribed."

In a 2001 New Yorker article, Amanda Petrusich discusses the decline of genre in music.

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