College Survival Guide
I’m in a fake band. We write real songs, play them and record them, but we don’t play live shows, and we don’t make records. The reason for this is simple: we suck. And it’s not even so bad that it’s good, like, say, mom rock. Sure, one or two of our songs, by virtue of one member who actually plays an instrument, are not half bad. They’re topical. Even kinda catchy. The recordings are shit, though, and the technical skill—if I speak for myself, anyway—is rudimentary. It’s purely for kicks, though, and we have no intention of becoming any good, not even by accident. It’s synth-pop really, although sometimes it’s a little folky, and other times it’s pretty rockin’. It’s also lo-fi, bedroom-tape wanking. It’s bedcore.
What’s that? Never heard of bedcore? That’s because we made it up. Oh, go ahead. Google it if you must. You’ll find about 30 results, and only a few refer to music, sort of. You might also note that of the few entries that do refer to a musical style called bedcore, they’re recent posts. One “Chods” posted about a week ago, claiming bedcore is “speeding up a bedtime song.” I disagree, sir. Bedcore is lo-fi, shitty, no-ambition-having indie rock. Interestingly enough, someone else on the same board suggested that shitcore might soon prosper, shitcore being hardcore mixed with shit. One could argue that emo has already explored this musical direction.
But what we’re really talking about here is the lexicon of music, that vast sprawling heap of goo that ostracizes the uninformed and insulates the in-the-know. I’m not talking about musical terms—flat fifths or downtuning or chromatic scales—I’m talking about genres and subgenres, those hundreds of often-hyphenated structures meant to finely tune every possible musical utterance. They range from the obvious (noise-rock, bitch-punk), to the less obvious but nonetheless intuitive (twee, shoegaze), to the outright esoteric (crust-punk, grindcore). All of this is to say nothing of genres that describe ethos more than sound, like straight-edge.
But like my beloved bedcore, musical genres are just words that dice music into smaller and smaller chunks, to the extent that they are so fragmented that they threaten to lose all meaning. Yes, genres are a much-needed utilitarian approach to understanding music’s endless variations and evolutions, but it’s also a reflection of the people making the music. Most rock bands I know are loathe to self-categorize. “It sounds like us,” they’ll insist. This obsession with originality, though amusing, still does little to aid music fans. Perhaps, by narrowing and distinguishing the musical possibilities, artists feel they’ve conceded to a description while resisting categorization.
Or ask anybody you know what kind of music they like, and they’ll likely throw an umbrella genre at you. (Undoubtedly, someone, somewhere would answer: I’m into Grebo.) Liking, say, rock, tells your inquisitor nothing about you though, because rock, like Walt Whitman, is large and contains multitudes. So math rock is a useful term whose very root implies numerically inclined nuances; post-rock however, is about as uselessly vague as it gets. What’s the cutoff, anyway? When did rock part ways with rock? And what immediately followed that still sounded like rock while no longer exhibiting its original core attributes?
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I propose that all genres should really be three-parters. First, I want a tempo indicator up front. Not everything can just be called slowcore, midcore or fastcore, and this is where genres fail us the most. Two: one subset genre is allowed, but only if it’s onomatopoeic, or damn near close. Is there a more beautifully and appropriately named genre than swing? Three: give me a genre umbrella, and stick to the oldies: rock, pop, rap, hip-hop, r&b, jazz, soul, world. Mid-twee-pop is frail, mid-tempo pop. I’ll take some fast-sludge-rock. And so on.
In the end, it’s all just shorthand for this protean thing we call rock ’n’ roll. At its best, the language claims and invigorates the sound it describes. Spazcore comes to mind. At its worst, it’s clinical, lazy and inadequate, denoting mere deviance from its root genre. See alt-country. I’ll tell you one thing: Americana needs a new publicist, because as of press time, no one still knows exactly what it is.
But don’t get too tripped up in the lingo. The cold dissection of music is a real snoozefest anyway—it’s the honest, visceral response to the tunes that counts more than a cataloging, scientific approach. After all, how else could we end up with terms like bedcore, mope rock and sadcore, were it not for a reckless disregard for the rules? We should enjoy it while we can, because who can say what the post-bedcore musical landscape will sound like, when everyone’s making lap-pop and Can-indie has taken over?