First, a correction. Last week, Michaelangelo Matos outlined how 40 different music genres got their names. He noted a story from Simon Reynolds' book Energy Flash: Reynolds was told by DJ Navigator that Tivoli Gardens in Kingston, Jamaica, was known as The Jungle, and its denizens as Junglists. The first comment on Michaelangelo's piece came from Simon himself: "Actually MC Navigator got the story garbled, as I discovered several years after Energy Flash came out. Arnette Gardens, in Kingston, was where the junglists lived. Tivoli Gardens was a rival neighbourhood, don't know what they called themselves there (surely not gardenists)."
Second, another correction. Michaelangelo ascribed the coinage of gospel as a genre term to the Rev Thomas A Dorsey. Not so, said musicjourno: "According to the Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music, the first use of the term "gospel" to describe the music came in 1874 with the publication of Gospel Songs with the book Gospel Hymns coming just a year later." So there.
Many posters offered futher refinements to other genres. And many more asked where other genre names had come from. There was much back and forth about the origins of emo, for example, before GrahamLand offered what we've always believed to be the accepted version: "To clarify, [emotional hardcore] started in the mid-80s in the Washington, DC hardcore punk scene (the scene I grew up in) with bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace being the definitive examples … Actually the term 'emo-core' came from a Thrasher magazine article from '85 or '86. DC's maturing hardcore bands didn't refer to themselves as emo, but the name stuck."
There was much argument about whether giving names to different types of music was strictly necessary. On the one hand, you either like music or you don't and the name doesn't matter. On the other, giving a name to approximately similar sounds his helpful for people who want to explore. One anecdote reprinted by machiajelly delightfully exposed the shortcomings of genre naming, though: "I think it was Ry Cooder that I remember being asked by a journalist something like: 'Ry, you've recorded so many different kinds of music – rock, folk, jazz, reggae, and miscellaneous. Tell me, which do you enjoy playing the most?' After a longish pause, he replied: 'You know, deep down, what I enjoy the most is the miscellaneous.'" And catta offered some wise words on the perils of overcomplication: "In one sense you need the shorthand for descriptive purposes. The problem today is that there's so many sub-genres, variants, mutant offsprings and 'post-this' and 'post-that', it ends up defeating the purpose for anyone without an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire terrain of modern music."
Peter Bradshaw gave Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In four stars in F&M last week, prompting a lively thread beneath his review. One of the themes discussed was Almodóvar's attitude to women, which gave some posters pause for thought. "Great," said k8thegreat. "An upmarket Boxing Helena. Is there some universally-held male fantasy where guys keep a woman in their bedroom and hack her up from time to time as a hobby? I probably don't want to know the answer to that question."
"Dumb, neurotic, fucked-up, emotionally backward, sexually rapacious or sexually confused women aplenty in PedroLand, where intelligent, developed, clear-minded or substantial women are absolutely non-existent. The peddled mythology that Pedro is the man who lurves women doesn't bear scrutiny, and yet it is repeated so often that, excuse the cliche, it has become the accepted truth," sniffed Vanderlyd. This one looks like it could run and run and run, if you ask us.
