Have you ever wonder where music terms come from? These terms seem to flourish out of nowhere and everywhere, and the Guardian had an interesting article about this a few days ago.
Nomenclature is really important when you write about music,if you are clever enough you can even come up with new ones, but there are already so many of them….the Guardian had the list of all the different origins:
There are the straightforward terms, the ones that comes directly from already existing names: 'Gospel', which was more or less invented by Rev Thomas A Dorsey, comes from his group's name, the University Gospel Singers, 'bluegrass' comes from the name of the country singer-mandolinist Bill Monroe's backing band: the Blue Grass Boys who were already named after Kentucky, ‘The Blue Grass State’, and 'glitter rock' comes from English glam rocker Gary Glitter.
But there are less obvious terms, which were inspired by a genre created by a musician: ‘Free jazz’ comes from Ornette Coleman’s 1960 album, ‘blue-eyed soul’ from the Righteous Brothers' 1963 LP, ‘rocksteady’, a successor to ska and a precursor to reggae, from an 1966 Alton Ellis single, ‘soca’ from Trinidadian artist Lord Shorty’s Soul of Calypso.
And you can combine both above ideas, some terms come from a name and a style! ‘Acid house’ was inspired from Phuture's 1987 single Acid Tracks, ‘ambient’ from Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978).
Other genre names come from lyrics: ‘Doo-wop’ derives from many groups’ harmony vocals, singing just this,… doo-wop, de-dooo-doo (TheTurbans, The Five Satins) and may have been first coined by NY radio DJ Gus Gossert, whereas another DJ, DJ Lovebug Starki claimed to have come up with‘hip-hop’ by rhyming ‘hip-hop, hippy to the hippy hop-bop’.
Other genre names come from record labels because of the type of music they release, just like ‘Industrial’ was named after Industrial Records and Throbbing Gristle, other genres come from compilation albums: ‘Outlaw country’ wasnamed after 1976's Wanted! The Outlaws, ‘no wave’ after 1978's No New York, and ‘techno’ after 1988's Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit.
Sometimes terms directly come from musicians themselves: ‘Afrobeat’was invented by Fela Kuti in 1968 to describe his music, ‘Riot grrrl’ was the name of a 1991 fanzine, Pete Townshend came up with ‘Power-pop’ in 1967 to describe The Who’s sound,… which is not exactly what the term has become these days.
‘Dub’ is short for the dubplate Jamaican sound system that operator Ruddy Redwood ordered in late 1967.
Obviously, journalists have contributed a lot to this game: Billboard coined ‘easy listening’ in 1961 and ‘rhythm & blues’ in 1947,while Village Voice invented ‘retro-nuevo’ and ‘skronk’ (what? via Robert Christgau). William S Burroughs invented ‘heavy metal’ in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine, a real keeper later used in Rolling Stone in 1970. But Creem came up with the best one: ‘Punk rock’!! via Dave Marsh. NME’s Ian MacDonald invented ‘krautrock’ in 1972, Melody Maker’s Simon Reynolds used first the term ‘post-rock in 1994, Mixmag’s Andy Pemberton found ‘trip-hop’ in 1994, and The Guardian/XLR8R magazine’s Dave Stelfox came up with ‘dubstep’.
There are also pre-thought terms, invented to sell a product, like ‘new wave’ was made up by Sire label’s Seymour Stein to sell punk to US audiences who were afraid of punk, and ‘neo-soul’ by Motown executive Kedar Massenburg to sell artists like Erykah Badu. ‘World music’ originated from a 1987 industry meeting with the intention to sell non-Anglophone music.
This is just scratching the surface, there are hundreds ofterms to describe music and it is really hard to even start making a list! Did we need a chillwave when we already had a coldwave? What do the terms post-pop,post-rock, post-punk and post-grunge exactly mean? Is it useful? Useless? Vain? Pointless? Probably, but as long as there will be music we will endlessly combine words, rearrange them and fail at describing the sound.