Most artists hate it when the music they make is considered to be part of a certain genre, and it is easy to see why. After all, creating art is an act of deeply personal expression, or so we have been told again and again. Being lumped in with a bunch of strangers whose music shares some similarities with the ones they make thus strips artists of their individuality. Being categorised, crammed into a genre, feels like an act of rhetorical violence to some.
Liner note:
On post-orientalism as a Genre
by Kristoffer Cornils
Most artists hate it when the music they make is considered to be part of a certain genre, and it is easy to see why. After all, creating art is an act of deeply personal expression, or so we have been told again and again. Being lumped in with a bunch of strangers whose music shares some similarities with the ones they make thus strips artists of their individuality. Being categorised, crammed into a genre, feels like an act of rhetorical violence to some.
Critics like me know this, and we understand the artists’ impulse to distance themselves from belonging to this or that genre. Yet, we often ignore it. This has partially to do with the economics of criticism: We neither have much space nor do we receive a significant amount of attention, so assigning someone’s music to a certain genre serves as a shortcut—it saves space and time where both those things are precious commodities.
Music fans often do not care about their favourite artists’ refusal to be categorised. Some might claim that their favourite music is profoundly sui generis, something literally previously unheard-of, but even more revel in the idea that an artist’s work can be neatly labelled, and thus made comparable with the music that others make. For most fans, this doesn’t strip any of the involved artists of their individuality—on the contrary.
Instead, genre creates identity between different bodies of work and their respective makers, between the artists and their fans, as well as among the listeners themselves. This makes genre a germ cell from which subculture grows. And what is culture if not a polylogue between subcultures? Isn’t it thus immensely beautiful that we identify certain musics as belonging to certain genres—isn’t that how we make sense of our collective identity?
You could argue that musicians who do not want their music to be categorised and nevertheless insist on wanting to reach an audience, bringing people together with their art is a futile exercise in wanting one’s cake and eating it, too. Some are smart enough to realise this and instead make up their own terms to categorise what they do in an attempt to insist on their individuality. This is very transparent,and rarely met with success.
It does however get interesting whenever groups of people come together under the banner of a genre. From futurism to riot grrrl, this has a long history, one mostly associated with the modernist project. And while that did produce a lot of dramatic manifestos, it also fostered connections between artists who preferred to put the ideal of collectivism above their own sense of individuality. So why does it seem so naive in retrospect, especially so today?
Because we are not living in modernist times anymore. However, postmodernism has also waned. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, in a seminal 2010 essay, suggested that our current time is marked by an unsynthesisable dialectic of the two, metamodernism, that rests on a mix of contradictory attitudes—sincerity and irony, empathy and apathy, and so on. If this is the current paradigm, what role does genre play in it?
Nonet at all, really, or at least not a positive one. Genre is over, a lot of my fellow critics say, or that we have at least transcended our need for genre in music—metamodernism, after all, is marked by individualism, not collectivism. Hence, more and more artists approach genre with a sense of detachedness, and even fans of certain genres would probably find the manifestos like those of the futurists or the riot grrls quite cringe-inducing.
It is interesting that in this metamodernist situation, post-orientalism was established as a genre; that a slew of artists working alongside and with composer Ehsan Saboohi, who proposed the term, would so readily express their willingness to be identified with a specific genre, risking that every single one of their compositions and records could be considered an expression of or even a manifesto for what post-orientalism is, or could be.
These artists welcome the idea of genre as a germ cell of subcultural discourse and thus the entry of new ideas into the polyphony of culture. Nevertheless, their modernist fervour is marked by postmodernist strategies: Among other things, composers whose work is being released by Saboohi’s Post-Orientalism Music label work with recordings of Persian radifs, ancient melodies that they juxtapose with new musical approaches and sounds.
However, this happens in neither an ironic nor apathetic fashion. Post-orientalism as a genre is not a metamodernist phenomenon, but at its core a modernist project. The prefix that differentiates it from mere orientalism does not only imply that it comes after, but that it indeed tries to go beyond pre-existing cultural phenomena; to go beyond the so-called orientalist frames of reference as well as the so-called oriental traditions.
This means that Post Orientalism Music as a platform and post-orientalism as a genre try to forge a new identity, both between the so-called traditional and the so-called contemporary, the so-called West and the so-called East, and much more. This providse artists with something with which to identify, whether the mere concept or the work of other composers, while listeners are given the chance to also find identity in the diversity of their work.
If this feels anachronistic to you, think again. If it sounds like tribalism to you, think harder. The openness of the post-orientalist project and its social and political dimensions are very much contemporary. If anything about it seems off, that might simply be because it refuses to subject itself to the dominant metamodernist logic; that post-orientalism dedicates itself to sincerity without irony in an attempt to enter a dialogue that goes beyond itself.
This is, after all, what post-orientalism as a genre is all about at its core: It is about embracing difference with modernist fervour when that seems untimely, and like every embrace this creates a connection, an identity, however temporary it might be. Does this mean that artists with no affiliation to Post-Orientalism Music as a label and platform will enjoy being considered part of post-orientalism as a genre? Most likely not.
Critically applying the term to music working between old forms and a new sense of belonging wouldn’t be a merely economic choice. When any update of the modernist project, any instance of people banding together in order to look towards the future or of collectivism being prioritised over individuality is considered to be awkward and untimely, we have to ask ourselves why that is. This music does in the most radical way, and that should be celebrated.
Kristoffer Cornils