There’s something about labeling something, naming it, that’s silly and glorious and deeply human. I’ll never forget the passages in the Mars trilogy about naming, its insight into how putting a name to something advances the understood and understandable, tames the formerly meaningless, and marks the universe with the human mind’s presence. It is incredible to contemplate the unnamed: the planets before we called them that, the stars without our admiring eyes taking them in, the law of gravity with no such formulation. It is wondrous to observe our voracious appetite for taxonomy: the millions upon millions of named concepts, species, craters on Mercury, comets.
We love to label and name ourselves and our world, aiming to adjust perceptions (including our own) through language. So it is that music – in reality, invisible, weightless, ephemeral – is treated to so many words that seek to describe its look, feel, and significance, the sources of it and the audience for it. Music is categorized, each category assigned emotional and social and cultural meaning, and then we wade through our words, calling some to our side and disassociating from others. Words are forgotten, words are invented, and like our relationship to the planets and the axioms of physics, our understanding of the world of music is shaped by our use and disuse and misuse of these words.
I know I got so much pleasure, a year ago, out of listing all the names for music I had recently learned, proudly displaying not so much my familiarity with the sounds or scenes these words supposedly identify but my knowledge of the words themselves. You may not know, I smirked, but this word now refers to a certain kind of noise made in a certain place, at least when you’re talking to certain people. How exotic, how colorful these words I owned! Hyphy, Baile Funk, Grime. (Highlife, dubstep, garage, snap, favela, bhangra, plena, kwaito, hiplife, bomba, afrobeat, go-go.) This year there’s been the pleasure of “Bloghouse,” one of those deliciously useless words that carries in its DNA the stipulation that once any significant number of people know what it means it is to be decreed hopelessly obsolete, and the use of it will henceforth connotate nothing but your own pitiful inability to stay on top of the world of the hip and with it.
Here’s a new one. Chiptune is music made with the sounds and on the hardware of early video games. Besides being a neat addition to my collection of names for music, what I like about this (and the reason I’m writing about it) is the peek I got through a sample of this documentary into the way musicians and fans use this label, identify as a community. I thought I’d share the feeling of awe that I have at any genesis, biological or technological or sociological; I feel such wonder at how exactly humans form these communities, develop these signals, pool the resources and spread the word to create and distribute and consume something new, something niche, something wonderful.
This group of people, named, is now a scene, something you can chose to belong to or not, something you are either aware or unaware of, something you can admire, or make fun of, or ignore. I’d love to find out – maybe watching the film in its entirety would give me some idea – precisely when and where the word “Chiptune” was coined, but it’s pretty clear that it has created a group of people out of individuals, implying connections between people and sounds and events and also erecting barriers between others. As always, for it to mean something for something to be Chiptune, a lot must be “not Chiptune.”
The size of the scene, its wealth of proprietary knowledge and private signals, and its obvious disinterest in mainstream interest remind me of the hardcore music scene, which has a fantastically dense and terrifically silly internal taxonomy. To the best of my limited knowledge, hardcore ties or possibly surpasses electronic music in this regard: I’m told there exist such distinct things as grindcore, thrashcore, powerviolence, noisegrind, goregrind, deathgrind, metalcore, thrash metal, youth crew, skacore, and screamo. Add to this list hardcore’s fierce geographic identification and all the labeling and signaling that entails, and it begins to look like a music can compensate for having a tiny audience by exuberant naming.
Some of these “sub-genres” must be for all practical purposes linguistic nonsense, trying to differentiate what is really nothing especially different, but then the key is how much you care about minute deviations and how much you identify with the labels. Popular music rarely insists on careful categorization, partly because it embraces cross pollination, partly because it aims for universality rather than insularity, but also because it is rarely a proxy for a lifestyle or a tightly knit community. If the parade of hardcore labels seems laughable to you, consider the Wikipedia article on Tragic City Hardcore of Birmingham, Alabama. We learn, from Tragic City patrons no doubt, that “…the main staple of the Tragic City scene is an attitude… and the community is stressed over all.” Witness the glorious martyrdom of a group of clubgoers “mostly cut off from the national scene” and “overlooked” by the powers that be! This is more than music taxonomy. This is chosen, carefully designed, and fiercely defended social identity. I listen to grindcore; you listen to screamo. Let’s call the whole thing off.
We could invite ourselves to judge communities so eager to define themselves into minority status, or people aching to join only the most exclusive, exclusionary club of music fans, or the whole idea of conflating social choices with the enjoyment of particular sounds. We could just marvel at the industry and inventiveness of niche consumers and their earnest pursuit of art for which there is little widespread interest.
I of course value my own distance from such lifestyle brands as hardcore. I enjoy sampling a little bit of everything and imagining that I determine for myself what each facet of my life holds – that my clothing, friendships, work and music are chosen not according to formula but internal desire. While I collect names that describe the diverse music I enjoy, and hunger for more, I avoid labeling myself a fan of one thing or the other, hoping to escape all the prejudices and assumptions that come lumped with these names. But my aimed at cosmopolitanism is itself a powerful brand, no less the product of labels and dreams than any other, and the egotism of genre-blending pop music is merely another flavor of narcissism, not a different animal.
Whatever its merits as music or a social network or a sense of identity, the path a niche music like Chiptune takes is a joy to behold; the power of a name to create something out of nothing is breathtaking. A scene like Chiptune can, through the magic of cheapening communication and transportation technologies, gather fans with the exclusionary temperament of grindcore devotees in a global network. Naming will become an increasingly large part of the process of creation as geography decreases in importance and we need other ways to make sense of our cultural landscape. We must vigilantly watch our language, as Orwell warned, both to understand what is being said and implied and because the willful manipulation of names and signals can be monstrous (see: enhanced interrogation).
And we can all be grateful that the focused energies of small groups can incubate powerful works of art, the brilliance of which can both feed the egos in the tribe and flavor the popular art enjoyed by the rest of us. Chiptune is much older than my awareness of it, and I’m realizing that it must have informed the 2003 album Give Up by The Postal Service, an album that went gold, selling over 600,000 copies, filled with low bit chirps and tones. “Brand New Colony,” a cherished track in which the game boy blips really shine, comforted me with the insistent, repeated lyric “everything will change” when I felt like my heart had been ripped out, senior year of high school. The relevant passage today is this one:
We’ll cut out bodies free from the tethers of this scene/Start a brand new colony/Where everything will change/We’ll give ourselves new names…
This Joyful Noise 