Microgenre

• 1. Introduction

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  Pigfuck is a microgenre name so odd it sounds like an insult. Critic Robert Christgau coined it in the early 1980s to describe the noise rock of Sonic Youth. The label stuck as a real style name, not just a joke. A record collector's private shorthand could calcify into an accepted classification almost overnight.

  The term "microgenre" itself was coined in a 1975 French article about historical fiction, alongside the word "macrogenre." Its author defined a microgenre as "a narrowly defined group of texts connected in time and space." A macrogenre, by contrast, was described as "more diffuse and harder to generalize about." That precise definition sits oddly next to something like pigfuck. How did an idea from literary criticism end up shaping record shops, then the internet? And why do a streaming platform and a film library now count genres by the tens of thousands?

• 2. Origins In Music

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  Music journalist Simon Reynolds points to "Northern soul" and "garage punk" as early instances of what he calls "genre-as-retroactive-fiction." Both terms were coined in the early 1970s, yet neither caught on widely until years afterward. Reynolds argues that record dealers and collectors sometimes pushed these semi-invented genres to raise the resale value of original pressings.

  "Garage rock" and "power pop" gained recognition the same way, through a circle of rock writers who built their own annotated history of the genre.

  "Freakbeat" followed in the 1980s, credited to Phil Smee, while "sunshine pop" arrived as a coinage in the 1990s.

  Reynolds also gets credit for popularizing "post-rock," and critic Mark Fisher did the same for "hauntology." Both became rare examples of microgenre labels that reached wide, lasting use.

  In the mid-1990s, journalists at Melody Maker invented fictional bands to justify a New Romantic revival they named "Romantic Modernism."

  That same decade, electronic and dance producers began coining specialized descriptions of their own music to assert individuality. Trance splintered into progressive trance, Goa trance, deep psytrance and hard trance. House, drum-n-bass, dubstep and techno each generated large numbers of microgenres of their own.

  None of this needed the internet. That arrived in the next decade, once online scenes could name a sound one week and watch it spread the next.

• 3. The Internet Explosion

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  In the early 2000s, microgenres started spreading through the early blogosphere, and the pace of recognition sped up substantially. The shift is often explained as a result of "software advances, faster internet connections, and the globalized proliferation of music."

  In 2009, a New York Times writer described indie rock as evolving into "an ever-expanding, incomprehensibly cluttered taxonomy of subgenres."

  "Chillwave" was coined by the blog Hipster Runoff around 2009 as an ironic internet meme. Blog-era genres like bloghouse, blog rap, blog rock and shitgaze had already existed before it. Chillwave did not reach the mainstream until early 2010, when both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times wrote about it.

  Vice writer Ezra Marcus later described these as "music scenes created out of thin air." Pitchfork's Jonny Coleman put it more pointedly: "The line between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that could be real is as thin as ever, if existent at all." He called that territory the "uncanny genre valley," home to what he termed "publicists-cum-neologicians."

  Writing in 2019, journalist Emilie Friedlander called chillwave "the internet electronic micro-genre that launched a hundred internet electronic micro-genres." She named vaporwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, distroid and hard vapor as its descendants. Friedlander also pointed to a parallel wave of internet rap sharing what she called its "collagist, hyper-referential approach to sound."

  By the early 2010s, most microgenres were being linked and defined across various outlets online. Somebody was about to turn that scattered map into an actual one, built directly into a streaming app.

• 4. Spotify's Algorithm

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  Glenn McDonald worked at the music intelligence firm the Echo Nest, later acquired by the streaming company Spotify. In 2013, he built genre-mapping data that became part of Spotify features including "Daily Mix" and "Fans Also Like."

  McDonald also created the website Every Noise at Once, built to document and categorize internet-born music microgenres. He had already added the term "hyperpop" to Spotify's algorithm in 2018, drawing on that same site's data.

  In August 2019, that metadata fed into Spotify's "Hyperpop" playlist, curated by Lizzie Szabo, which helped popularize the movement under that name.

  Not everyone welcomed how fast a metadata label could turn into a named movement. Critics had already been watching this exact pattern play out in print, years before any algorithm got involved.

• 5. Critics Push Back

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  In 2010, the Atlantic's Llewellyn Hinkes Johns pointed to the succession of chillwave, glo-fi and hypnagogic pop as a "prime example" of a pattern. He described it as a new category invented, then "brazenly denounced, sometimes in the same article."

  Grantland's Dave Schilling went further, writing that the chillwave label "revealed how arbitrary and meaningless labels like that really are." He added, "It wasn't a scene. It was a parody of a scene." Schilling called it both a defining moment for the music blogosphere and "the last gasp."

  PopMatters critic Thomas Britt argued that the sheer number of niches invented by writers and commenters to "distinguish" acts is ultimately confining. He warned that a band tailoring itself to a category ties its fortunes to that category's shelf life.

  Music was not the only field about to run into that shelf-life problem. Publishers and streaming services were already applying the same narrowing logic to books and film.

• 6. Beyond Music

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  Digital publishing's spread in the 21st century pushed literature toward its own ever-smaller niches, from Amish romance to NASCAR passion.

  In 2020, Netflix identified 76,897 different film microgenres within its recommendation algorithms. The company had used categorizations like these to help develop successful series such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.

  Whether that count of 76,897 keeps climbing is really a question about naming. Every new show as specific as Orange Is the New Black is another chance for an algorithm to invent one more genre nobody asked for.