As our posts attempted to communicate, mainstream attention to certain musical genres appears minimalistic and often ignorant. While most of the time genres such as experimental music and heavy metal (amongst others) do receive some mainstream coverage they are often disregarded as they don’t fit into the perceived definition of ‘popular music’ by mainstream press such as “Rolling Stone”. What results is a lack of acknowledgment for their importance within and contribution to the field of music.
Our posts highlight the reasons behind the lack of mainstream coverage as well as the motives behind these decisions – such as censorship. Because some music strays from the ‘norm’ or adopts themes that cause conflicts of interest it is often overlooked, ignored or put into a negative light. All music has value, however obscure or however standardised. But it is the obscure genres that get ignored, which we believe shouldn’t be the case.
The mainstream music press has similar attitudes towards other forms of music criticism, such as academic studies which are intended for industry and academic journals as opposed to the popular music press. Since the popular music press is predominantly read by fans, this type of research and comment on music is disregarded, as it often requires a higher level of academic cultural capital to understand.
Since one of the factors that makes any story newsworthy is timeliness, academic writing on music is also largely ignored since it is often not written until years after an artist has been and gone through the cycle of popuarlity and obscurity. This is unfortunate for the way the histoy of music is remembered, since the best analysis can often only be made in retrospect.
We hope you enjoyed our blog because we all definitely enjoyed contributing to it!
Lilen, Heath and Millie
