The 00s Part 4: Variety Returns

Music is always evolving, mutating, and modifying itself…enough people may agree on a certain direction for a new sound to become a new sub-genre…and in time, sub-sub-genres may spring from that offshoot, multiplying things even more…

Think about it…in the 50s, you had rock, pop, country, and R&B…most everything that was released back then could be classified under one of those four headings…today, Spotify has organized things into nearly 2,000 different categories…

There’s music with names like “dark psytrance” to something called “stomp and flutter”…you might be into “vapor soul” or “fussball,” “gymcore” or “catstep,” “footwork” or “sleaz33e rock”…seriously….these are all actual Spotify genre classifications….

Now let’s circle back to alt-rock in the early 2000s…after a decade of things staying fairly close to a certain set of specs, it began to mutate again…yes, guitars were still important, but not essential…and there were certain shifts in attitude and outlook, created by world-shaking global events—because as we’ve learned, the sound of an era’s music is always just a little downstream from what’s happening in society at large…

Let’s deconstruct this concept a little further…this is alt-rock in the oughts, part four.