Genre busting: the origin of music

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Where did the terms retro-nuevo and skronk originate? Or hiphop? Michaelangelo Matos runs through an exhaustive
catalogue of music's phrasemakers and trendsetters

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Michaelangelo Matos
The Guardian, Thursday 25 August 2011 22.04 BST
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Music's phrasemakers (clockwise from top left): Brian Eno, Bikini Kill, William S
Burroughs and Ornette Coleman. Photograph: Redferns/Corbis

Music comes from everywhere, and so do the names

we call it by. There's a longstanding cliche that only the
music business needs genre names everyone else
either likes it or they don't. That is, of course, bunk, as
anyone who's heard enough people trot out lines such
as "I like all music except for rap and country" is aware.
Not least because quite a lot of those genre names
come from the artists themselves.
Gospel, for example, was more or less invented by Rev
Thomas A Dorsey. As Georgia Tom, Dorsey
played jazz and blues piano before turning to the Bible
for inspiration in 1932 and selling songs such
asPrecious Lord, Take My Hand to churches in
Chicago, then across America. His group's name was
the University Gospel Singers. Similarly, bluegrass

originates from the name of the country singermandolinist Bill Monroe's backing band from 1938 to
his 1996 death: the Blue Grass Boys. They were
named after Monroe's native Kentucky, "the Blue Grass
State". Glitter rock a synonym for glam comes from
Gary Glitter, about which the less said, the better.
More often, a genre name will come from a musician's
works. Free jazz comes from Ornette Coleman's 1960
album of the same name; ditto blue-eyed soul, from the
Righteous Brothers' 1963 LP. The mid-60s Jamaican
boogie dubbed rocksteady is named for an 1966 Alton
Ellis single, while reggae followed it into Jamaican
dancehalls on the heels of the Maytals'Do the
Reggay in 1968. Soca is a condensation of Trinidadian
artist Lord Shorty's Soul of Calypso, from 1974, while
acid house, originally from Phuture's 1987 single Acid
Tracks, has come to mean anything with a yammering,
squealing TB-303 on it.
Ambient, of course, comes from Brian Eno's Ambient 1:
Music for Airports (1978). Eno says in his famous liner
notes from 1975's Discreet Music that the idea had
come to him while recuperating in hospital after getting
hit by a car in January 1975; a guest put 18th-century
harp music on at low volume, then left the immobile
Eno to ponder its placement. The guest remembers it
differently: in Geeta Dayal's Another Green World,
Eno's then-girlfriend Judy Nylon says she put the harp
music on intending to balance it with the pouring rain
outside, and that Eno caught on immediately.
Sometimes lyrics become genres. Doo-wop comes
from any number of primordial R&B harmony vocalgroup records the two most obvious are the Turbans'
1955 When You Dance ("Doo-wop, de-doo-doo," runs
the end of the refrain) and the Five Satins' In the Still of
the Nite a year later (under the sax solo, the chant
"Doo-bop, doo-bah!"). In the late '60s, New York oldies
radio DJ Gus Gossert put it into wide use, though he

claimed he got it from California aficionados.

Old-school Bronx DJ Lovebug Starski claims to have
coined the term hip-hop by rhyming "hip-hop, hippy to
the hippy hop-bop" at early parties, telling Peter S
Scholtes in 2006: "Me and Kid Cowboy from
[Grandmaster Flash's] the Furious Five used to say it
together. I'd say the 'hip', he'd say the 'hop'."
The term jungle came from a soundsystem yard tape
from Jamaica that featured the chant "Alla the
junglists". MC Navigator of pirate station Kool FM told
critic Simon Reynolds in his book Energy Flash:
"There's a place in Kingston called Tivoli Gardens, and
the people call it the Jungle." WhenRebel MC sampled
it, breakbeat-led house had a new name. Reynolds
points out that the British rave label Ibiza had "the first
use of the word 'jungle' on their [12-inch] sleeves",
including 1991's Noise Factory single,Jungle Techno.
Sometimes record labels become genre names, as with
industrial, named after Throbbing Gristle's imprint,
established in 1976, and lovers rock, industrial's polar
opposite: sentimental, romantic reggae named for the
London label of Dennis and Eve Harris from around the
same time. And sometimes record labels just mandate
new terms. Outlaw country, no wave and techno all
came into use via compilation albums: respectively,
1976's Wanted! The Outlaws (featuring Willie Nelson,
Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser);
1978's No New York (Teenage Jesus & the Jerks,
Contortions, Mars and DNA); 1988's Techno! The New
Dance Sound of Detroit (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and
Kevin Saunderson).
There are occasions, too, when an artist just says
something is something, and that is that. Think of
Afrobeat not be confused with Afropop, an old catchall to describe, well, all pop from Africa. Afrobeatwas
the name coined in 1968 by Fela Kuti to describe the
music he was inventing around that time, made up of

funk, jazz, Nigerian highlife, anti-authoritarian lyrics and

high-grade weed.
The 90s were rife with musician-coined genres. Riot
grrrl was the name of a 1991 fanzine put together by
four of that music's key players: Allison Wolfe and Molly
Neuman of Bratmobile; Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail
of Bikini Kill. Illbient was coined in 1994 by DJ Olive, of
the trio We, to describe a multimedia presentation to a
journalist in Brooklyn. "Some older man who said he
was a journalist asked me if this was ambient music,"
Olive says, "and I blurted out as a joke, 'Nope, this is
illbient.' We all had a laugh about it." And in 1996,
producers Ed Rush and Trace of the No U Turn label
minted the phrase techstep to describe their blaring,
dense, hard-as-hell style of drum and bass.
But sometimes an artist assigns a title that becomes
something else. Power-pop was coined by Pete
Townshend in 1967 to define the Who, but wound up
being what Eric Carmen of prime power-pop
practitioners the Raspberries described as "groups that
came out in the 70s that played kind of melodic songs
with crunchy guitars and some wild drumming". Not to
mention the endless acolytes who mimicked them.
Often, technology drives musical changes, so
equipment plays its role, too. Acid, noted above, is one
example. So is dub, short for the "dubplate" (duplicate
platter) Jamaican sound system operator Ruddy
Redwood ordered in late 1967 from Duke Reid's
pressing plant. The recording was On the Beach by the
Paragons, and the engineer, Byron Smith, accidentally
wiped the vocal. Reid played it alongside the vocal
version; the response was so strong he began putting
instrumentals on the B-sides. Eventually, creative
engineers such as King Tubby and Lee Perry would
take the dub side into whole new areas of bassheavy abstraction.
Of course, journalists need these terms more than

anyone, in a sense a recognisable genre name is

powerful shorthand. As the longtime bible of the
American music industry, thanks to its trendsetting
album and single charts, Billboard has played a
significant role in disseminating musical titles. Easy
listening, for instance, was coined in the 17 July 1961
edition (not, sadly, included on the magazine's Google
Books archive, though every other 1961 issue is).
Rhythm & blues came to be in 1947, when Jerry
Wexler, then a Billboard editor, began using it to denote
the kind of postwar black pop that he went on to
pioneer with Atlantic Records. Rhythm & blues became
a chart name in the 25 June 1949 issue, replacing the
previous issue's "Race Records".
Long before producing The Chris Rock Show and Good
Hair, Nelson George was himself a Billboard reporter
(he was behind the magazine's use of the term "black
music"). But it was in the Village Voice that George
came up with retro-nuevo, while reviewing Anita
Baker in 1986. The term meant 80s black pop with
roots in pre-disco R&B. "Black pop music had always
felt grounded in a very adult perspective on life and
love," George says. "The music became a lot more
juvenile in the 80s. To me, 'retro-nuevo' was a way to
highlight singers who were very contemporary but
hadn't totally abandoned tradition."
George's longtime Voice editor was Robert Christgau,
who made his own coinage with skronk, a phrase
synonymous with no wave that Christgau first used in
1978. "It was a complete piece of onomatopoeia,"
Christgau says. "It just popped into my head. I was
looking for a way to describe DNA and Mars. That's
what the guitars sounded like to me."
Heavy metal was also first used to describe ugly
guitars. The phrase, of course, originated with William
S Burroughs in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine,
featuring Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid. Then

John Kay of Steppenwolf sang the phrase "heavy metal

thunder" in 1968's Born to Be Wild. But it first reached
print as a synonym for hard rock via Mike Saunders
(later Metal Mike Saunders, singer for early-80s punks
the Angry Samoans), in a review of Humble Pie's As
Safe As Yesterday in Rolling Stone from 1970,
describing the album as "more of the same 27th-rate
heavy metal crap".
The same year, punk rock was coined Stone's Detroit
rival, Creem, via Dave Marsh, who used it in a ? & the
Mysterians live review ("Needless to say, it was
impossible to pass up such a landmark explosion of
punk rock, even after two nights running of Tina
Turner"). Punk magazine came along a few years later.
Britain does nomenclature like no one
else. Krautrock came from NME's Ian MacDonald in
1972, to describe Neu! and Can and the like; a year
later, Faust led their album IV with the 12-minute
epic Krautrock. Similarly, Simon Reynolds began using
post-rock in early 1994 (he says he used it in Melody
Maker, and the May 1994 issue of The Wire has his
essay on it) to denote bands using rock instruments to
non-rock ends. "I didn't actually coin it," says Reynolds,
citing Richard Meltzer and Paul Morley's use of it
before him as "an avant-rock synonym". He explains:
"I made it into a concept."
Also in 1994, Andy Pemberton coined trip-hop in the
June 1994 edition of Mixmag to describe the headnodding instrumentals of DJ Shadow and the early
Chemical Brothers. Similarly, dubstep first entered print
in 2002, in sometime Guardian writer Dave Stelfox's
XLR8R magazine feature on UK garage producers
Horsepower Productions. According to the journalist
Martin Clark, the term originally stems from a "tight
circle" and originates either with UK promoter
Ammunition or DJ Hatcha, whoseDubstep Allstars Vol
1 came out in June 2003.

As that indicates, the music business needs to know

what it's selling and who it's selling to. Hillbilly music, a
term that predates country music, was the coinage
of Ralph Peer, who in 1925 recorded a North Carolina
group he named the Hillbillies. When Peer
recorded Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family two
years later, the name stuck to the sound. Sire label
boss Seymour Stein famously came up with new wave
to sell punk to US audiences who were afraid of punk's
violent connotations. In 1995, Motown executive Kedar
Massenburg, who signed D'Angelo and Erykah Badu,
came up with neo-soul as a way to sell them. (It
definitively supplanted Nelson George's retro-nuevo.)
Then there is advertising. Bossa nova Portuguese for
"new wave" gained currency, according to Brazilian
music historian Ruy Castro, when it appeared in an
advert for a 1958 multi-artist concert put on by Grupo
Universitrio Hebraico do Brasil. World music was
hashed out in 1987 at an industry meeting. It was
intended only for a brief marketing campaign to pump
non-Anglophone musicians in retail spaces they might
not otherwise fit into, only to remain an acknowledged,
if unwieldy, category. Radio formats sometimes impose
themselves on the music. AOR is a US abbreviation for
"album-oriented radio" (later "rock") coined in 1972 by
Lee Abrams and Kent Burkhart's consultancy firm for
the FM rock radio stations that would define ultra-slick
middle-American rock: Styx, Boston, Aerosmith. In
practise, it usually translates to "definitively pre-punk".
And of course, radio plays a big role in the history of
the term rock'n'roll itself though it had been used in
blues records dating back to 1922 (Trixie Smith's My
Man Rocks Me with a Steady Roll, for example) and, as
Preston Lauterbach's superb new book The Chitlin'
Circuit makes clear, was basically everyday talk in
postwar R&B: Roy Brown's 1947 Good Rockin'
Tonight (later cut by Wynonie Harris and, on his second
single, Elvis Presley); Wild Bill Moore's We're Gonna

Rock, We're Gonna Roll (1947); the Dominoes' Sixty

Minute Man (1950) ("I'll rock 'em, roll 'em all night
long"). Then in 1952, Cleveland DJ Alan
Freed switched his radio show's name from Record
Rendezvous to The Moondog Rock'n'Roll House Party.
We'll leave it there