IDM Mailing Archive

I say IDM is a mailing list and a genre. It's fine if some of you want to stipulate that IDM is a list and not a genre, but the fact is most people consider IDM a genre (at least implicitly). I think treating IDM as a genre makes good sense even though we can't slap a precise definition on it. When we talk about IDM music we all know what kind of music is being referred to, even though the music is incredibly diverse and doesn't seem to occupy a tidy commercial category like "house." Even if linguistic purists insist that IDM is merely a list, it's clear that the people on this list prefer to talk about a certain kind of music. And lots of people get a little annoyed when decidedly non-IDM musicians come up (say, Michael Jackson). If IDM is merely a list, then nothing is off-topic. Michael Jackson, Beethoven, and Britney Spears should all be welcome topics. The fact is the IDM list is *about* something, and that something is a certain variety of music--a music we sloppily refer to as IDM. Otherwise it's just a big coincidence that we talk so much about Warp/Rephlex/Schematic/ etc. You might argue that IDM is the list and we just talk about a bunch of different kinds of cutting-edge contemporary electronic music. I would reply that IDM, as a genre, *is* all this cutting-edge electronic music which doesn't really fit snuggly into traditional dance genres. Whether you choose to call it IDM or call it something else is a matter of linguistic conventionalism; the fact is we're both still talking about a category of music. Why not give that category a convenient little name? Now the linguistic purist might argue that IDM should not be a genre because IDM is so diverse and it has no universal properties-- putative IDM recordings have nothing in common. That may be true, but that doesn't mean IDM is useless or invalid as a genre. The fact is lots of recognized genres, e.g. "art" or "game," don't have any common, essential qualities (or if you can think of one for art I'd love to hear it). But the category is still understood by everyone, and it makes talking about these subjects much easier. (The idea that a category only makes sense if its members share a common quality is Plato's "essentialism"-- but most modern thinkers have thrown that idea out in favor of Wittgenstein's "family resemblances." According to W, members of a category need not have any single common quality; it is sufficient for them to have "overlapping similarities.") In IDM music there are enough overlapping similarities that IDM makes sense as a family of music even though IDM music may have nothing in common. And everyone treats it like a genre on this list anyway, so why fix it if it isn't broken? Putting things into a category for the sake of talking about it doesn't stifle creativity or group things that shouldn't be grouped or oversimplify the world: We all know perfectly well how imperfect language is and how otherworldly and ineffable this music gets. But words aren't the coffins of ideas--just because we're forced to make generalizations in language doesn't imply we don't appreciate the diversity or ingenuity of IDM. It's just we like to talk about it too, and to talk about anything you have to impose categories on it. You have to call it something. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as people realize that the music stands alone as an art form and words can hardly touch its sublime real nature. Kevin ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org