Friday Night.
Your friend says “Hey (you), The XYZ Club has Reggae tonight – want to go?”
Ding! The poor reggae band just got demoted to being a “Genre Band”.
No one cares who the band is – as long as they are playing Reggae, everyone will have a good time. If the club substituted another Reggae band of equal skill at the last minute, nobody would mind – or even notice. That’s sad – but the Reggae band doesn’t care, they thought they had a good show. They rocked! They made money!
I’m not picking on Reggae here – any genre can overwhelm the act, but certain styles seem to crush the individuality of bands more than others. Top offenders are Ska, Swing, Blues, and Metal. How many freaking times have you seen a sharp suited bunch of guys hop up and stage and announce their quirky Swing-y name… “Hey, we’re the Poppin’ BeBob Elephant Daddys!” Dear PBED – I don’t care who you are – If your sound is a generic mush of your genre’s standard shtick, I WILL FORGET YOU THE SECOND I LEAVE THE ROOM. If you must be boring, please at least give out free drinks.
It’s the same problem cover bands have – by giving the audience what they want, you become a living jukebox (or in the case of genre bands, “vibe-box”) that delivers a predictable, expected, safe entertainment-pellet for the bar patrons to get sweaty to.
YOUR ONLY HOPE OF ESCAPE, FOOLISH “GENRE BANDS”:
- Write a songs good enough to crawl into the audience’s brain and go home with them.
- Change your boring-ass sound once in a while – switch up your sound during your set (go acoustic, then get loud, use weird effects, get rid of the bass player for a song, actually fire that guy permanently, he’s totally neurotic, whatever).
- Get naked, light something on fire…This is an emergency situation! Your audience has written you off! You must react!
Sadly, lots of Ska/Reggae/Blues/Funk/Whatever bands are out there right now, tonight, playing for comfortable little crowds of ‘fans’ (of the genre, not the band), firing up the good people with predictable moves and stale conventions.
They are musically dead. Unless you own the genre, the genre will own you. Now I’m going to go write a Reggae song. I LOVE Reggae!