Seems cool, but one critique of Slog Music Posts. You guys almost always overlaod the narrative with other bandnames. I know it's cool nowadays to roll with the hedging on inescapable oversaturation (see the prolific paul Constant), but instead of all these bandnames, maybe you can list a band that a Stranger employee plays in. You all aren't JUST critics, are you? I know Jeffrey Taylor isn't. He made that wicked soundtrack to that very wicked scarefest movie (well, maybe it wasn't, i don't know, but when you're stoned hella, it's a frightening flick.) yadda yadda ya ya ya daht daht daht. ignore me. 99% music crit is vomit, day old.

I was a mod before you was a mod.

I always peg it with "96 Tears" by ? and the Mysterians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeolH-kz…

still fresh a half-century later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBTT3VPr…

Defining musical genres by what they sound like as opposed to their peers, influences, and influence-ees has the same problems as classifying animals with the Linnean system instead of cladistic methods. So:

Los Saicos aren't an early punk or protopunk band (regardless of what they sound like) because their music played no role in creating the US and UK punk scenes. Rocket from the tombs _is_ because their members went on to form pere ubu and the dead boys. The velvet underground, the modern lovers, the stooges, and various garage/psych bands were proto punk because the early punk bands were listening to and imitating elements they heard in their records.

Death is not at the root of hardcore even though they've got a song or two where they could almost pass for the Bad Brains. They would be if the Bad Brains had developed their style listening to those records.

6, cool analysis. Now do 'Grunge.'

Peeing w/ laughter 7

@7: thanks. The beauty of analyzing this way is that you don't have to resolve whether or not "grunge" is a genre. There's a bunch of musicians with a common set of punk-based and other influences who also influenced and interacted with each other, so you carve off part of the graph and give it that label.

Unfortunately, I don't think you can formally use the methods and tools of modern taxonomy directly to analyze music effectively because massive horizontal "gene" transfer is the norm. In biology, taxa for which is the norm don't casually pick up genes from organisms on the other side of the country or world.

And to apply it to grunge, I'd need to know whether anyone out here paid any attention to those Squirrel Bait records :-).