Genres are socially constructed systems of expectation, not fixed prescriptive feature sets

Genre is not a list of sonic features that a track either has or lacks; it is a set of orientations, expectations, and conventions negotiated continuously by artists, fans, critics, marketers, and archivists. Scholars Lena and Peterson define genres as ‘systems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that bind together an industry, performers, critics, and fans.’ The ‘generic contract’ governs what an audience expects (e.g., a repeated quarter-note kick at 140 bpm for trance techno). No single person or entity can categorise a work into a genre unilaterally. Boundaries are hazy and change over time, which explains why canonical industrial artists often deny being industrial: the label’s generic contract has shifted away from their self-image. A common misconception is that genres are objective categories; in fact they are perpetually contested social facts.

Examples

Industrial artists denying the ‘I-word’ label while being canonised as its exemplars; genre community politics around what counts as ‘real’ techno or ‘real’ house; the ‘sells out’ narrative as a genre-policing move.

Assessment

Take a genre you participate in as listener or producer. Identify three elements of its generic contract (tempo convention, lyric expectation, production norm). Then name a specific record that violated one element and describe how the community responded.