Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.
— Martin Mull, maybe?

All good writing strives to say the unsayable.
— Louis Jenkins

I stupidly want to do that thing, and I am ill-equipped for doing it as well as I would prefer, but here we go.

If I still owned a bunch of record albums I’d probably still do a version of what I did with Mom and Dad’s collection when I was a kid: lay or kneel on the carpeted floor in front of the cabinet where the records were stacked vertically spines facing out; flip through the stack, bathing in whooshes of sacred aging-cardboard air as they albums gently slapped against each other; hold worn cardboard covers to my face and inhale in the same way any decent human being does when they pick up an old book; pull out single records or small stacks or maybe the whole collection to flip the covers back and forth back and forth while reading the long notes on the back or the inside and try to figure out how all those words and images and that musty-seductive smell relate to the sounds in the vinyl grooves and the lives of the people who created the sounds; try to figure out what it all meant. What it all means. All of it.

There’s pretty much no such thing as a rock band anymore. A rock band couldn’t possibly be as cool as a screamocore post-punk dream-rock math band. The proliferation of such terms, however, has created some confusion among casual music fans. “What in the world is grindcore?” some wonder.

That’s why the Homegrown Music Festival steering committee commissioned the handy list of meaningless music-style descriptors with vague definitions that appears below. The glossary was originally compiled for the 2007 Homegrown Field Guide, and appears here as a refresher course.

Obviously it’s not necessary to include well-known genres like rap, soul, techno, country, hip hop, blues and reggae in the list because most people are familiar with those terms.

Also, since the list of music-writer lingo is seemingly endless, and this particular writer is lazy, numerous terms such as trance, electronica, reggaeton and synth pop will have to be left undefined. The goal here is not to be comprehensive, but simply to be helpful.

American roots music is basically folk music, but saying “American roots” or “Americana” instead of “folk” leaves the impression the artist is more like Woody Guthrie than like Joni Mitchell.

Black metal is thrash metal played by people who dislike mainstream culture and religion. The goal is to show contempt for anything conventional by distorting and otherwise mangling song structures while shrieking a lot. You know, get mad at the man, take it out on music in general.