Reflections from the Surface: When a Niche Music Iceberg Meme Took Over My Life
If you’re here it means one of three things: you’re one of my five followers on Medium — I love you lots, by the way, my SEO skills have finally gotten where they need to be and this somehow ranked on Search or you have stumbled upon the latest offering of Sets and the CD on Youtube and would like to know more about this riveting project.
Here is the final graphic of that I’m talking about, for reference.
Over the past three weeks, my life has been monopolized by the monolith above. I have breathed, edited, pondered, organized, reorganized, listened, ingested, curated, sorted, analyzed, questioned, rejected, eliminated, hated, recorded and eventually purged every single name you see on that list, and let me tell you something. I still don’t think this scratches even the bare limits of some of the weird stuff that’s online. This project started off with more than 50 more music genres included, so I felt it necessary to address the limitations of my video and the iceberg.
How I Selected the Genres and Tiers.
Through pain and suffering. For real, if I didn’t love making videos, I have no clue how this would have even happened. The original idea was to only pursue internet music genres, but when I learned about some of the crazier and weirder ’80s musique concrete (no, I won’t bother with the accent) pieces from before the net, I couldn’t resist broadening my horizons.
So the project aims to detail and outline niche music genres, meaning the more specific, “cult-status” scenes and more bizarre findings. You’ll notice that the few things included at the surface have been chosen not by popularity, but more so for specificity. These are all very selective and clear groups that more people know of. The further down we go, the less accessible these groups become. In the first three-four tiers, we’re not necessarily ranking the music by “weirdness” per se, but more so as to how likely people are to know of it. I explain criteria for rankings in the video, so watch it!
“Val, X is Missing!”
You have no idea how many genres (including my all-time favorites: psychedelic music and shoegaze) I had to completely eliminate from this list. It is by no means a detailed and comprehensive overview of every single music genre. The reason why the genres that were excluded were eventually ditched was, to be frank, time constraints. This project was becoming unbelievably endless and I don’t think they would have added much to the present-day niche music conversation. Most genres included here have a peculiar internet history or are 2020s staples. Bigs of the past have been left behind, but you don’t have to agree.
If my snub of your favorite music pushes you to make your own iceberg, I can only hope you’ll send me the link, because I want to see it!
Why Only Six Tiers?
Because three is the magic number and twice of a good thing is a great thing, no?
That is the real answer. Also, simplicity rules.
Why Didn’t You Mention Y Artist?
I kept name-dropping to a minimum. I kept going back and forth into if I wanted to make a music genre iceberg or an artist iceberg and I found the idea of talking genre conventions more elastic and fun to explore.
Maybe, we’ll see the day when I do an artist one. I used an artist one as reference and you will notice I picked apart several people mentioned in it. Again, it was a matter of principle and attempting to keep things concise while also being intriguing.
Why Didn’t You Just Use Z Iceberg?
For the life of me, none of them had exactly all the things that I wanted to cover — mainly, all the Vaporwave subgenres I have written about before and my deep, devoted love to the man, the myth, the legend AdBlock Plus. It didn’t feel right to edit someone else’s work, so I just made my own colorful version. You can clearly tell graphic design isn’t my passion.
Hello Kitty Suicide Club, Really?
It was getting too heavy and I had to end it on a joke!
The Audio Sounds Weird…
One day I’ll learn, I promise. If you wanna teach me, DMs are open on Twitter ;)
And a Note on Vagina Dentata Organ
Performing with animals is disgusting. I don’t really share my own opinion on things on videos but I couldn’t restrain myself when it came to that. It looks like the animals weren’t harmed, but in the footage that does include more of the TV performance, you can clearly see those poor dogs do not want to be there. They shouldn’t have been there, and because of that, I made the decision not to show them.
That is all! Please drop a comment on the video if you liked it, subscribe to the channel (seriously, what do you have to lose lol) and share the video with your friends if you found it weird and disturbing enough to be worthy of your time.
