Welcome to PostGenre.Org, the home of PostGenre Media. Started by Rob Shepherd in February 2020, we strive to provide our readers with the opportunity to consider, hear, and appreciate music beyond traditional categories.

In the era of primarily physical recording formats, categorization was king. This was more to adapt to limitations of the time than a conscious choice. Record stores and radio stations would need to categorize to better target their listener or risk their business being lost in the shuffle. With the rise of primarily digital media and “contextualized playlisting”, however, these labels are of increasing irrelevancy. A recent study reports that 78% of music lovers, particularly those under the age of 40, do not ascribe to following a particular style. Despite this, existing music publications often still needlessly impose traditional divisions, something we ascribe to end.

Consider, for instance, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. Although hip hop at its core, the album incorporates many facets of jazz, funk, rock, and pop. Despite this, most focus was placed on only one or a few of those areas. This does a disservice to the work as a whole by forcing a specific viewpoint upon the music, one which may or may not align with the artist’s. We aspire to provide a more holistic view of art not only in hopes of better expressing the musician’s viewpoints but also to attempt to provide a unifying force. Music has a long history of transcending and mending even the most extreme of divisions and we believe that by attempting to step out of the way, we can better allow the form to nurture these relationships.

That said, “jazz” (in whatever way defined), will have a significant, though far from exclusive, role on this site. This is in no small part because more than any other, jazz can be seen as the first post genre music. This is evident in the fact that some put the works of artists as diverse as Louis Armstrong and John Zorn into the same box. It originated as a unique combination of other styles including the blues, European classical music, and African rhythms . Additionally, its most prominent figures in part pushed the music forward by combining it with other forms. Miles Davis, for instance, mixed the already hybridized art with classical, rock, and even hip hop. For John Coltrane, it included 20th Century classical (e.g. Stravinsky) and Eastern music. Today, musicians like Thundercat or Terrace Martin are nearly impossible to confine. Duke Ellington once dreamed of an era in which music was distinguished by only its quality; in many ways, that time is now.

But jazz is just a starting point. We welcome any music outside the traditional box or which stretches the box into a new shape. We are limited only by our creativity and capability. At PostGenre, we believe in the power of music to dissolve barriers, whether stylistic, geographic, societal, or temporal.