Recent Passtimes: Inventing Musical Genres

About a year ago, I realized that a lot of the music I was listening to had a common thread. It wasn't really the tempo, or the instrumentation, but something else that was cohesive about the genre but couldn't be summarized with the conventional adjectives used to characterize music based on style. It wasn't indie rock, it wasn't alt country. It wasn't blue grass, and it wasn't industrial hip-hop. I realized I needed to come up with my own genre... and so I did!
My favorite musical genre is contemplative melancholy (an example of which is posted on the right, Gillian Welch singing Dear Someone.) This genre hasn't made it onto Wikipedia's seemingly exhaustive list yet, but I am sure it will. It describes so many bands that I love! Instead of listing them (again) here, since I have mentioned many of them in previous posts, I will just post another song on the right-- The Weakerthans singing "Aside"-- to show you the breadth of this terrific new genre.
Once I invented one musical genre, I was accused of making a cottage industry of it-- gloom pop (to describe the Soulsavers), introspective swing (for Nina Simone's Feeling Good), and folk techno for classics like Suzanne Vega's 7" single Tom's Diner (though I later found out someone had invented folktronica, which is way cooler). Once it became a topic of conversation, others popped up (which I didn't invent) like intellectual sleaze rock and mountain soul (okay, I kind of invented that last genre, but really I just saw the phrase and co-opted it for my new classification passion-- but now I need to find a band that it applies to...) If you have favorite bands but don't know how to lump them together using conventional means, I highly recommend inventing your own musical genre. If you do, please tell me as I am looking for new ones in an attempt to articulate my likes and dislikes more effectively (not a problem, you say?) Look for this and other such activities in my upcoming book-- How to Have Fun in a Paper Bag.