Worst music genre names you've heard?

[Trot Shuffle 3,597]

What's the worst name for a music genre you ever came across? And maybe it's surprised you when you listened to some works from it and it became one of your favorites? It can be anything from silly to ridiculous.

For me, it would be "Intelligent Drum & Bass/jungle" over anything else. It makes it sound like every other style and sub-genre is "dumb" in comparison. Apparently it came from British media labeling it as such and it stuck, for some reason.

From Wikipedia about it:

Quote

Intelligent drum & bass or intelligent jungle is a smoother style, influenced by ambient music, chillout, jazz and soul music.

Yeah, no. Just because it's jazzier and "softer" than the more hardcore jungle dnb coming out around that time doesn't make it more "intelligent" than anything else. It just makes it sound too posh and uptight, like, "You're an idiot if you don't listen to the intelligent tunes like me!" which obviously isn't true and should never be true for any music genre.

I'll personally stick to calling it "Ambient/Atmospheric Drum & Bass/Jungle" since that describes it MUCH better and is less pretentious. (I tend to swap those names around a bit but they're used to refer to the same thing.)

Great example IMO: "Intense - West Side Blues" released in 1997, one of my personal favorites as of late  And yes, that's a real sax performance on an EDM song!

Little fun fact related to this: One of the members of Intense, Dan Duncan, had his father, Malcolm "Molly" Duncan, on the sax for their songs, who was a founding member of Average White Band and has also worked with a lot of other folks like Marvin Gaye, Tom Petty, and Dire Straits. All of those in itself is a totally different rabbit hole to jump through so I won't do it here, but you're free to search his name and find out the work he's done. Crazy connections though, there's a lot of cool history here!

Edited September 7, 2023 by Trot Shuffle
I've also realized that IDM ("Intelligent Dance Music") exists too. Honestly anything with that kind of condescending name to it is a terrible pick for a name to me.

[Iforgotmybrain 3,514]

Despite really liking the genre I've never liked the term "shoegaze". Like what does that even mean? "Shoegaze" it sounds like some sort of shoe polishing liquid not a genre of music.

[ZiggWheelsManning 7,371]

Modern County, if you thought I hate normal Country to loads  

Edited September 7, 2023 by ZiggWheelsManning

[Prospekt 10,984]

Lowercase is about as weird as it gets. The name is strange and the music is even stranger. Minimalistic sounds are amplified and distorted. A guy named Steve Roden once recorded a lowercase album called Forms of Paper. The only instrument is... paper. Roden made various noises with paper, recorded them, and used various distortion effects to make them unrecognizable.

5 hours ago, Iforgotmybrain said:

Despite really liking the genre I've never liked the term "shoegaze". Like what does that even mean? "Shoegaze" it sounds like some sort of shoe polishing liquid not a genre of music.

The name comes from guitarists constantly looking down ("gazing") at their effects pedals while they play. Still a bizarre name, though 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Prospekt

[Sir Hugsalot 8,621]

Normally I don't roll with "worst" topics, but boy, do I not have a good contender for this one here. Thank you @Trot Shuffle

So, metal overall has some... rather special names. But Wintersun has beaten them all. At one point its leader, Jari described their genre, as "Extreme Majestic Technical Epic Melodic Metal". That is one mouthful of a genre name 

I love their music still (especially debut album), but at one point Jari went on extreme ego trip and this genre name is a good example of that. Fortunately later he shortened it to simple "Majestic metal", even if it's still a genre that does not really exist. 

9 hours ago, Iforgotmybrain said:

Despite really liking the genre I've never liked the term "shoegaze". Like what does that even mean? "Shoegaze" it sounds like some sort of shoe polishing liquid not a genre of music.

This is actually a reference to the fact that it's common for guitarists playing this genre to keep looking down when they play live. So that name actually is QUITE LITERAL xD

[Silly Druid 6,141]

True Equestrian Black Metal

[Brony Number 42 9,932]

Baby metal or bubblegum metal.

[Tacodidra 59,800]

Ones that aren't descriptive like the already mentioned "shoegaze". I don't care what the musicians do while playing, I care what it sounds like.

Also "EDM" for similar reasons. I remember it used to be called "dance", which immediately gives at least some idea of what it's like. With an acronym, there's no way to understand it unless you've heard it before – from the context where I first heard it, I knew it was some kind of electronic music, but I still thought it was a new subgenre for a long time. I still call it dance most of the time.

[Evil Pink One 12,992]

K pop.... uhhggg gives me shivers.