Were genres closer together in the 1960s?

Comentarios

• u/Proof-Contribution31·1·1 ago 2026, 15:02

  There's a case too for this for a couple of decades. Really before music distribution completely changed. I think genres today and are so mushed together that it really starts to feels like there are absolutely no limits on genre whatsoever. To point where it all starts to just feels like it's just a slurry of genres with no delienation whatsoever. wanna make free jazz trap beats with hints of opera and black metal riffs and background covals? Go ahead! Hell, it probably already exists.

  • u/BigYellowPraxis·1·1 ago 2026, 15:26

    Problem is, anything that mixes free jazz, trap beats, hints of opera and black metal riffs is unlikely to do any of those particularly well

    • u/SellsLikeHotTakes·1·1 ago 2026, 15:45·1 respuesta

• u/Koraxtheghoul·1·1 ago 2026, 15:07

  Joe South is a country artist that wrote songs like "Games People Play" and "Hush" wearing a paisley shirt and with a baby sitar on some tracks... but I'm not sure that's to unique again today as we have Taylor Swift crossover.

• u/Nooge62·1·1 ago 2026, 15:08

  Quite the opposite. Rock n Roll was seen as eviland anti-establishment - cue preachers denouncing it from pulpits, Elvis not being filmed on TV below the waist and so on. Races were literally segregated, so little mixing there. It's the plot of Footloose or Hairspray on a national scale. Many of the first RnR hits were "black" and therefore never heard by whites until Elvis sang it. Access to media was far more limited. You listened whatever the radio decided to playlist and you bought one record and listening to it for the rest of the month. There was also a clear line between RnR and the old music of Sinatra etc. You would never be caught dead enjoying it. Now mixing genres is cool. Country music was all twang and that accent. Now much country music gleefully steals from rock and much of it could be a Fleetwood Mac tribute band to my ears.

  • u/Little_Power_5691·1·1 ago 2026, 15:20

    I don't think we're talking about the same thing. My point wasn't that people mixed genres more in the 1960s socially or culturally. I meant that the genres themselves seemed musically closer together. For example, you mention country. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Byrds all experimented with country to varying degrees. And they weren't the only ones. These same artists also had no qualms about covering songs from black artists. Some things you say may have applied to the early 60s, but mid to late 60s boundaries were definitely blurring.

    • u/curious1playing·1·1 ago 2026, 15:41

    • u/Nooge62·1·1 ago 2026, 15:43·1 respuesta

• u/kingofstormandfire·1·1 ago 2026, 15:43

  Yes, a lot of genres cross pollinated and borrowed from each other, which is what kept all the genres constantly evolving and vibrant since they looked both to the inside and outside for new sounds and ideas.

• u/AtomicPow_r_D·1·1 ago 2026, 15:48

  I don't think genres were that much closer together in the '60s. When Dylan went from Folk to Rock it was considered a betrayal, even though it mostly went well for him. (But folk fans wouldn't just switch to rock for him, and they didn't.) It has gotten easier (cheaper) to have drastically different sounds today than back then. The keyboards available to rock and soul bands back in the day were fewer; same with amps, bass guitars, etc. You wouldn't have seen a Soul act on tour with a Rock band. And Prince bombed opening for the Stones in the Eighties for similar reasons, I'd assume. Today, singers like Ariana G. or Sereda (white, Canadian) sound like American black girls and sing Soul adjacent material. It's more like assimilation to my ears. But you still have Country acts staying in their lane, mostly. Also, today people are up in arms about "cultural appropriation", polite speak for theft, which used to be called having influences.

• u/SellsLikeHotTakes·1·1 ago 2026, 15:50

  I think your right partially it's just that back in the 60's the popular genres were closer to their shared roots of blues, jazz and folk music so stuff like instrumentation and song structure tended to more shared. Though with your Sex Pistols example I've seen people argue that a lot of post punk bands ended doing some very similar things to prog rock it just got a different label.

• u/P00PooKitty·1·1 ago 2026, 15:53

  I think like youth/adult and like cultural/racial focus were bigger genre definers than anything back then. Jazz, however, already had at least a dozen subgenres: dixieland, jazz standard, pop, big band, sweet music, third stream, bebop, salsa, meringue, chacha, rumba, samba, bossa nova, modal, free. I think im missing some Too.

• u/rora_borealis·1·1 ago 2026, 15:59

  The sound pallette they had up to a certain point around the 60s was limited to conventional physical instruments. Then in comes the electric guitar and synthesizers and all the new sounds people figured out how to make. The broader sound pallette gives us more room for variance. 

• u/Moni3·1·1 ago 2026, 16:04

  I'm a regular over at r/rockhall where the discussion is almost constantly about who qualifies to get inducted because the music they made isn't rock and roll. So I posted this a couple weeks ago:

  Some genres exist on music charts. Those measure sales within specific markets. Billboard does not recognize “rock and roll” as a market, and neither do other charts. “Rock and roll” is music that has landed on R&B, jazz, country, gospel, pop, middle-of-the-road, adult contemporary, Top 40, rock, alternative, college, and other charts.

  Other genres are created by academics to define and explain, critics and the music industry to interpret and sell, and artists to label themselves and what they make. The term “Rock and roll” was created by artists to describe partying and sex. A radio DJ named Alan Freed used it to describe music and then popularized it promoting it to young people. He used it interchangeably with R&B, marketed it energetically, and created sensational moments in the music industry that made a lot of people a lot of money, and subverted a lot of social and artistic expectations.

  Genres naturally overlap. What separates them might be trivial: language, class, race, or lyrical content for example, which when performed by someone in a different language, of a different class, or race, with a different set of lyrics qualifies it as a different genre.

• u/Funny_Inspection6893·1·1 ago 2026, 16:12

  Well, we can start off with saying rock n roll is basically dead. Post Malone is famous for being everything. Taylor Swift just released a country song. Beyonce released a whole country album.. A few years back it was common to have rappers as features on pop songs, but that's definitely out of fashion. Drake did some genre mixing in his last batch of releases. But lately pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Bruno Mars, and Ariana Grande, and country stars like Morgan Wallen and Ella Langley have mostly stayed in their own lanes.

• u/NortonBurns·1·1 ago 2026, 17:44

  People just didn't bother labelling every single pigeon into their own pigeon-hole, so cross-pollination didn't upset anyone either. Now we seem to have to categorise everything into sub-sub-sub genres, so much so that an artist could lose their audience if they accidentally stray into another category.

• u/j3434·1·1 ago 2026, 17:57

  Before you really get into a discussion about genre, you have to decide what you mean by genre. First, you have to understand that genre names used by most people are not exact, but just a tool for discussing entertainment. But the genre terms we know were actually prominently created by record industries to sell their music to specific demographics. The billboard charts changed their genre names many times based on the demographics they were targeting. Did you know at one point the billboard had a hillbilly music chart? And Race records? Later blues was marked as Rock and Roll . And if you say classic rock, you are not really talking about a genre. You’re talking about an industry created classification that covered radio playlists. But it’s an interesting topic but never worth a debate. But I think your statement is valid, but I think you probably need to expand your understanding of genres as industry trade names or as specifically subjective pigeon holding or is actually names that describe a music that has a specific theory.

• u/tunenut11·1·1 ago 2026, 18:12

  People got music in a very different way in the 1960s. AM radio was the main way and top 40 was huge. And a weekly chart could include the Beatles and Buck Owens and Dean Martin....pop, country, rock and roll, along with soul. So the typical teenage kid heard all this stuff. While there were stylistic differences, these were almost all melodic vocal short songs. There were certainly other genres out there, like classical, blues, jazz...these were played on the very less common FM radio band and on some AM radio too. So what I think happened is that all the various genres started splitting into hundreds of sub-genres over time, whole new genres came out and started splitting into their own subgenres, like techno, jungle, trance, and various other electronic dance music, like all the flavors of rap and hip-hop, all the flavors of metal. The listeners have now seemingly infinite choices, not just top 40 on the radio, so I meet people who have long lists of favorite musicians I've never heard of, and I've heard a lot. I don't know if this answers your exact question, but it just seems like there was much less musical variety available for most people 60 years ago.