CR on Music Theory Print

Crabcore

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Origin and legacy#

“Crabcore” originated in late 2007, and was first seen in a live performance by Blessthefall. While performing “Higinia”, former lead singer Craig Mabbitt is seen squatting, almost in a “crab-like” way during the breakdown. However, the term “crabcore” was later popularized in reference to the Ohio metalcore band Attack Attack!, who featured a “crab-like” dance during breakdowns in their music video for the 2009 single “Stick Stickly” from the album Someday Came Suddenly. Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo is also known for a similar stance during the band’s live concerts, long before the popularization of the term “crabcore”. According to John McDonnell of The Guardian: Attack Attack!’s second album peaked at No. 26 on the Billboard 200, prompting Metal Insider reporter Zach Shaw to write “Crabcore reached this high on the charts? Indeed a sad day.” In 2011, the animated sitcom South Park episode You’re Getting Old aired, parodying “tween wave” music, possibly referring to “crabcore”. In 2016, Abandon All Ships’ bassist Martin Broda tweeted “#defendcrabcore” just prior to the release of their single “Loafting”. Many other bands have been referred to as “crabcore” for featuring a similar stance or musical style, including Asking Alexandria and This Romantic Tragedy.

Crank wave

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Etymology and characteristics#

In March 2019, NME writer Mark Beaumont coined the term “gristle rock” to describe groups stemming out of the South London music scene such as Fat White Family, who spearheaded the scene. The band described the movement as an “art-sleaze-punk-freak” scene. He cited the song “Match Bet” by Squid along with acts such as Idles and Fontaines D.C. as inspiring the phrase. In 2021, writer Matthew Perpetua coined the term “Post-Brexit New Wave” in an article for NPR Music to categorize the emerging style as emblematic of a British post-Brexit cultural malaise. Perpetua defined the groups as primarily stemming from the United Kingdom and Ireland, he stated the musicians had “internalized more recent musical and cultural trends” and “disappointment and pessimism about Britain’s future”. He cited Black Country, New Road’s early style as drawing from contemporary media such as “micro-influencers, PR teams, online forum threads, UE Booms and NutriBullets”. as well as angular guitarwork and large leading basslines. Artists tend to be described as anxious, socially conscious and intellectual.

Creole music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Early development#

In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory, including New Orleans, from France. In 1809 and 1810, more than 10,000 refugees from the West Indies arrived in New Orleans, most originally from French-speaking Haiti. Of these, about 3,000 were freed slaves. Creole folk songs originated on the plantations of the French and Spanish colonists of Louisiana. The music characteristics embody African-derived syncopated rhythms, the habanera accent of Spain, and the quadrille of France. Central to Creole musical activities was Place Congo (in English: Congo Square). The much quoted 1886 article by George Washington Cable offers this description: The booming of African drums and blast of huge wooden horns called to the gathering … The drums were very long, hollowed, often from a single piece of wood, open at one end and having a sheep or goat skin stretched across the other … The smaller drum was often made from a joint or two of very large bamboo … and this is said to be the origin of its name; for it was called the Bamboula. Cable then describes a variety of instruments used at Congo Square, including gourds, triangles, jaw harps, jawbones, and “the grand instrument at last”, the four-stringed banjo. The bamboula, or “bamboo-drum”, accompanied the bamboula dance and bamboula songs. Chase writes, “For Cable, the bamboula represented ‘a frightful triumph of body over the mind,’ and ‘Only the music deserved to survive, and does survive … ‘”

Cringe pop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Cringe pop has spread due to the advancement of technology, essentially allowing anyone with a laptop to be able to produce a song and a music video. The rise of social media and streaming sites, especially YouTube have provided a platform for cringe-pop writers to publish their work and these platforms are fundamental for their existence. While the origins of cringe pop are unknown, an Indian magazine credited Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” as giving birth to the genre. The song, which was released in 2011, has over 149.6 million views and 3.8 million dislikes on YouTube as of January 2021. Black was soon followed by Taher Shah, a Pakistani singer. His music video “Angel” went viral.

Criolla

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Croatian hip-hop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Origins#

During the 1980s in Croatia and Yugoslavia, there was a mainstream surge of rock music called new wave which mostly suppressed other types of music from the mainstream. Electro-pop bands like Denis & Denis and funk musicians such as Dino Dvornik were unique at the time. It was Dino Dvornik that in 1989 launched his first album and started a revolution of electronic music in Yugoslavia. In the middle of the 1980s in Rijeka emerged the first Croatian rapper MC Buffalo who released the first and only hip hop album in Yugoslavia. During that time in Zagreb Slavin Balen formed a radio show that played hip hop music called Rap Attack.

Crossover music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Classical crossover#

Classical crossover broadly encompasses both classical music that has become popularized and a wide variety of popular music forms performed in a classical manner or by classical artists. It can also refer to collaborations between classical and popular performers, as well as music that blends elements of classical music (including operatic and symphonic) with popular music (including pop, rock, middle of the road, and Latin, among other types). Pop vocalists and musicians, opera singers, classical instrumentalists, and occasionally rock groups primarily perform classical crossover. Although the phenomenon has long been widespread in the music industry, record companies first used the term “classical crossover” in the 1980s. It has gained in popularity since the 1990s and has acquired its own Billboard chart.

Crossover thrash

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Etymology#

The term “thrash” originated as a way of referring to hardcore punk, seen on the 1982 hardcore compilation New York Thrash. The name “crossover” was coined in reference to Dirty Rotten Imbeciles’s 1987 album Crossover.

Precursors#

Hybrid forms of metal and punk had existed as early as the mid-1970s, with the most notable act being Motörhead. However, Discharge were the first band to turn the fusion into “something a little more long-term”. With their 1980 EPs Reality of War, Fight Back and Decontrol, the band began to merge the nascent sounds of hardcore punk and street punk with elements of heavy metal. The band’s influence was immediate and widespread, helping influence the beginnings of grindcore, crust punk, black metal and D-beat, and notably pioneering thrash metal groups Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Sepultura. In his book Choosing Death author Albert Mudrian called Discharge “the ultimate crossover act, marrying the passion and intensity of punk with the speed and extremity of heavy metal.” The initial contact between punk rock and heavy metal involved a “fair amount of mutual loathing. Despite their shared devotion to speed, spite, shredded attire and stomping on distortion pedals, their relationship seemed, at first, unlikely.” Their 1982 split LP with fellow Washington band the Faith showed both bands exhibiting quick, fiery, high-speed punk rock. It has been argued that those recordings laid the foundation for early thrash metal, at least in terms of selected tempos, By 1985, pioneering Boston hardcore bands including SS Decontrol, DYS and the F.U.’s had begun to play heavy metal. Author Steven Blush said of the fusion: “It was natural. The most intense music, after Black Flag and Dead Kennedys, was Slayer and Metallica. Therefore, that’s where everybody was going. That turned into a culture war, basically.”

Crunk

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Etymology#

The term has been attributed mainly to African-American slang, in which it holds various meanings. It most commonly refers to the verb phrase “to crank up”. It is theorized that the use of the term came from a past-tense form of “crank”, which was sometimes conjugated as “crunk” in the South, such that if a person, event, or party was hyped-up, ‌"cranked" or “cranked ‌it was said to be “crunk”. The term has also been traced to usage in the 1980s coming out of Atlanta, Georgia nightclubs and meaning being “full of energy” or “hyped”. In the mid-1990s, crunk was variously defined either as “hype”, “phat”, or “pumped up”. Rolling Stone magazine published “glossary of Dirty South slang”, where to crunk was defined as “to get excited”. A seminal year for the genre was 1996, with the releases of Three 6 Mafia album Chapter 1: The End (featuring “Gette’m Crunk”), and Memphis-based underground hip hop artist Tommy Wright III’s album On the Run, which featured the Project Pimp track “Getting Crunk”. Artist Lil Jon was instrumental in bringing the term further into the mainstream with his 1997 album titled Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album. He later released other songs and albums using the term, and has been credited by other artists and musicians as galvanizing use of the term as well as mainstreaming the music genre itself. The term has continued to evolve, taking on a negative stigma with police, parents and the media. In 2011, the company which manufactured “Crunk” drink brought out an alcoholic version named “Crunk Juice”.

Crunkcore

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History and characteristics#

Crunkcore combines the post-hardcore genres of screamo and emo with hip-hop, particularly the Southern hip-hop genre crunk, along with electronic music such as electropop, dance, pop, rock, and the metal genres of nu metal and metalcore. Writer and musician Jessica Hopper claims that Panic! at the Disco’s fusion of emo and electronic elements influenced the development of crunkcore in the mid-2000s. Kerrang! noted retrospectively that a mostly online presence through mediums such as Myspace was a major feature of crunkcore. The lyrics of the genres are mostly party-themed, hedonistic, and sexually explicit. Family Force 5 is a lyrical exception, instead melding the sounds of the genre with Christian-themed lyrics. Hollywood Undead, Brokencyde, and 3OH!3 are credited as the primary artists behind the creation and emergence of crunkcore. The roots of the genre are in the output of the rap rock group Hollywood Undead, but the genre achieved popularity through Brokencyde, who are considered the most responsible for crunkcore’s rise. Warped Tour co-creator and CEO Kevin Lyman calls the group 3OH!3 “the real tipping point for scrunk” as “they were the first emo-influenced act to depart from traditional instruments in favor of pre-programmed beats”, while still retaining many of the stylistic elements of emo. That group achieved the genre’s greatest success, the 2008 single “Don’t Trust Me”. The genre declined in the 2010s, although Brokencyde and 3OH!3 continued to record and tour, respectively, for the next few years. Blood on the Dance Floor and Family Force 5 are the most prolific artists in the genre, with a respective eight studio albums and five studio album and nine EPs. Crunkcore is typically characterized by the use of screamed vocals, although some crunkcore artists do not scream. For example, 3OH!3 do not “incorporate the blood-curdling screams of many scrunk acts”. Millionaires and Kesha likewise eschewed the screamed vocals typical for crunkcore but retained the sexually explicit lyrics and thus are still often considered part of the genre.

Crusade song

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

List of Occitan crusading songs#

The following list is only of those songs defined as “Kreuzlied” in Lewent, “Das altprovenzalische Kreuzlied” (Berlin: 1905). Lewent only lists the Crusade songs that have a call to crusade. For a more complete list, see the new database by Paterson.

List of French crusading songs#

The following table is adapted from Smith, Age of Joinville, p. 17, who cites Les chansons de croisade, eds J. Bédier and P. Aubry (Paris, 1909), p. xxxv.

Crust punk

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Lyrics#

Crust punk lyrics generally discuss real-world issues as a means of activism. In particular, they discuss political and social themes such as class struggle, environmentalism, anarchism, and anti-capitalism. Sometimes these themes are hyperbolised to the point of discussing the apocalypse, religious control and nuclear destruction. Many bands also discussed feminism, animal rights and veganism or vegetarianism. In contrast, Amebix’s lyrics sometimes discussed mysticism and Gnosticism.

Instrumentation#

Crust punk is a derivative form of anarcho-punk, mixed with metal riffs. The overall musical sound was described by SFGate writer Loolwa Khazzoom as being “stripped down”. Drumming is typically done at high speed, with D-beats sometimes being used. In Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics, author Gabriel Kuhn referred to the genre as a “blend of 1977 British punk, roots culture and black metal”, with the genre often taking influence from death metal, grindcore and powerviolence.