The avantgarde's relation to popular music

The whole Art Music vs. Popular Music side-track, while interesting and engaging, was an unnecessary and diverting distraction that in an ideal world would never need to happen.

With EM and Jazz it is not sufficient to simply throw those two words into the mix because they are such broad categories of music. While we can safely assume that we're obviously not talking about Dixieland or Synth-pop, other subgenres of either EM or Jazz are less obvious and would still be wholly wrong. 

Electronic Music refers to how the sounds are made, not the style(s) of music that it creates. The early days of Electronic Music occurred entirely in an Art Music context, (it would be tedious to list the various schools and movements of Electronic Art Music here), and since those pioneers of Electronic Music were also using the emerging technology to confront the basic ideas of "what is music" some of them can be regarded as avant-garde. It would be a false assumption to assume that all subsequent Electronic Music developed out of these vanguard explorations into Electronic Music (because it didn't), the technology may have been a result of it, but the adoption of that technology by Popular Music was nothing more than that. The only connection between Electronic Art Music and Electronic Popular Music is the use of synthesis of sound. It would also seem logical and natural that any hybridisation of Electronic Music would occur within it, i.e., between Electronic Art Music and Electronic Popular Music, yet this does not appear to be the case. The two exist independently of each other and in isolation from each other. When crossovers occur (and crossovers differ considerably from hybridisations) they invariably crossover Electronic Popular Music with Classical Art Music and the result can only lean towards Popular Music (just as with any crossover).

This post is a re-type from memory as the original disappeared into the aether on hitting [post]. I thought the forum up-grade had cured all this losing posts crap but it seems that was a lie. Shame, the first draft was far wittier and much better written than this will be.

This is starting to bear the hallmarks of selecting the data to fit an hypothesis rather than discarding a hypothesis that fails to fit all the available data. As the scope shrinks from Popular Music, to specific subgenres of Popular Music, to subgenres that have associated subcultures, to subcultures that have ideologies, to factions within those subgenres to promote those ideals, to individuals with agendas, (I make no apologies for the crass over-simplification here, this merely serves as an illustration), then the pool of data that fits the ideology becomes more apparent but it is also a convenient method of masking all the data that fails to support the original premise. 

The Dutch blogger is a fair example of this, in rejecting the poseurs, wannabies and hipsters he is preselecting his sample to what he feels is an authentic representation, except it is only a representation of his idealised view of authenticity. He is creating a sub-sect within the entire Black Metal community that (he assumes) would support his view, and thus heightens his credibility while maintaining the appearance of distanced impartiality. [A sub-sect that probably doesn't exist in reality and in all likelihood, never did]. So now when he subdivides albums (and thus artists) into those that he feels are authentic and those who he believes are not he can validate his notion of Black Metal being everything he wants it to be. Except the greater pile of rejected albums suggests that it isn't. It seems to me that what he is looking for is a romanticised version of what he believes the genre once stood for. As you say - a myth.

[In my occasional brushes with the UK Black Metal scene over the years, all of the fans and artists seemed pretty genuine and sincere to me. To date I've yet to hear any "family-friendly" Black Metal ... though much of it is indeed mediocre].