Genre Jumpers

Robert L. Hunt
May 31st, 2026
No Comments

When Jon and I first started writing and performing music, “the labels” wanted every artist neatly shelved in a single lane, shrink-wrapped in a tidy label, and sold as one dependable flavor—as if musicians were canned soup and not human beings with guitars.

Back “in the day” a customer walked into a record store—the old-fashioned kind with rows of vinyl, cardboard dividers, fluorescent lights, and the faint perfume of paper sleeves and dust—and found music sorted into a fixed lineup: Popular Vocals, Rock ’n’ Roll, Beat, British Invasion, Rhythm & Blues, Country & Western, Nashville Sound, Folk, Jazz, Soul Jazz, The New Thing, Bossa Nova, Easy Listening, Bubblegum, Acid Rock, Underground, Comedy, Spoken Word, Classical, Soundtracks & Shows, Children’s, and Gospel. Simple. Civilized. Mildly judgmental, but simple.

That was pretty much it—no sprawling taxonomy, no endless maze of subcategories, no committee somewhere arguing over whether a snare drum and a banjo qualify as a bold new movement. Maybe 20 genres, give or take a couple. Today, the classification game has exploded beyond mortal memory. There are more than twenty rock genres just in the “A’s” now. At this rate, by the time you reach the letter M, you need a packed lunch and emotional support.

For perspective, this is what the ROCK category looks like now—and keep in mind, this is only the A’s ⁽¹⁾ : Acid rock, Active rock, Adult album alternative, Afro-punk, Afro rock, Album-oriented rock, Alternative country, Alternative dance, Alternative hip-hop, Alternative metal, Alternative pop, Alternative R&B, Alternative reggaeton, Alternative rock, Anarcho-punk, Anatolian rock, Anti-folk, Arena rock, Art punk, Art rock, Avant-funk, Avant-garde metal.

There are now more than 300 genres associated with rock music. To my astonishment, the list includes names that sound less like music and more like dares dreamt up at two in the morning—everything from Melodic Death Metal to, yes, Cow Punk. I’m still not sure when the cows started rocking, but apparently at some point someone heard a guitar, saw a barn, and said, “right there, that’s a movement.”

My point is simple: Jon and I are not going to be tied to that kind of classification. Bugger the algorithms, we say. We’re going to keep making whatever kind of music lights the fuse on a given day, and we’ll let ears—not spreadsheets, interns, focus groups, or a man in expensive shoes with a market-segmentation deck—sort it out. Will it cost us in the long run? Quite possibly. After all, how will the powers that be know where to shelve us? What will people call us? Heaven forbid we color outside the lines, upset the filing cabinet, or splash the wrong shade into the grand paint-by-number masterpiece of modern marketing.

We are ANDERSON HUNT and ANDERSON HUNT & FRIENDS, and we are proudly GENRE JUMPERS of the first order. We’ll hop fences, dodge pigeonholes, and cheerfully ignore anyone waving a clipboard. We hope you keep listening, keep enjoying the ride, and if the music makes you grin, pass it along to your friends and family.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rock started out in the 1940s and ’50s as rock and roll, then really came into its own in the 1960s, especially in the U.S. and U.K. Since then, it’s split off into all kinds of styles—blues rock, folk rock, psychedelia, glam, metal, punk, grunge, indie, and a whole lot more.

Genre Jumpers

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Unsubscribe