OF DJENT

What the hell is "djent"?  I wonder because I seem to have been listening to it for some time now without actually knowing that I'm listening to it.  I'd never even heard of this elusive sub-genre until two days ago, and yet it seems to have already wormed its way covertly into my music collection, illicitly invading my ears on a weekly basis without my knowledge.  That's assuming it actually exists, of course.

When I first encountered the term in an online album review, I assumed it was a typo.  After it had cropped up in several reviews, I decided to investigate further, and discovered a whole new musical style which I had hitherto never known existed.  Except that it wasn't a new musical style.  The bands and the sound have been around for years; the only thing that was new was the name.  The term "djent" was apparently coined by one of the guitarists from Swedish band Meshuggah, and is an onomatopoeic expression for the sound of a palm-muted, distorted guitar.  While there are an awful lot of metal bands who utilise palm-muted guitar playing, it seems the term has come to refer to a particular group of them.  Trouble is, the unique sonic quirks which mark these bands out as part of the "djent" scene (highly complex riffs and song structures, polyrhythmic drumming and a mixture of melody and heaviness) are already considered hallmarks of such musical styles as technical metal, post-hardcore, progressive metal and math-rock, the overlap between which is such that it sometimes hardly seems worth differentiating.  Already blessed with such an overabundance of genre tags, it seems pointless to add yet another to the same group of artists.  What, then, is the point?

The rise of "djent" is just the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of the human obsession with dividing and categorising music into as many conveniently named sub-genres as possible.  "Djent" is not what I'm listening to when I put on a band like Protest The Hero or Between The Buried And Me, because "djent" is not really music, no more than, say, "rock" and "jazz" are.  They are words that we use to attempt to crudely describe the sounds we're hearing, and create neat little groupings of sonic experience.  Convenient, I suppose, but it's far too easy to get caught up in the application of such meaningless labels.  Using words to describe music can often be incredibly difficult; they're two completely distinct forms of communication.  Why we'd also want to go throwing redundant terms like "djent" into the mix is beyond me.

Plus, it sounds ridiculous.