Top 10 Weirdest Music Genres

Top 10 Weirdest Music Genres

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Top 20 Music Genres That Died

You're not gonna find songs from these genres topping the charts anytime soon. Join http://www.WatchMojo.com as we count down the Top 10 Weirdest Music Genres. For this list we’re looking at the weirdest, most bizarre, and obscure music genres we can find. This isn’t a judgement on the quality of the music or musicians that make up these genres, just confirmation that they're not at all conventional.

A lot of these genres are going to be tough to define, and this format is no exception. At it's heart a satire of consumerism, Vaporwave emerged as a genre in the 2010s across various online music communities, beginning with artists such as James Ferraro and Vektroid just to name a few. Start with a foundation of basic pop music and add a heavy dose of 80s and 90s pop culture, then mix samples of smooth jazz and corporate lounge music while using pitch shifting and loops to achieve a distorted sound and you've got yourself some Vaporwave.

Today’s popular music is all about dense, catchy, overwhelming beats and compositions- you know, hooks and massive choruses. By contrast, lowercase asks listeners to experience sounds drowned out by the auditory clutter of the world. Lowercase artists digitally amplify natural sounds like anthills and flowers growing, taking a microscope to sounds otherwise imperceptible to the human ear. Others, such as Steve Roden, isolate everyday situational sound, like the handling of paper, or the sound of a quiet library. Minimalist and ambient it may be but lowercase is unlikely to top the Billboard charts anytime soon.

In the early 2000s, ‘HORSE the band’ jokingly coined the term “Nintendocore” to describe their unique style of music, which combined metal with 8-bit video game inspired synth. The term caught on, leading other video game inspired rock and metal musicians to adopt the term. Nintendocore’s ancestry can be traced to Chiptune, a genre of music spawned in the 1980s that incorporated 8-bit synth from the video game world and EDM like tempos. It’s a formula that is just so crazy that it works, leaving video game fans everywhere looking for the nearest mosh pit.

Hardcore techno and gabber were among the first EDM subgenres to push the number of beats per minute in an aggressive direction. But splittercore and extratone make them look tame by comparison. Both splittercore and extratone fall under the larger umbrella genre of speedcore, which is defined as any EDM where the BPM exceeds 300 BPM. Splittercore is speedcore on amphetamines, usually exceeding 600 BPM. It pushes the boundary of recognizable EDM to its very limits... and then extratone demolishes those limits, going beyond 1000 BPM. In fact, the human brain struggles to keep up, and the individual beats sound like a single pulsating drone.

Who were the original metalheads you ask? So metal they were metal before metal existed? Pirates! Pirate metal pays homage to the original headbangers of the sea by mixing power metal, thrash metal and speed metal with traditional pirate ballads, chants and the folk sound associated with seafaring. Lyrically, pirate metal is all about buried treasure, rum, kidnapping landlubbers and other pirate pastimes. Pirate metal fans around the world have 80s metal band Running Wild to thank for inventing the genre when they abandoned their Satanic imagery for the pirate life with their third studio album, Under Jolly Roger.

There seems to be a clear correlation between weird music and genres that end in “core”. In this case, our hybrid genre combines crunk music with screamo and emo. This is usually achieved by pairing vocal styles more commonly used in emo and screamo with electronic beats similar to those found in Southern hip hop. That being said, crunkcore really feels like an odd pastiche of pop culture from 2005 to 2010. Throw everything you can find including hip hop, scene kid fashion, emo, screamo, techno, suburban youth, auto-tune and Hot Topic into the mix and you get the neon monster that is crunkcore.

Avant-garde is a term that can be applied to any piece of art which pushes beyond the accepted boundaries of that given art form. In the case of music, it’s difficult to set any specific set of characteristics, but a number of composers from the 20th Century rose to prominence by radically altering the definition of music, and came to be commonly known as avant-garde composers. Among them are Arnold Schoenberg, who worked with serialism, a technique of composition using a series of systematic values, and John Cage, who’s most infamous piece consisted of four minutes and thirty three seconds of sitting in front of his piano in silence.

Psychedelic synth and folk music feel like an unlikely pairing to begin with, but add Catholic symbolism to the mix and things get really weird. The 60s and 70s resulted in a lot of experimentation, but this genre stands out from the crowd. Sister Irene O’Connor’s Fire of God’s Love/ Songs to Ignite the Spirit sounds innovative and experimental even today, without considering that it was recorded by an Australian nun living in a monastery in 1976. Musicians Pastor John Rydgren and Emily Bindiger each made significant contributions to the genre with their respectively trippy releases Silhouette Segments and Emily.

This is another genre that is more about an idea than any distinct musical characteristics. It is considered to be a form of avant-garde music, but it pushes the definition of music so far beyond recognition that danger music is also called anti-music. Confused yet? You should be. Danger music is defined by one thing - the theory that some music can be inherently dangerous. Musicians creating danger music prove this hypothesis in various ways, such as playing loud enough to deafen an audience, attacking the audience, or writing “the performer should blind themselves 5 years after performing this piece” in the sheet music. Fun. Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions. Baby Metal or “Kawaii Metal” Chap-Hop Seapunk Country Truck Driving Music

Noise music is produced all over the world, but no one does it quite as weird as the musicians of Japan, who have developed a distinct and highly regarded noise music culture, known as Japanoise. While the 1980s and 1990s were certainly the high point of the genre, Japan maintains its position as a mecca of noisemusic. The Japanoise movement encompasses many subgenres of noise music coming out of Japan, from the tabletop electronic noise of MSBR or the Incapacitants, to more punk inspired Japanoise artists like Ruins. Japanoise has also produced arguably one of the most famous and respected noise musicians ever, Merzbow. Do you agree with our list? What’s the weirdest music you’ve ever had the pleasure or displeasure of listening to? For more unique top 10s published every day, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.