MP3 players on shuffle, internet radio communities such as Last.fm and “If you like this, try this” guidance on the web have contributed to a surge in people’s awareness of different musical eras and genres, and to a marked reduction in pop tribalism. These days, it is not only acceptable to admit a partiality to several distinct types of music, it’s positively de rigueur. In this brave new long-tail world, we are on a never-ending journey of discovery, veering off at any number of tangents. With the number of music genres reproducing like rabbits, the journey might become a trek. The most welcome help in such circumstances is a trusty travel guide, to place that journey in context, to make it seem less daunting and more fun (and discovering and buying new music should surely be that). Here, then, in the first part of a weekly series, is Culture’s musical satnav.

INDIE ROCK

Arctic Monkeys, Wild Beasts

Blokes who remember Meat Is Murder (and former riot grrrls, for that matter) grumble and groan when asked about today’s “indie” scene. From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, the term was a rallying cry not merely for music released on independent British record labels such as Creation, Factory and Rough Trade, but for a DIY ethos and an awkward, oppositional attitude. Fey outsiders from Morrissey to Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, and fierce autodidacts from Mark E Smith to the masked men of Clinic, could rule their own roosts and connect with like-minded souls. Indie was then a way of life; now the word is applied, willy-nilly, to any two-bit guitar band in skinny jeans. Thus, indie has become a marketing category, empty of meaning. Critics call the interchangeably ho-hum tunes of the Kooks, the View, the Wombats, the Pigeon Detectives and their ilk “landfill indie”. How grateful, therefore, were grumpy middle-youths for Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys, who cussedly signed for an independent label, in Domino, write great songs and cock a snook at the Establishment. Yorkshire, indeed, is a bastion of “proper” indie values, with labels such as Dance to the Radio and bands including the Cribs and Wild Beasts. Richard Clayton

ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS

Recent: Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006); The Cribs, Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever (2007); Wild Beasts, Limbo, Panto (2008)

Classic: The Smiths, The Smiths (1984); The Jesus and Mary Chain, Psychocandy (1985); Belle and Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996)

Key track: Arctic Monkeys, When the Sun Goes Down (2006)

BLUE-EYED SOUL

Amy Winehouse, Adele, Duffy

The past two years in music have shown just how commercially potent blue-eyed soul remains, with singers such as Amy Winehouse and Duffy selling millions of albums around the world. A term originally coined in the 1960s to describe white singers and bands — such as the Righteous Brothers, the Rascals and Dusty Springfield — whose sound was indebted to rhythm and blues and soul music, it first became really big business in the 1970s and 1980s, when David Bowie, Hall & Oates, Rod Stewart, George Michael and Simply Red rode high in the charts with slick, soul-infused hits.

For some, the term will always be synonymous with a dilution of the form; and, at its worst, the genre has certainly lent weight to that argument. The Australian singer Gabriella Cilmi, who had a big hit last year with Sweet About Me, didn’t put a foot wrong in the song, which is a note-perfect facsimile of classic Motown — and in a sense, that’s the problem. Yet from Dusty in the late 1960s to Amy today, white artists with real emotional and vocal heft have proved that soul can come from anyone, as long as the song, and the performance, communicates a sense of rapture or pain that is authentic and searing. Now the singer and Mark Ronson collaborator Daniel Merriweather looks set to join the party with his debut album, due in April. Dan Cairns

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