Ten great genre songs about songs and genres

If you ever have the opportunity to work with groups of young storytellers, you’ll probably notice a trend. It doesn’t matter the medium. Novelist or screenwriter, poet or painter, the first story told by a great many young artists is their own. They write, paint, or sing about themselves and their life experiences.

Often, they are instructed to do it. The old “write what you know” advice. But even if they never heard that mantra, storytellers would probably find themselves most interested in telling stories about themselves anyway.

Sometimes, as artists, they move on and explore other genres and other types of stories. Sometimes they don’t – they continue telling the same story throughout their entire career, diving ever deeper into nuance. There’s no right or wrong way to do it.

Songs about genres can tell you more than you think

Musicians are no different. Hip-hop has made singing about yourself de rigueur, but artists have been putting their origin stories into songs throughout the whole of pop music history. Or they have been looking back. Whether it’s Billy Joel introducing himself as the “Piano Man” or Waylon Jennings wanting to go back to “Luckenbach, Texas,” musicians eventually get around to singing songs about the songs they are singing.

The songs themselves can be elegiac or satiric. They can pine for the old days or laugh at how it has all played out. Today’s task is to pick ten such songs from ten different musical genres and listen to how they treat their subject. I’m looking for a cross-section of reverence and good-natured ribbing.

Mainly, I’m looking for good songs about different genres of music. Most of them come from insiders – practitioners or the particular type of music they are describing. But not always. Sometimes, an outsider can serve up a different point of view.

Mostly, I’m looking for songs that are fun. If you work with enough of those developing storytellers, the biggest problem you tend to encounter is the tendency they have to take their subject matter a little too seriously.

The following examples – even the ones that lean a little toward the serious side – never lose sight of the fact that music usually functions best when it catches a listener’s ear with a rhythm and a melody. After that, the song can take off in plenty of lyrical directions. As these songs do…

In chronological order, ten songs about ten genres.