Genre Motif/Showtunes

• Main
• All Subpages
  • Classical
  • Country
  • Easy Listening
  • Electronic Dance
  • Folk
  • Hip Hop
  • Jazz
  • Metal
  • Pop
  • Punk
  • R and B
  • Rhythm and blues
  • Rock
  • Showtunes
• Create New

This term can encompass a ton of music crossing over with a lot of different genres, but what is usually thought of is the Rodgers and Hammerstein style of extremely earnest escapist pop made (in)famous through plays such as The Sound of Music, Oklahoma! (yes, that exclamation mark is part of the title), and South Pacific. It is the driving force of its own style of fiction and its use in other genres usually is meant to show somebody as either Camp Gay or otherwise very chintzy. As a Dead Horse Music Genre, it's almost never shown in a positive light outside of its own context.

---

Examples:

• One episode of American Dad has a sequence showing how the military roots out homosexuals from their ranks. The interviewing officer starts a sentence with "Clang clang", which causes a random person in line to burst into "The Trolley Song" from Meet Me In St. Louis in a very Camp Gay manner.
• In the UK, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical output is usually ridiculed by the people who appear on topical humorous quiz shows. For a while ALW was also associated negatively with the Conservative Party, leading to this section of society to hate him and his works even more. In recent years, with the rise of television programmes designed to find talented leading ladies for big West End shows, the negativity has abated somewhat.