Getting to the heart of words made with ‘-core’
According to the music streaming service Spotify, which keeps track of the kinds of music you listen to, many of my son’s favorite songs are in the otacore genre, while I have dabbled in bardcore. Since the first COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, social media has been full of cottagecore. What does this -core suffix mean, and why is it appearing all over?
The American Dialect Society explains that -core is a “productive suffix for aesthetic trends, such as gorpcore (functional outdoorsy gear) ... and goblincore (chaotic aesthetic inspired by goblin folklore).” The suffix was an ADS nominee for most creative word of 2021, probably because it has been used to coin names for hundreds of music genres and aesthetic styles over the past two years.
It’s easy to see how the suffix works – if your music or style is focused on X, then it’s Xcore. It’s not always easy to understand what the X refers to, though. For example, hikers will know that gorp is a trail mix of “good old raisins and peanuts”; the style of gorpcore features synthetic fleece, ripstop pants with lots of pockets, and interesting wool socks. My son’s otacore – music that resembles the soundtracks of anime cartoons – comes from otaku, slang in Japanese and now also in English for a “nerd” who is obsessed with anime and manga. Bardcore “gives modern hits a medieval makeover with crumhorns aplenty and lashings of lute,” as the i, a British newspaper, puts it, with artists such as Hildegard von Blingin’ and her collaborator Friar Funk.
Some of these genres and aesthetics are necessarily quite obscure, given that Spotify lists over 5,000 of them. Others, like cottagecore, have made it into the mainstream, perhaps because it’s a social media-friendly repackaging of an age-old urge people have felt to live in nature and get back to “simpler times.” Cottagecore’s mix of wooded solitude, homegrown veggies, and crafting was especially appealing early in the pandemic when so many people were stuck at home.
The suffix -core comes from hard core, which at first (1841) referred to broken bricks or stones that formed the hard substratum of roads and foundations. By the 1930s, it was an adjective that described the “base” or “core” of groups such as political parties. It then made its way into pornography and, in the 1970s, music, where it was used for “very loud, fast rock,” according to Merriam-Webster.
Why do we need all these -cores? Social media platforms place a premium on individuality, while their algorithms need to discern similarities to show users other posts they might like. I’m quite a bit gorpcore, with a little bit of royalcore thrown in.
