I actually think the opposite is important. At least in my experience, every time I’ve tried to write in a certain genre without being exposed to a bunch of it, the result has been very derivative of the most stereotypical elements; cf. my alt-country phase, which was embarrassingly cliched. I’m experiencing that as well at the moment with disco; I’m trying to make a disco album but I just don’t know enough about it in order to make something interesting.
When I’ve had a lot of exposure to a genre or other kind of stylistic movement, it’s facilitated a knowledge of how to exploit the tropes, or avoid them. I guess the main one for me has been chipmusic, which isn’t really a genre, but at first I wasn’t very familiar with it as a scene/movement and thought it was all just videogame music. After spending a few years going to gigs and seeing all kinds of people playing anything from avantgarde/noise to black metal with chip instruments, I got more of a sense of what can be done with the gear etc. I think having that kind of experience with a scene or style can really help, even for personal taste outside of making music, e.g. when people say “I hate country music” and they’ve only ever heard radio country music from the past 20 years.
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