You may know it as dream pop

July 27, 2007 12:14 AM

The return of shoe-gazing.
posted by meech (34 comments total)

Here is a you-tubeified version of the article:

Diamond gazers

'Shoegazing' is back - and has shaken off its old image of being about bands who just stare at the ground while they play. Jude Rogers talks to the pioneers of nu-gazing

At the start of summer 2007 a supple, shimmery thread started darning itself through a long line of euphoric-sounding albums. From Maps to Blonde Redhead, Mahogany to Deerhunter, Asobi Seksu to Ulrich Schnauss, you could hear the heady, woozy influence of a style of music that had been a byword for naffness and overindulgence for the past 15 years; a type of music that Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers had said he "hated more than Hitler". Names like nu-gaze, stargaze and shoetronica were used to describe it, names that couldn't quite hide the scene that dared not speak its name. For shoegazing was back - the sound of jangly indie fed through layers of distortion, overdrive and fuzz; of delicate souls turning themselves up to 11. In Summer 2007, bands, clubs, Mercury prize-nominated albums, films, and novels are all proud to claim it as an inspiration.

Why shoegazing and why now? "Because it's time to be adventurous again - and it's time to reclaim the music from the term," says Nathaniel Cramp, the cheerful, bearded promoter of Sonic Cathedral, both a shoegazing club that travels around the UK, and a record label. The term is the first problem: it began life as it remains - a derogatory word coined by Food Records boss Andy Ross in 1990, co-opted by the NME to describe bands like Slowdive, Chapterhouse and Moose, who would stare at their pedals through their curtains of hair rather than engage with their fans when they played live. "It wasn't very fair," says Neil Halstead, formerly Slowdive's shy teenage frontman, and now the leader of country band Mojave 3. "The live shows were far from fey. They were about the energy of the experience, about sheer volume, and about taking a quantum leap. It's was about getting excited, getting stoned, but the same time it was about being geeky - something that wasn't rock'n'roll in any respect."

Groups like Ride and My Bloody Valentine were the big bands of shoegaze, and were fiercely anti-rock in their music and their outlook. "We didn't want to use the stage as a platform for ego, like the big bands of the time did, like U2 and Simple Minds," says Mark Gardener, then Ride's lead singer, and now a solo artist. "We presented ourselves as normal people, as a band who wanted their fans to think they could do that too." Ride managed to take this to another level in February 1992, having a top 10 hit with the eight-minute epic Leave Them All Behind.

So what went wrong? Indie's dance revolution harmed shoegazing early on, bands from prosperous Thames Valley towns such as Oxford and Reading being easily mockable, and less exciting, next to their druggy and arrogant Madchester rivals. From 1992, grunge started bovver-booting its presence all over pop culture, its pessimistic lyrics and musical sparseness utterly at odds with shoegazing's lush, languid optimism. "We had no chance after grunge," says Gardener. "We were the opposite of greasy smack-takers from America. We were nice boys - and nice boys on the wrong kinds of drugs."

But 15 years later shoegazing has become hip again. Cramp thinks the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation in late 2003 - curated by My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields - speeded its return, and his club's mission is to contextualise shoegazing in terms of its influences and inspirations. "You'll just as likely hear Syd Barrett and Ladytron as you will Swervedriver and Moose. It's music I know people in Ride T-shirts with fringes will like - although they're too old to have fringes now, they've receded too much - but also music younger people will find exciting too." He mentions one of Sonic Cathedral's latest signings, Kyte, a band of boys in their early 20s who'd never heard shoegazing records until Cramp played them some, and Manchester's Working for a Nuclear Free City, who came to shoegaze through the ambient music of Brian Eno.

James Chapman, the 28-year-old bedroom musician behind Mercury prize-nominated Maps, likes this idea of putting shoegazing into context. He was only dimly aware of it as a child. "To me, shoegazing is just a stage of psychedelic music. I hear late 1980s dance in the music of that time, but also a lot of the late 60s psychedelic folk scene." These influences were also flagged up by bands at the time: Shields said that dance music was the inspiration for his band's biggest album, Loveless, while Gardener and Halstead still love the Byrds, the Doors and the Velvet Underground. Chapman thinks psychedelic music of either the dance or rock kind is always exciting to experience live. "I want to make music and play music that has the same effect on someone as My Bloody Valentine had on me - making people want to join together and escape themselves."

Ulrich Schnauss, the 29-year-old DJ whose dreamy second album Goodbye came out in June, thinks this escapism is vital to shoegazing's appeal. He comes from the north German outpost of Kiel, a dull town that he saw as the equivalent of Reading, home to Halstead's Slowdive. "Too much music these days is about how bad these towns are, about everyday life, and all the dull details. Shoegazing is a way out of that - there's melancholy in it, but lots of heaven there too." He thinks people connect with dreamy music more in times of world crisis, and points out how psychedelic music has flourished during the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. "It's music that offers a much more profound way of trying to cope with a bad world, isn't it? Offering hope rather than breaking your guitar and shouting 'fuck you!'"

Andrew Prinz of New York's Mahogany, who have played to huge crowds in North and South America, believes the romantic nature of the music has universal appeal too. "All the imagery on the original records was about love - all nature and kissing, subjects that could be really wet. But with these washes of sound, they become really electrified and erotic - and everyone wants to hear music that's electrified and erotic."

Shoegazing is also spreading beyond the CD racks. Eric Green, a young film-maker from Los Angeles, is in post-production on a documentary about shoegazing and the music that preceded it called Beautiful Noise, in which he interviews fans of the genre, including Trent Reznor, the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne and Billy Corgan. They were willing to talk, he says, because there wasn't a shoegazing backlash in America; the music was seen as part of an ongoing heritage of experimental rock, which fed into later genres like space-rock and post-rock. "But I decided not to use the word shoegazing in the film in case it upset anyone," he admits. "And because someone had said to me, 'The word "mafia" isn't in The Godfather, you know.' So I left it out."

First-time novelist James Buckley was braver, calling his book Celebrate Myself, after another mocking NME name for the original shoegazers, The Scene That Celebrates Itself. It tells the story of a self-righteous MBA student who's also into shoegazing music. "The business world and shoegazing both attract intelligent idealists," he says. "And a lot of those bands were university-based." He has met a lot of Ride fans in the City, and says he sees plenty of men from the trading floors at the back of gigs.

Still, images like these won't help change the minds of detractors. It doesn't help that Alan McGee, the man who signed Ride, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive to Creation, is its most vehement critic. "Bloody nonsense. My Bloody Valentine were my comedy band. Ride were different - they were a rock band, really, a fantastic rock band - but My Bloody Valentine were a joke, my way of seeing how far I could push hype." Although he said Shields was a genius in the Guardian in 2004, he now says, unconvincingly, that the revival is just people still buying his lies.

But the fans don't agree - they see this music as theirs. "This music is the opposite of hype," says Schnauss, vehemently. "It's about genuine emotion. It's about standing at a gig or walking around with your headphones on and being completely transported. It's about that kind of beauty." Or a Chapman neatly puts it: "It's all about music that doesn't stare at its shoes. It stares at the stars."
posted by meech at 12:15 AM on July 27, 2007 [5 favorites]

I did love MBV and Ride the first time around. Maybe I need to restock the music collection with them and the likes.

Oh yeah. Holy crap!
posted by YoBananaBoy at 12:18 AM on July 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

'shoegazing' makes me think of a certain class of too-cool-for-you indie-punk-rock people which travel around in packs where I live (and probably in most other college towns). it's like if you removed everything good about goth kids, punk kids and emo kids and put them in a blender and then gave the blender a know-it-all face

my nerd friends and I used to call them 'smirking shoegazers', but we've found 'fucking romulans' to be more apt. if they're looking to the stars now, I guess we can call it romulan music.
posted by maus at 12:35 AM on July 27, 2007

maus: They are staring at their shoes because they are stoned/shrooming. It's not personal. I bet you hate Dub too... asshole. :(

The Deerhunter record is amazing. The new Blonde Redhead is great. Asobi Seksu works but can get boring. Ulrich Schnauss is charming and sweet.
posted by basicchannel at 12:39 AM on July 27, 2007

Huh. I have a DJ friend who always talks about shoegaze. I'll have to send him this post.
posted by brundlefly at 1:01 AM on July 27, 2007

a) EssayFilter

b) Can't we just kill all music journalists and be done with it?
posted by i_cola at 1:02 AM on July 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm put off by music-related articles such as this one because of the compulsive need for them to apply ridiculous labels and sub-labels to every act. One of my biggest pet peeves about Pitchfork, for example, is that it's all about comparing an artist to their predecessors, whether or not they were an influence (almost as though two artistic acts could not come to similar conclusions).

Take the music for what it is. If you enjoy it, good. If you don't, then don't listen to it. Standing from a distance and pointing at shoegazers/goths/emo kids/hardcore kids/whatever is a silly exercise in pigeonholing and illegitimizing people.
posted by spiderskull at 1:07 AM on July 27, 2007

New labels for music. Just what we need. The band names are useful, though - thanks!
posted by Leon at 1:20 AM on July 27, 2007

Maybe it's time to get the old band back together and cash in on this.
posted by chillmost at 2:21 AM on July 27, 2007

Naw fuck that. Nobody paid any attention the first time around.

I'd rather have Swervedriver back for a few shows. They were absolutely amazing.
posted by chillmost at 2:23 AM on July 27, 2007

The Portland band The High Violets (youtube) get called this a lot.
posted by D.C. at 2:26 AM on July 27, 2007

Here's a nice list of some older and current shoegazers from Milk Milk Lemonade. Shoegazing (by the way, the label may have been about drugs, but it was mainly about the fact that as a guitarist you had 12 different foot pedals to hit at any given moment, so you had to look down all the time) never really went away. There have been elements of it in many indie rock bands since the early 90s.
posted by sleepy pete at 2:27 AM on July 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

chromewaves has been on about loaferglancing for years now.
posted by progosk at 3:14 AM on July 27, 2007

Thanks for the YT linkified text, that was really helpful.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 4:30 AM on July 27, 2007

[Creation label head] Alan McGee: My Bloody Valentine were my comedy band... My Bloody Valentine were a joke, my way of seeing how far I could push hype.

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless was, and is, one of the truly great albums of the rock era, a magnificently distorted work of obsessive petsoundian perfectionism so much more flat-on-your-back ceiling-gaze than shoegaze, a buzzing icebox swarming with Blake's angels, a reasonable excuse for being moved to bad prose.

Alan McGee, on the other hand, was, and is, a pathetic little man.
posted by Kinbote at 4:39 AM on July 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

Kinbote: If the band essentially killed your record label, you might be a little dismissive of them, too.
posted by sleepy pete at 4:48 AM on July 27, 2007

Sleepy Pete: If I'd blown an entire record label up my nose, I'd be looking for someone to blame.
posted by Kinbote at 5:03 AM on July 27, 2007

Huh, so it has a name. That stuff I like. Cool.

Maybe I should read a music review once a year, to keep up on the lingo.

Thanks for the post, meech, very informative.
posted by sidereal at 5:12 AM on July 27, 2007

If shoegazers had been a wee bit more inclusive it might have worked - but it wasn't about that. It was full of people who were too busy perfecting their impression of a moody shot of eno/reed they once saw on the back of an album somewhere to actually open up and do anything worthwhile - much like a wannabe model who walks around scowling at everyone, including the cat.
I was so glad the ravers, the roses, the mondays, oasis , even nirvana - came and blew these self serving f*ckers out of the water.
Apart from that though, thanks for putting this post up - you should go the whole hog and make it available only by snail mail though : )
posted by sgt.serenity at 5:27 AM on July 27, 2007

Ride and MBV defined my university days. As I remember from gigs, most fans were pretty far from the shoegazing stereotype. The emo comparisons are pretty wide of the mark in my experience.

They still get a listen most weeks in my house (which the wife bloody hates, but there you go, she was listening to Kenny G at the time. Really.)

And yup, Alan McGee was, and is, an arse. Loveless stands as one of the greatest albums of all time, and McGee's just still pissy about it nearly bankrupting Creation at the time. But I suspect he was pissing money away as fast as Kevin Shields was burning it in the studio. At least Kevin's got a legacy to show for it.

When Lost in Translation came out there were a few interesting articles about how he got lured out of the quiet life he was leading in order to do it. The soundtrack's great, but it's a shame that his new compositions weren't the best things on there.
posted by dowcrag at 6:50 AM on July 27, 2007

"Bloody nonsense. My Bloody Valentine were my comedy band. Ride were different - they were a rock band, really, a fantastic rock band - but My Bloody Valentine were a joke, my way of seeing how far I could push hype."

This explains an awful lot to me. I got Loveless when it came out, and I've listened to it in detail several times -- I actively dislike the album, and this is coming from someone who not only loves drones and noise but performs fairly regularly in that scene.

The big issue to me is the pitching -- I hate, hate, hate the way pretty well every song on that album has a fundamental pitch that slowly waves up and down, like a cheap record player that needs oil. It's not that clever a trick, perhaps good for a single song, and it's slightly nauseating.

(Of course, the lame vocals don't help...)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:06 AM on July 27, 2007

This is a great, great, greeeeaaaat post - thanks for the YouTube links.

[I cannot understand why the haters here don't just fuck off and go away. So. Fuck. Off]

Anyway, I recently pulled out all my old shoegazing CDs from my university days. I mean, my god, Loveless was almost a religious artifact to my undergrad self.

Living as I do on the edge of the world where no great bands ever come, it didn't matter to me if the band does not engage with the audience. I just liked listening to the music.

So, once again, great post!
posted by KokuRyu at 8:44 AM on July 27, 2007

I totally agree with Lupus about Loveless. Every song has to have that same chromatic whine? Feh! (I thought I was the only one!)
posted by grobstein at 9:26 AM on July 27, 2007

New labels for music. Just what we need.

Are you talking about the term "shoegaze"? That label has been around since the early '90's.

As for the music itself, it's much better if you're very very stoned I think. At least, everyone I know with extensive shoegaze collections is or was a serious burnout (yes, I know there will be people who love shoegaze that have never inhaled). Shoegaze is kinda the jam band of the Art School set. There's a lot of great sounds in there, but at some point it gets a bit tedious. I like shoegaze best for the heavy, drone-y, drug-smoked sound it inspired in other bands' music, but I personally don't have the attention span for it. Except maybe as the soundtrack for a two hour, six course breakfast made on a camp stove in the woods after staying up all night. Then it's perfect.

Still, this is a good post, so thank you.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:04 AM on July 27, 2007

Another newish band that has the feel of shoegaze, but with the added geek bonus of creating instruments out of old commodores, printers, and ataris, is Tree Wave out of Texas (couple of mp3s here). They just came up on the player at work
posted by sleepy pete at 12:02 PM on July 27, 2007

Damn, I was hoping for some shoes worth looking at.
posted by darksasami at 2:49 PM on July 27, 2007

maus: They are staring at their shoes because they are stoned/shrooming.

I was a guitarist in a 'shoe-gazer' band in the very early 90's ... the reason I was looking at my shoes was because I had like 10 guitar pedals to help my instrument make the pre-requisite 'shoegazery' noises. I had to keep looking down for fear of stepping on the wrong one at the wrong time.

Anyway, I always assumed that was probably the case with all of those bands ... though the comment quoted above was often a factor as well.
posted by General Zubon at 5:24 PM on July 27, 2007

oh ... and a joke going around at the time was that the formula for writing a shoe-gazer song was "verse-pedal-chorus-pedal-verse".
posted by General Zubon at 5:57 PM on July 27, 2007

I was so glad the ravers, the roses, the mondays, oasis , even nirvana - came and blew these self serving f*ckers out of the water.

Agreed. I actually liked a lot of the bands described as shoegazing, but the ones I liked were really something else - Swervedriver were basically psychedelic rock with influences from the art world; MBV were an art noise band, lots of early Sonic Youth and Glen Branca there along with the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Ride were the worst kind of polite, rock-as-priesthood kind of band though. I hated them with a passion.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 11:35 PM on July 27, 2007

I appreciate the post quite a bit, but I would have made some different choices as to the youtube linkage.

Ulrich Schnauss - A Letter From Home (fanvid)
Slowdive - Alison
Slowdive - When the Sun Hits (live)
Slowdive - Avalyn (live)
Ride - OX4 (live)
Ride - Vapour Trail
Ride - Dreams Burn Down (live)
My Bloody Valentine - When You Sleep (fanvid, after much argument my friends and I determined that this song was the best to introduce someone to Loveless)
Swervedriver - Duel (live)
Swervedriver - Son of Mustang Ford (vhs rip, not the best sound)

Enjoy!
posted by crashlanding at 12:00 AM on July 28, 2007

I have to admit, gladly, that shoegazer is my favourite (sub)genre of music. I'm not going to argue who is or isn't, but I still find myself listening to alot of My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized (earlier stuff), Cocteau Twins, Lush, Slowdive and the like.

I myself have writen some shoegazer-esque music, although the days of me trying to write shoegazer music purposely are long gone. I'll have to put my song up on for people to compare. Thank god others are taking an interest in it.
posted by Chocomog at 4:47 AM on July 28, 2007

although i find some of the older stuff dated (lush, for instance),
loveless is still a amazing cd...
and the new ulrich schnauss is great!
posted by fisherKing at 8:29 AM on July 28, 2007

Geez, people: just say "your favorite genre of music sucks" & get away from the thread already.
posted by Pronoiac at 9:49 AM on July 28, 2007

Gee. I thought they called it "shoegazer" music cuz that's what we (the audience) were doing. Rather than bop on the dance floor, the room would be filled with people just standing in front of the stage looking at their shoes, maybe swaying to the music a bit, but no matter what was going on stage, we didn't pay much attention. We were there for the sound and the vibrations and the fact that if you were very lucky, you might notice your ears bleed as you went home.

You mean to say the guys in the band were gazing at their shoes too? That's deep.
posted by ZachsMind at 8:48 PM on July 28, 2007