The Cultural Politics of Shoegaze
Capitalist Alienation, Utopian Music, and the Genre that Saw the Future
Breaking out of the United Kingdom in the late 1980s early 1990s, shoegaze is a niche genre of music that has produced some of the most beautiful and euphonious records to this date. Made up of mostly young working class teens with a DIY aesthetic, shoegaze was a truly unique genre that sadly faded away as quickly as it had smashed onto the scene. Bands broke up, were dropped by their record labels, or degraded into Britpop; before we knew it, the beautiful genre had seemingly retreated to the deepest underground.
Influenced by genres like noise rock, garage rock, psychedelia, post-punk, etc. as well as bands like Cocteau Twins, and The Jesus and Mary Chain, shoegaze set out to create ethereal, and dreamlike atmospheres by combining soft and tranquil vocals with an overwhelming wall of sound made up of effects pedals, reverb, distortion and feedback. The Shoegaze scene was spearheaded by bands like My Bloody Valentine with their masterpiece Loveless (1991), Slowdive with Souvlaki (1993), and Ride with Nowhere (1990) and contained other notable bands like Lush, Swervedriver, Chapterhouse, Pale Saints, and Drop Nineteens who would release breathtakingly beautiful albums throughout the 90s.
Albeit an oftentime dreary, melancholic, and depressing genre, there was a sublime beauty to be found in the wall of sound. One could get lost in soothing dreamlike textual environments created by these brilliant artists. One could retreat from the world and get lost in the symphony of sound. Slowdive’s Neil Halstead notes in Pitchforks documentary on Souvlaki that there is something essentially youthful about shoegaze as a genre. Shoegaze is a genre created by angsty teens, and is filled with a certain youthful melancholia. Despite the older bands like Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine making comebacks (as well as some of the proto-shoegaze bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain), there is still something that only the young can seemingly produce with shoegaze’s distinct sound.
As the famed literary critic Fredric Jameson proclaims in his masterpiece of criticism The Political Unconscious: “Always Historicize.” One must always understand the social, political, economic, and cultural structures existing and at play during the production and reception of a work. You cannot divorce a work from history; criticism must be grounded in historicity. The historical context is immensely important for understanding shoegaze. The cold war had ended, capitalism had prevailed, Margaret Thatcher’s haunting exclamation of there being “no alternative” has seemingly rung true. The world has been enamoured in capitalist realism as many have accepted Fukuyama’s end of history thesis; the punk musicians screaming “no future” have seemed to have predicted accurately. At the time the UK just got out of Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution. Neoliberalism entailed mass privatization and deregulation, the stripping away of welfare and social safety nets, and massive increases of wealth for the elites and poverty and unemployment for the lower classes. This era was also characterised by the massive concentration of wealth within tech companies that accompanied the massive increase in technological advancement. The rise of shoegaze (as well as grunge) coincided with the fall of the USSR in 1991 and these are necessarily related phenomena
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer analyzed what they would call the culture industry, referring to the mass commodification and standardization of art. Art was produced not to be artistic or have merit, but rather, to produce as much profit as possible. Art became a commodity bought and sold on the market. At this time in the UK music scene the culture industry was dominant: the once radical punk was tame, the once underground metal had achieved arena filling commercial status, popular music became boring. For Horkheimer and Adorno, culture was plagued by an overwhelming sameness, and this was observable in mainstream music.
Shoegaze on the other hand was a rebellion. A rebellion against the sameness of culture, it was a manifestation of teenage angst at the time. There is something to be said about the way in which moody, depressed, angsty teens used advancing music technology as a response to the alienation and advanced capitalism. While shoegaze was seemingly never a political genre with apolitical lyrics, nothing is ever apolitical. More than just the need for historicizing, there is the need to look at the “unconscious” of a cultural text. Jameson argues that to truly understand a text, one must analyze the way in which the form itself is shaped by the unconscious internalization of political developments. Every cultural artifact has an ideological unconscious to it. Shoegaze was never apolitical, for it never could have been apolitical. For the Neo-Marxist thinker like Jameson, the unconscious of a text always has a lot to say about class conflict and capitalist social relations. Shoegaze was forever wrapped up in the depression and alienation of late capitalism. The shoegaze sound was a refuge from the numbness of the conservative capitalist rule.
But why shoegaze? What separates the genre from all of the other genres created by moody depressed teens? Surely it cannot be more angsty than the incessant whining of Morrissey’s vocals on a Smiths track. Shoegaze represents a break from the traditional conception of marketable music. Shoegaze’s drowned out androgynous vocals mixed with loud walls of sound and fuzz was distinctly different from anything to exist in mainstream music. The very form itself was a rebellion against the culture industry. The shoegaze sound is the “imagined future” of popular music. Where grunge was a retreat into nihilism, shoegaze on the other hand was a retreat into fantasy. The overwhelming amount of sound and creation of a sensual environment to disappear into is a re-emergence of the utopian as a socio-political concept.
While shoegaze had seem to dry out (not that it ever went away, wonderful bands produced wonderful records in the underground) and new genres seemed to arise (grunge coincided with shoegaze and can be seen as the rebellion against the music industry or slowcore could be seen as the continuation of capitalist melancholia) there has been a recent revival. My Bloody Valentine released M B V in 2013, Slowdive released a self-titled record in 2017 and Rachel Goswell has posted about how they are working on another album. Important bands to the scene like Swervedriver, Lush, Ride, and The Jesus and Mary Chain reunited, released eps, and toured. But more than just the old guard of the genre making a return, new bands came along with brilliant records. Beach House (occupying shoegaze’s even more ethereal cousin dream pop) would release beautiful records like Teen Dream (2010), Bloom (2012), and Depression Cherry (2015.) Bands like Ringo Deathstarr have become a staple on the scene. New genres arose like blackgaze (combination of black metal and shoegaze) spearheaded by bands like Deafhaven and Alcest. Despite still being relatively niche, it’s undeniable that shoegaze and it’s related genres have made a massive comeback around the world.
But the question then remains why? Simply, the conditions of capitalism in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis have worsened. Capitalist alienation is high, rates of depression and anxiety (which are very much political) are rising, we live in gilded age rates of inequality, an entire generation has lived their entire lives at war, political change seems impossible, and there is the oncoming insurmountable climate crisis. The dominance of nostalgia and the cultural inability to create the new combined with the return of the depressive conditions that once made the genre so prominent returning set up the revival. The return of shoegaze and grunge to the forefront of alternative music in the early 2010s is a reflection of that state of affairs repeating. That is, a global crisis of capital; culture cycles in roughly twenty year periods, and generally we see a financial collapse every twenty years. More than just that, the revival of the genre is another case of the recycling of dead forms, an essential characteristic of postmodernity. Ironically, a genre about the imagined future within music is resurrected from the dead because of the inability to imagine the future. Just as cyberpunk was a radical imagination of the future, so was shoegaze, but, just like our still going obsession with cyberpunk, our conception of the future is stuck in the past. While it is perfectly acceptable to enjoy the works of a truly wonderful genre, it is of the utmost importance to understand the politics deeply embedded in the form itself, and the consequences of these political developments.
Not done reading this one yet, but I wanted to get this of my chest before I fall asleep.
1 I really wanted to point out, as with all genres seemingly, I don't think it died in Japan. Sonically anyways. Ling Tosite Sigure has defiantly be called a shoegaze band before, and I kinda think some of Hitorie's discography and maybe Geek Sleep Sheep (mostly Feedback of of Candy) have shoegaze elements.
2 It's super serendipitous that you brought up shoegaze and grunge and that I'm reading this now, mostly because shoegaze and grunge are the new names for the FLCL sequels that Adult Swim green-lit, especially so considering FLCL is perpetually steeped in the miasma of 90's Japanese nostalgia, coming of age, and garage rock from the pillows.
ok