While unpacking the fullness of that revelation falls on us all in daily life, here let us simply think positively of one of the forebears of shoegaze, AR Kane. This is a simple and hard fact we are confronted with again and again in the colonized world, with their labor often erased or else just obscured for decades. Kane – “honeysuckleswallow” (1989)īlack people have invented a great deal, if not most, of the art we love. Opener “Take Me to the Other Side” is one of the unusual songs where these wildly different styles combine, forming something tighter and more forceful than pure psychedelia but woozier than proto-punk-not to mention, one of the rare Spacemen 3 tunes where you don’t have to be on drugs to get the desired effect. Scattered throughout the interstellar clouds of ambient guitars, though, are noisy squalls indebted to bands such as the Stooges and MC5. Recorded when founders Peter Kember and Jason Pierce were still a functioning partnership (the two ceased writing songs together shortly afterward), The Perfect Prescription feels light-years away from the inevitable comedown: songs regularly stretch past the five-minute mark, and every strummed chord seems to ring out into infinity. Glass Spacemen 3 – “Take Me to the Other Side” (1987)Īmong a certain subset of hallucinogen-taking hipsters, the debate as to whether The Perfect Prescription or Playing with Fire is the superior Spacemen 3 album is as heated as those between Radiohead’s OK Computer and Kid A, or Weezer’s Blue Album and Pinkerton. As a result, the marriage of guitar noise and pop songwriting has become a new abbreviation for feeling out of focus but still visible. Incomplete and ambiguous, much like an American navigating Japan with a limited understanding of the native tone. “Just Like Honey” aspires to be sweet, and to some extent it is, but it’s ’60s counterculture and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand filtered through a pre-grunge prism. It’s Tokyo, and this film has been set to music. But as soon as those drums arrive, deliberately stolen from the beginning of The Ronettes’ 1963 evergreen declaration “Be My Baby,” while Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanson are sorting their low-key, light-weight May-(very) December romance, we’re thrown into a soundscape that sums up being a bit off in a foreign land and recognizing others who suffer from the same malady. (Sorry.) In 1985, at the time of its release, U2, Run-DMC, Prince and The Police were clogging up my Big 80’s cassette mix. I was one of the millions of people who had no idea “Just Like Honey” existed until it appeared at the end of Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation. So in our latest genre history, we offer a list of 45 of the best shoegaze songs, from the early roots creating the foundation of the sound to the pioneers, progenitors, torch-bearers and descendants.īlanco y Negro The Jesus and Mary Chain – “Just Like Honey” (1985) Regardless, it’s hard to deny just how amazing it all sounds. Over the past decade or so, the influence of shoegaze has been more prevalent than arguably at any time since its arrival in the late ’80s and early ’90s-though not necessarily everyone is excited about that. As we survey the history of shoegaze as a whole, we trace how we got here, from rough sketches more than 50 years ago to contemporary updates that keep pushing it forward. And the seeds of its effects driven wall of guitars were planted not just in the post-punk era, but in the stranger corners of glam rock, the experimental nature of krautrock, and the Velvet Underground’s embrace of noise. Slowdive’s Neil Halstead cites The Cure as an influence, not only in sound but in how Robert Smith maintained picture of stoic restraint onstage. Kane and My Bloody Valentine, though its seeds were planted decades earlier. Shoegaze took off in earnest in the late ’80s, with British bands such as A.R. And so it is with shoegaze, one of the most fruitful and inspired sectors of indie music in the past 40 years, awash in effects, dense layers of guitars, and an eye ever focused on the pedalboard. But the way that these things always go-choose your favorite absurdly named genre here-is eventual acceptance and celebration of someone’s once-sarcastic critique. And Lush’s Miki Berenyi called “shoegaze” a “slag-off” term, implying a kind of inertia on the part of the artist. In the early ’90s, British magazine Sounds published a review of a Moose live show, in which the term “shoegaze” was used to describe the manner in which singer Russell Yates had kept his eyes fixed on floor the whole time-supposedly because of lyric sheets he’d placed in front of him. It sounds almost like a joke, and in a sense it was.
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