a grammar

This old track isn’t a very good example of what shoegazer bands are like — not unless you turn it up really, really loud — but it’s a good route to talking about something that’s been on my mind. The world of blurred-out, noise-cloaked, shoegazing indie rock is something I’ve always been partial to. These days it feels more and more like a style I mostly enjoyed Back Then, but I’m still a sucker for dashes of it. So: what’s the point of it, what’s the appeal?

As far as I can tell, it has something to do with mixed feelings. The sounds themselves are mixed up, really — that’s how some bands in this area can seem aggressive and sleepy-narcotized at the same time. (See: My Bloody Valentine.) The core image of a shoegazer, at least guitar-wise, is of someone making a huge, fuzzy, relentless sound while standing mostly still and staring glumly down. In other words, the musician doesn’t have to project personal size or power, doesn’t have to stomp around making grand moves, doesn’t have to control or master everything. (A lot of singers in this world trend toward the meek, pretty, innocent, or frail.) The musician’s being bathed in the same wash of sound as you, really, which sets up an interesting contrast: this is a style of music that’s both passive and active, full of big head-scrubbing noises but also maybe a little helpless in the face of them.

That’s my idea, anyway, and for me it does a decent job of explaining a lot of the emotional states that feel really particular to this kind of music.* It explains these specific varieties of bitterness and frustration you can get out of them — one where someone makes confused sheets of noise with the instrument, getting all kind of catharsis out of that buzz … without trying to make that catharsis about personal power. On the other end of the spectrum, it explains this particular vision of beauty and joy — songs where the guitars are this grand, overwhelming rush that the singers can barely penetrate, where everything’s breathless and relentless and people are very small within it. It explains why some of this music is really good at capturing shades of confusion, resignation, exhaustion, or being overwhelmed. It’s sort of the opposite of someone like Karen O saying she’s “bigger than the sound” — in this world the sound’s always bigger. It wants to be this vast environment that you and the singer’s voice can both wander around in.

The sound on this particular track is relatively soft and contained, of course. The song’s by the Boo Radleys and it’s called “Does This Hurt?” It’s from 1992. But it seems relevant because its emotions feel infinitely mixed. There’s this kind of exploding joy to it — music racing upward and upward, all heart-bursting — but also an ache and confusion in there, like the joy is too much, overwhelming and maybe a little sad. There are shades of pleading and longing. And the lyrics are clearly pretty angry with this Caroline, but they’re delivered in a relieved, sighing way — as if he’s just now come to peace with whatever’s going on. I liked this one a lot when I was younger.

* The fact that some of these states are passive, resigned, or introspective — hell, sometimes even solipsistic — isn’t a big problem for me; those are meaningful states too, after all, and they’re a natural match for hazy headphone listening.