My friend PJ is publishing an article for an Italian music magazine later this year; the article will feature interviews with musicians involved in the “shoegazing” movement of the early 1990s. He asked me to put together the magazine’s supplemental web content: an outline of the movement for those who, uh, missed it. Here’s a first draft—it’ll be revised and broken into several pages, so don’t freak out about the length. I’m guessing it’ll be edited to be more bullety as well.

EDIT: Hopefully, there will also be a chart, since all of these different relationships and influences are hard to keep track of.

 
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Learn more

If you’d like to know more about shoegazing, start with the Wikipedia article, which provides a great overview. We’ll take a different approach on this site, using audio and video to give you a “sonic understanding” of the movement.

By the way, we’re using the word movement instead of genre, because “shoegazing” is probably best described as a set of musical characteristics and influences that impacted a few different bands and scenes in different ways during the early ’90s. In other words, you’ll find that there were hardly any bands that fit the traditional definition of shoegazing for more than a few songs on an album or two.

The most we can say is that, in the first half of the ’90s, dozens of UK bands, of which many were associated with the Creation label, briefly experimented with similar sounds.

First, let’s get to know those sounds with the single that best fits the traditional definition of shoegazing:

 
Slowdive, “Alison” (Souvlaki, 1993)

There are a few things to notice here: the use of layered, ambient guitar distortion effects, the prominence of keyboards, the laconic male and female vocals (but also a strong presence of overall melody in the song), and the impressionistic nature of the lyrics. These are the general “rules” of shoegazer music, though most of the music bent at least one of the rules.

The lyrics and vocals are perhaps the best clue to the personality of the movement. Vocals were often purposely buried under the other layers of melody. Many of the bands seemed to use them as just another ambient/rhythmic instrument—consequently lyrical meaning was relatively unimportant. For some bands, the lyrics were nonsensical phrases selected simply because of the way they sounded, and were never even officially transcribed. Lyrics websites are noticeably at a loss in their transcriptions of shoegazer lyrics.

Some shoegazers’ personalities fit this style well: the band members also seemed to wish to fade into the background behind their music. Most shoegazers were noticeably unsuitable for rock stardom, shying away from interviews and rarely looking out at the audience during concerts… as you might guess, this is where the term shoegazer came from.

 

The core of the sound

A “canon” of shoegazing might look something like this (note the similarities to the Wikipedia “shoegazing timeline”):

• My Bloody Valentine, Isn’t Anything, 1988
• Lush, Gala EP, 1990
• Ride, Nowhere, 1990
• My Bloody Valentine, Loveless, 1991
• Slowdive, Just for a Day, 1991
• Catherine Wheel, Ferment, 1992
• Lush, Spooky, 1992
• Chapterhouse, Whirlpool, 1992
• Curve, Doppelgänger, 1992
• Slowdive, Souvlaki, 1993

As mentioned earlier, Slowdive are perhaps the best example of a shoegazer band that followed all the “rules.” Chapterhouse’s sound is probably the closest to theirs (“Pearl,” Whirlpool, 1992), though with more pop elements. Meanwhile, Lush, perhaps the best-known shoegazer band of all, featured a softer sound:

 
Lush, “Sweetness and Light” (single, later released in Gala, 1990)

This “softer” variant of shoegazing was directly influenced by the Cocteau Twins, a band active in the ’80s and ’90s, as well as the larger “dreampop” movement.

A alt-rock-influenced facet of the shoegazer movement also existed, and it was the only male-dominated one. Ride’s early career is the best example. Though they’re very different to Lush, perhaps you’ll agree that both share things in common with Slowdive.

 
Ride, “Unfamiliar” (Today Forever EP, 1991)

The alt-rock variant of shoegazing was perhaps the most visible one, due to its ties to the more famous rock movements of the era. For example, Catherine Wheel ( “I Want to Touch You,” Ferment, 1992) frequently toured with The Smashing Pumpkins. The Boo Radleys (“Lazarus,” single, 1992) alternated between shoegazing and Britpop, and had close ties with bands from both scenes. Swervedriver (“Rave Down,” Raise, 1991) had a similar connection with grunge. Even Ride employed popular modern rock directors for their videos, (such as Kevin Kerslake for “Leave Them All Behind,” Going Blank Again, 1992).

Another notable sound from the era is that of dance-pop group Curve, which put their own spin on shoegazing:

 
Curve, “Horror Head,” (Doppelgänger, 1992)

Curve’s sound was more or less unique, though it became influential to post-shoegazer rock (as explained later in this article).

 

Origins of shoegazing

If you’ve clicked on the links and videos above, you’ve got a pretty good idea of the general sound of shoegazing, and how different bands adopted and changed it. Now let’s examine more deeply where that sound came from.

1960s art-rock. Though each of the main elements of shoegazer music were also present in the protopunk and psychedelia of the late ’60s and early ’70s, many of those bands were even more obscure than shoegazer bands. Not surprisingly, the influence on shoegazer music most often cited by journalists is one of the best known: Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.

Post-punk. Reed’s influences (in particular, his vocal stylings and use of experimental guitar effects) were channeled into the shoegazer era by ’80s post-punk bands such as Hüsker Dü, Mission of Burma, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Chameleons… and perhaps most importantly, the Scottish band The Jesus and Mary Chain.

The Reid brothers of JAMC are seen as both godfathers and honorary members of the shoegazer movement. Their music fused post-punk and noise rock sounds (note the highly distorted guitar noise of “You Trip Me Up,” Psychocandy, 1985) with the Velvets’ delivery. In the famous track below, you can hear the two influences working together:

 
The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Just Like Honey,” (Psychocandy, 1985)

This video is also important because it sets a visual precedent for the “shoegazer” stage presence—specifically, the near motionlessness of the band, as well as a seeming disregard for the “audience” (in this case, the camera). In fact, JAMC were known for being intentionally rude at their concerts; they often played with their back to the audience and limited their shows to four or five songs (occasionally inciting riots by doing so). Shoegazer bands would go on to adopt a less hostile version of this disaffected style.

Irish band My Bloody Valentine were equally influential. In fact, MBV were arguably the only band to successfully bridge the post-punk and shoegazer movements. Their 1988 debut Isn’t Anything ( “Feed Me with Your Kiss,” Isn’t Anything, 1988) was by some definitions the first shoegazer album—more accurately, it was the first post-punk album to feature prominent female vocals and keyboards (revealing subtle influences of ambient artists such as Brian Eno). And like many post-punk and shoegazer albums, it utilized multiple layers of guitar distorted almost beyond the point of recognizability.

But it was MBV’s second album, the ambitious Loveless, that galvanized the shoegazer movement. Frontman Kevin Shields spent three grueling years attempting to outdo his first album, employing over a dozen engineers and bankrupting both himself and the Creation record label. The finished product was so dense and unconventional that it barely charted and didn’t come close to covering its costs. Yet many publications rank this unknown album as the either the best rock album of the 1990s, or the second-best behind Radiohead’s OK Computer. So we’ll examine it closely here.

 
My Bloody Valentine, “Only Shallow” (Loveless, 1991)

This opening track is simultaneously obscure post-rock and pop—discernible “hooks” seemingly stitched together from layers of noise. The rest of the album is even harder to grasp. The lead guitar of “To Here Knows When” operates on its own harmonic logic over the top of an obscured Cocteau Twins-like vocal track. And the concluding track “Soon” somehow managed to chart as a pop single (according to the Wikipedia article on Loveless, Eno described “Soon” as “the vaguest music ever to have been a hit”).

Loveless was a dark pop album, as were the shoegazer albums that followed it. Because Loveless is the most difficult shoegazer work, it’s a good one to get to know—if you “get” it, the rest of the movement will be relatively easy to understand.

Indirect influences. Other movements also impacted the early history of shoegazing. For example, the goth subset of post-punk (exemplified by this clip from Siouxsie and the Banshees) could be seen as one of the roots of the shoegazer sound. Cranes were one of the few bands to be labeled as both goths and shoegazers.

The Madchester scene also made its mark—in particular The Charlatans, The Inspiral Carpets and especially The Stone Roses experimented with sounds that could be seen as shoegazer prototypes. And finally, British indie band The House of Love shouldn’t be overlooked as an early template for Ride and Catherine Wheel.

 

Contemporaries

A few early-’90s pop acts were mildly influenced by shoegazing—for example, The Cranberries and The Lemonheads. Mazzy Star and The Cowboy Junkies are sometimes connected to the shoegazing sound as well, but might actually have been more directly influenced by the Velvet Underground.

Mid-90s Britpop was more strongly influenced, and was quick to acknowledge its admiration for shoegazer bands. Bands such as Oasis and The Verve admittedly borrowed guitar riffs from the movement (note the relationships among Oasis’ “Live Forever,” The Verve’s “Lucky Man”, and Catherine Wheel’s “Black Metallic”) and even stole some of their personnel (former Ride guitarist Andy Bell left the band to join Oasis). Suede also incorporated shoegazer elements into their Madchester-influenced sound.

 

After shoegazing

But it should be noted that, overall, the impact of shoegazing was relatively small. Nearby bands picked up a few chords here, a lyric or two there, and a guitar effect somewhere else, but weren’t necessarily transformed. When shoegazing died out in the mid-1990s, it seemed to leave few traces.

Even the shoegazing bands that outlived the movement failed to retain its sound. Lush ended their career with a Britpop album; Catherine Wheel’s Rob Dickinson reworked post-punk, Pink Floyd and Talk Talk to create his own pop sound; Curve took a sharp turn into techno- and industrial-influenced pop, arguably setting the stage for Garbage and The Cardigans in the process; and finally, Slowdive were reincarnated as indie folk band Mojave 3. Early pioneers such as the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields remain on the scene, but have produced no new shoegazer music.

Why was the movement seemingly so obscure and so easily forgotten? Some answer this question by noting the dominance of grunge in the early 1990s; it’s tempting to say that shoegazing competed with grunge and lost. However, Britpop was a more likely competitor (Blur’s Damon Albarn famously declared war on grunge in the mid-’90s); shoegazer bands simply didn’t have the same aspirations toward fame and were never remotely in the same league as grunge, commercially speaking. Shoegazing is more accurately portrayed as an extension of the post-punk movement, and its album sales reflected such origins.

Descendants. Besides, it should also be noted that, after a decade or so of near invisibility, the shoegazing aesthetic lives on. “Post-rock” bands such as Sigur Rós, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Mogwai play a minimalistic version of post-punk with keyboards and muted vocals—an alternate evolution of the shoegazer formula. And there’s even a loose, mostly unrelated assortment of musicians that have been labeled “nu-gazer“: for example, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (direct descendants of the Jesus and Mary Chain), The Dandy Warhols and one of the most promising brand new bands, Serena-Maneesh:

 
Serena-Maneesh, “Drain Cosmetics” (Serena-Maneesh, 2005)

However, “nu-gazer” is even less functional than “shoegazer” as a musical term. Like shoegazer bands, Serena-Maneesh and BRMC have much more to do with their influences than with each other, and constitute a musical genre only in the creative imaginations of music journalists.

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Interestingly, shoegazing’s broadest exposure and greatest commercial success took place nearly a decade after its demise. For her film Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola entrusted soundtrack duties to My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields. Shields remained loyal to his roots, including several old-school shoegazer tracks; for her part, Coppola featured many of them in prominent scenes in the film. Perhaps most memorable is the final segment of the movie, set to JAMC’s “Just Like Honey.”