These shoes were made for gazing
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.
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