If the fact that the projected release date for a deluxe album reissue has evidently dropped down to six months after the record was initially released is any indication, our threshold for nostalgia appears to be getting smaller every day. I guess the artists themselves may be the first to admit that this is little more than a cash-grab opportunity, considering there’s less and less cash to grab the first time around with every passing year as new and unwelcome corporate institutions weasel their way into an industry that’s very quickly pushing its creators out—but they’re also entirely warranted in pulling the trigger on this type of press spectacle so quickly when you think about how deeply buried that release becomes in an unending avalanche of high-profile music from their peers even a month later.
On the editorial side of things, the consensus seems to be that a decade is a reasonable amount of time before we can speak of a record again after its release date, allowing for a large enough shift in the zeitgeist that we can reassess the project’s merits from a fresh point of view. But what about entire genres? When is it time to dust off descriptors that haven’t found their way back into the shared influence pool through TikTok, Netflix music syncs, or the deus ex machina of the right person finding the right demo recording at the right thrift store at the right moment? When can we expect Numero Group to release a box set compiling the movement’s greatest hits?
Currently, it seems like the fairly nebulous tag “blog rock” is being used quite a bit, though it feels like less of a genre and more of a cultural moment fueled by remembering-some-guys nostalgia (as a millennial myself, recalling the name “Bishop Allen” for the first time in at least a decade recently caused me to fall gently onto my fainting couch). Similarly, “indie sleaze,” as far as I can tell, is little more than a revisionist history of this era by a generation too young to know that Glee ever covered that Ed Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros song—a revisionist history in which we were all too busy having sex to even know what Glee was, I suppose.
When I think of subgenres that define the early-’10s, many of them can only be stumbled upon in 2023 by finding a Tumblr account that hasn’t seen activity since the height of seapunk.
But what I’m talking about is genre genre—a descriptor that sounds like something rather than a vague term that loses meaning almost immediately after it’s been coined (it seems you can record stadium-filling guitar riffs in your bedroom these days, so I’m convinced the term “bedroom pop” only continues to exist for the financial benefit of Spotify at this point). When I think of subgenres that define the early-’10s, many of them can only be stumbled upon in 2023 by finding a Tumblr account that hasn’t seen activity since the height of seapunk—which, like witch house, likely faded from memory because no one could think of a cooler name for it. Maybe seapunk will flow back to shore like krautrock in another decade or so.
Arguably the worst offender from this period was “shitgaze”: a rough take on shoegaze where rather than 90 percent of the track being swallowed up by dense reverb, that percentage was instead reserved for ear-splitting lo-fi noise, tape hiss, and, occasionally, campy vocals shouting things like “welcome to hell, puker corpse!” I guess that sentence alone offers a reasonable enough explanation as to how this subgenre failed to find legs in the 2010s, but there’s still the part of me that looks back on my high school years spent slowly working my way back through the Modest Mouse discography and having the revelation that Sad Sappy Sucker isn’t actually all that bad. Or, similarly, that The Thermals peaked with More Parts Per Million. You know what? I think the biggest pro-shitgaze catalyst for me was Hot Hot Heat. I’m sure someone out there relates to at least one of these statements.
Aside from the fact that it sounds like a complete accident, what sets shitgaze apart from the other genres of this era is that it never quite achieved any degree of legitimacy. When you google the term, the top results are mostly just links to user activity on sites like Reddit and Rate Your Music, as well a prominently listed Urban Dictionary definition published in 2010 (“That band sounded so rough, I couldn't even tell when they changed chords. So shitgaze!”). Beyond that, you’ll find the Wikipedia page for the band Psychedelic Horseshit, who are credited with coining the term they applied to their own music as well as to other figures in the local Columbus, Ohio scene such as Times New Viking. Witch house, on the other hand, has its own Wikipedia page, not to mention countless generic hours-long mixes on YouTube—chilling lo-fi beats to cast spells to.
Aside from the fact that it sounds like a complete accident, what sets shitgaze apart from the other genres of this era is that it never quite achieved any degree of legitimacy.
It wasn’t long afterward that the West Coast garage rock scene commandeered the term, with Sic Alps (who claim Ty Segall as an alumni), The Hospitals (for whom John Dwyer played guitar), The Intelligence, Gang Wizard, and countless other acts largely proving to be brief stepping stones for musicians who later found fame in other pockets of rock music (remember those grating early Wavves albums your more-online-than-you friends subjected you to? Shitgaze, baby!). Personally my interest in the genre was recently piqued again when I got into a handful of albums by Eat Skull (who shared members with The Hospitals and The Intelligence), Meth Teeth (whose vocalist now plays bass in Soft Kill), and The Bitters (comprised of Queen of Swords’ Aerin Fogel and Fucked Up’s Ben Cook, a.k.a. Young Guv). I’ve also been enjoying the gothic flavors which seem to have a longer shelf life: check out Grave Babies and Sealings.
It may be hard to make the case that shitgaze achieved anything that noise-rock, hardcore, or even metal hadn’t proven before—but noise-rock, hardcore, and metal are currently thriving. When was the last time you heard anything that sounded even remotely as deliberately headache-inducing as Rip It Off? As wanna-hear-the-most-annoying-sound-in-the-world as Magic Flowers Droned? While those aforementioned genres are subject to achieve crossover mainstream success once they’ve had their edges softened a bit, King of the Beach seemed to have signaled the death knell for a subgenre which, to be fair, would just be “rock” music if you softened its edges at all. Maybe it only adds to the appeal that shitgaze denotes a very specific era in music.
Psychedelic Horseshit
Which leads me to my point: I don’t want to sound all “Why is no one talking about this?” about a highly polarizing genre you can barely tolerate for more than 30 minutes at a time, but instead I want to draw attention to shitgaze as a pocket of music that seems to have fallen through the cracks between the MP3 era and our current streaming-dominated model. One of the other defining traits of this genre seems to be that none of its creators have bothered to upload their bygone bands’ discographies to Bandcamp, so all the MP3 files in my library have been purchased on Amazon (I wonder who that money went to…), since they’re literally not available to own any other way (I did buy Eat Skull’s III on vinyl through Woodsist, since it comes with an MP3 download—as far as I can tell the only way of securing that record digitally).
Sure, several of these albums are on Spotify at the moment, but I wouldn’t count on that being the case even a few years from now when our model for consuming music inevitably shifts (lord knows that company is out of ideas). While we may have to wait until the next anniversary divisible by five, a reverently un-remastered (de-mastered?) reissue of East General and Everything Went Wrong would be incredible (and I wasn’t kidding about that Numero comp). But the bigger issue to consider here is one having to do with the archiving of music—even music that requires you to check that your headphones are plugged in all the way. FL
