Nostalgia for the past is by no means a new thing. It isn’t just kids these days who believe they were born in the wrong generation, because culture has always been cyclical to a degree. The style of the 00s making a comeback with the “Y2K aesthetic” craze is no surprise at all. Many fashion scholars reference the idea of a 20 year cycle. The 50s heavily borrowed from the style of the 1930s, which borrowed in turn from the 1900s. Despite this, nostalgia today feels different somehow.
Walking into clothing stores is jarring, with the most chic decade changing from rack to rack. 60s style babydoll dresses hang right next to a bedazzled tank top right out of an early 2000s pop music video. Right next to that rack is a shelf of neatly folded sweaters with orange and brown stripes, which makes my mom cringe. “I haven’t seen that color combo since the 70s,” She says.
Last year I went to Pond’s concert in Asheville, the day after in a town over we told a barista and he asked if they are ‘like shoegaze’; I said yeah thinking ‘shoegaze’ was the band Slowdive.
A year later I’ve delved into shoegaze and most notably grunge gaze, a la Wisp opening at Slowdive, interviewing New York’s Glimmer, reddit acclaimed shoegaze No Joy and listening to California’s Midrift, Arizona’s Glixen and Connecticut’s Ovlov.
These genre evolutions from Rock, with its roots respectively in Blues, Country and Folk, reflect conversations between industrialization and balance with nature and distortions organic and synthetic as well as personal and collective struggles.
Speaking with Glimmer’s Jeff Moore, he mentions transitioning from Brooklyn and urban life to a more natural rural setting, how often a walk in the woods can help his creative process and reveal how the piece hes working on should be.
Similarly, Canada based No Joy’s Jasamine White-Gluz discusses inspiration for her new album ‘Bugland’ which explores feelings of exploration into natures chaotic and diverse systems, feeling like entering another world or land. Rooted in experimentation, it makes sense a band so genre bending and oozing would take notes from nature and its patterns having millennium to curate an expansive ecological playground.
Returning to its roots in Country and Folk, elaborations from Rock like Shoegaze and Grungegaze work to further develop the image of music genres as archival in the way they document and trace cultural contexts such as the plight of the working class.
“I was just a boy and they put me to workin’ right alongside the men. . . Every man would be hollerin’. . . You might call them the blues but they were just made up things.”
The echoes of hardship that reverberate through blues and its descendants are still present, even as these sounds evolve and shift into new forms. They pose the question post-commodification: who profits?
This idea of ‘culture vultures‘ in particular to the blues is presented in Sinners in its portrayal of Americana and the effect of whitewashing as seen with Elvis and other figureheads who profited from the craftsmanship of underrepresented and oppressed groups.
“It’s what happened to your fore parents and other people”. While I drove up to New Yorks Appalachia nestled in Hamden New York, fresh off a visit to my great aunt, I felt moved by the revealed relics of my ancestors moving through me.
When I find the tombstones of family names of mine and those I know alike in the cemetery down the street I feel larger and small, a bug, a giant, a blip, a monolith.
Jasamine White-Gluz of No Joy mentioned inspiration from fashion in our interview, this idea of futuristic ideas yet often reminiscent of natures codes and patterns, reflecting organic chemistry’s motto: nothing new under our sun.
"The Byrds on The Big T.N.T. Show, 1966." Wikimedia Commons and KRLA Beat, permission via Public Domain.
What Is Jangle Pop?
Jangle pop describes a sound characterized by bright “jangly” guitars. Bands created this sound by using single-coil pickups. Pickups on electric guitars convert string vibrations into electricity. Inside of the pickup are magnetic bars, wrapped in coils. Metal coils can convert vibrations into electricity even without a power source. The metal strings on guitars work as a second magnetic body, which moves over the magnetic bars and coils. When a magnet goes over the coil an electrical current flows through it.
There are two main ways to make pickups, single or double coils. Double coils reduce the amount of outside noise interference because each coil can cancel out any background humming done by the other. Single coils on the other hand do not have noise reduction. Single coil pickups offer a crisp and clean tone, which when paired with the use of minimal distortion on amps creates the jangly sound for which the genre is named. Some jangle pop acts also employed the use of 12-string guitars. 12-string guitars produce a cascading, shimmery sound. This sound is due to the fact that it is impossible to vibrate all of the strings simultaneously.
While influenced by pop and utilizing pop writing conventions, bands still usually had a DIY mentality, an amateur sound and cryptic lyrics.
CONTENT WARNING: This review, film and/or soundtrack contains themes of war, sexual expression, illicit drugs and racial inequality.
Musicals: some love them, some hate them. I can’t claim to be a big fan of musicals until we get to the specific category of old musicals. “Hair” would fall under this category.
“Hair” started as an off-Broadway musical in 1967 and moved to Broadway the following year. Later the musical was released on film in 1979 with the same title. This story is an anti-war drama with comedy sprinkled in and follows a good ole’ Oklahoma boy being shipped off to Vietnam as he spends his last couple days in New York City. There, he meets a group of four hippies: Berger, Jeannie, Hud and Woof. They turn everything upside down for him and change his perspective.
Fleetwood Mac "Rumors" album on record player. Image by Sophia Dutton-Rodkin
What does it mean to have a diverse musical palate? Does it mean liking many artists in one genre? Many genres but few artists? Many similar genres? A few wildly different ones? As someone who loves exploring different genres, I don’t think there is a “right” answer.
Everyone is allowed to like whatever they like. There is no right or wrong answer to the question: What is good music?
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” – Margaret Wolff Hungerford.
A less literal paraphrase might be along the lines of: “Good music is in the heart of the listener.” Everyone has different upbringings and experiences and tastes. There might be some music that is objectively bad but if someone likes it there has to be a reason behind it. Maybe they are noticing something others aren’t.
Having a diverse music taste is important. Not only is it important to help make connections with people and create relationships, but I believe it is important to an individual and make them unique. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry had the same three favorite artists and five favourite songs, there wouldn’t be much to talk about pretty quickly.
Having a diverse music taste is especially important for musicians. Many musicians tend to take what they love to listen to and incorporate it into their own work. This isn’t always an intentional thing either. Sometimes there is a natural instinct to have a certain style. I have been told repeatedly that my singing and songwriting style sounds like an artist I’ve never listened to before. On the other hand, a friend of mine is a very big grunge fan and has a voice that could easily be mistaken for Kurt Cobain.
Vinyl Records. Image provided by Unsplash, lincensed CC0 1.0 Universal.
I can’t speak for everyone but I tend to have moods where only a certain style, genre or song will scratch the itch in my head. As an example, I tend to really like alternative rock, indie, and grunge music but sometimes I just need to listen to Dutch or Russian rave music like Joost Klein (explicit content warning) or Lida (explicit content warning). Sometimes I need my bbno$ fix (explicit content warning). While Public Theatre might be one of my favorite alternative rock bands or Alice in Chains (explicit content warning) might be one of my favorite grunge bands, it is important to be able to have a variety.
In my own music, I find that I take aspects from different genres and toy around with them. Most of my songs tend to be in a typical grunge or alternative rock format with guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. But every so often, I like to toy around with synthesizer sounds, brass instruments, acoustic upright bass, and piano.
There is nothing wrong with liking what you like. There is no reason you shouldn’t listen to the same album over and over if it brings you joy. I just think that there is a whole world full of different sounds that can bring one just as much joy.
