Issue 4, Article 1
In 1921 jazz emerged as the newest and most vibrant genre of popular music for America's urban youth, and the music critics had already begun to announce its death. Never mind that the remainder of the twenties became known as "the Jazz Age," owing largely to the immense popularity of jazz during that time and the music's functionary role as the soundtrack to the wild escapades of the period. Never mind the fact that to call everything after 1921 anachronistic or "un-jazz" would exclude from consideration some of the most widely acclaimed achievements within the genre, such as the work of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, or John Coltrane. When each of these innovators came forth, there were plenty of critics willing to denounce them as the opposite of "jazz." No, in 1921 jazz died, and those critics were probably right to recognize that, even if they might have been a little premature. Jazz as they had known it until 1921 was a high-energy blues-influenced form of dance music, and many things which were later called jazz did not necessarily stick to the genre cues or aesthetic guidelines of the early Dixieland jazz to which the critics referred.
It could also be argued, and has been, that rock and roll died when Elvis went to war, or when any of a number of the early rock dignitaries left the scene. And of course, to argue that would be to exclude many great achievements in rock‚Jimi Hendrix, the Who and much of the Beatles' most acclaimed work. In fact, our definition of rock, and the wailing and crunching guitars we associate with it, would not have been included as part of what rock and roll was about.
But these early genre pallbearers were of course dissenting voices, subject to either stubbornness or an urge to remain fashionable by being ahead of the crowd. By and large, the crowd didn't care, went on dancing, and probably trampled the critics in the process of charging the stage or record store.
So we come to 1998. It's approaching a half-century since the ostensible birth of rock and roll. And really, almost anyone you talk to on the street who pays attention to music (and doesn't have a stubborn or nostalgic viewpoint) will admit to you that we are probably past the glory days of rock. A few years ago Rolling Stone, that mammoth purveyor of rock culture, did their duty and devoted an entire issue to rock stars defending their ideology and denying their genre's death. "Rock is still alive! It'll never die," they defiantly shouted in unison.
Boy, if that isn't a sign that rock is on its last legs and about to topple over, I don't know what is. When you can't even find any fans to defend your music, and the musicians have to be asked to do it with articles instead of albums, you're screwed.
So the music industry freaked out. They had basically been making pop for a while and calling it rock in the eighties, and then they gave rock another try with grunge, and, well, Kurt shot himself and Vedder decided he didn't waannna be a rock star, after all. No new talent surfaced that didn't sound like the previous batch, and so now, as a compensatory measure, we have seen the re-embrace of "pop." A bad word for such a long time, pop was like the sort of embarrassment that you know goes on, but don't acknowledge. Then "pop" re-entered our vocabulary as a viable musical term. A host of indie bands began calling themselves pop instead of whatever the hell else they might have been called, and five person boy bands and Spice Girls flooded the market. God save us.
There's another edge to this sword, of course. Some independently signed bands that had caught on to the possibilities of electronic music and had been quickly schooled in the possibilities of jazz and other "dead" musics began experimenting. The critics identified the movement, and called it "post-rock." Some key names include Tortoise, Isotope 217, The Sea and The Cake, Ui, Oval, Mouse on Mars, and Trans Am. Basically, most post-rock attention and activity has been centered around Chicago-based label Thrill Jockey, and there is a tendency among reviewers and critics to figure that anything produced by the label could feasibly be called post-rock. However, some groups known widely for more than their post-rock-ness have nonetheless been included within the scope of post-rock, such as Stereolab and Spiritualized.
So what is post-rock, anyways? The paradox of creating such a label and listing bands within it is that almost inevitably, the groups involved often seem not to have much in common with each other in terms of their sound. Some share a general principle of using live instruments as the basic tools for making their music and then applying the studio technologies of hard disk recording and dub-reggae influenced effects to manipulate their sounds and eventually come out with something which sounds otherworldly, yet sublime.
Chicago's Tortoise and New York's Ui share this technique, and their original incarnations' instrumentation was also the same, consisting solely of bass and drums. Both groups have since added much additional instrumentation, Tortoise placing emphasis on shimmering vibraphones, guitars, and horns ornately positioned in counterpoint to one another. The post-rock attitude towards instrumentation seems to be one of focus on the sound to be created, not on the genre cues associated with such an instrument. Synths are of course not out of the question, but neither are they necessary to the music. For example, on "Swung From the Gutters", from Tortoise's TNT, vibraphones played in drumroll style, heavily reverbed, and panned across the listener's range, have the same cumulative effect as would spooky synth pads in a hard jungle track.
Although Ui and Tortoise share some elements of technique, their sounds are very different. Where Tortoise opt for complex, rich, contrapuntal arrangements that segue into each other, Ui tend to create sparse, atonal, and percussive pieces. All in all, Ui might be somewhat more "punk rock," than Tortoise, though neither band has lyrics, and both have members hailing from the punk tradition. In fact, the member demography of these groups has more to do with their sound than much else. Tortoise includes alums of countless prominent indie bands, as well as veterans of Chicago's jazz scene (Braxton fans will be interested to know that one Tortoise member, Jeff Parker, is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). John McEntire studied experimental electronic music, engineering and production techniques at Oberlin, and is an occasional DJ. Tortoise's enveloping and mesmerizing sound seems to come not from a tendency towards abstract pontificating, but from the assemblage of diverse musicians with similarly experimental and creative attitudes towards music.
But similarities between "post-rock" groups start to break down eventually. For example, Mouse on Mars is an unusually organic, quirky, and song-form-based techno group, while Oval construct amazing, fragile ambient beatless soundscapes out of skipping CDs. Of course, parts of Mouse on Mars' sound shares some of Tortoise's more electronic components. Also, parts of Tortoise's groundbreaking "Djed," off Millions Now Living Will Never Die, sound crisply ambient and ethereal in much the same way an Oval track would. And Isotope 217's enjoyable jazz meets dub flavor has elements in common with Tortoise and, to a lesser degree, Ui. Overall, however, "post-rock" is at its clearest not a defined sound, but an attitude towards sound.
Basically, after a certain point, the idea of a "post-rock" label is pathetic, almost as much of a fiasco as that whole "alternative music" thing. These bands operate not by establishing a new set of genre cues, but by firing off so many genre cues at one time as to force the listener to pay attention to the music purely for its own sake, its own unique sound. And if the general idea behind post-rock is that we are beyond rock and roll and the sign of this is experimentation with electronics and instrumentation, then Hendrix, the Beatles and the Who were as post-rock as they get. Of course, to say that would be preposterous. So, if the "post-rock" fuss re-teaches us anything, it should be that listening to music as within a genre is a very limited way of understanding it, and all in all, you're probably better off disregarding the critics (including the author of this article, I suppose) and checking out the music itself (which is sublime, especially in the case of Tortoise's TNT, Mouse on Mars' Autoditacker, Isotope 217's the Unstable Molecule, and Oval's Dok. Available at your local record emporium.)