I’m Jeanette. This was me, a
few years back, reading from my first book Seasons
They Change: The Story of Acid and Psychedelic Folk.
As you may make out from the
picture, Seasons was a whopping tome: it began with Shirley Collins and ended
with United Bible Studies. And on page 213, I wrote this:
In 1991, a
photograph of four youngish men submerged in the lake of a derelict Kentucky
quarry, with only their bemused faces visible, announced a new phase in the
American underground. It was the cover of Slint’s Spiderland, the album that began post-rock.
Why was I writing about Slint in a book on
acid and psychedelic folk music? Well…
The arresting
photograph on the front of Spiderland was
taken by an actor currently questioning his future. Will Oldham had gained
acclaim for his role as a young preacher in Matewan
(1987), but the years since had not been kind. He had come to realise that
not all roles would be so stimulating; that movie sets in general were not
supportive; and that he would struggle to gain creative fulfillment from
acting.
Will Oldham was hugely important to my Seasons purpose. There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You,
the Palace Brothers debut from 1993, was an uncompromising version of folk.
It was clearly punk- and hardcore-indebted (or, at least a record that couldn’t
have been made without their
influence) yet consumed with the brutality of the American religio-folkloric
tradition. It sounded modern, and ancient, all at once, with nothing backhanded
or ironic in its expression. Shit was real.
There
Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You featured Brian
McMahan, Todd Brashear and Britt Walford of Slint. As I was writing about
Oldham in Seasons They Change – which
was difficult, the man is supremely self-mythologising and inconsistent in interviews
– I began to think more about ‘post-rock’. What did the term even mean? Did it describe a sound, explain a
philosophy, or was it just something that journalists cooked up ‘to put a label
on us, man’? (© every band ever).
I tried to describe 'post-rock' in Seasons (rather clunkily on
reflection, as was my earlier blinkered assertion that Spiderland was some sort of 'beginning'):
Post-rock took
elements of previous genres and artists – the expansiveness of The Velvet
Underground circa White Light / White
Heat; My Bloody Valentine’s dream pop; the erratic post-punk of Scritti Politti
and Public Image Limited; Can’s Krautrock rhythms; the No Wave detachment of
Ut; the belly-fire of hardcore – but did not combine them in any recognisable
way. Instead, it sucked it all into that derelict quarry, stripping away
clichés and comfort, and left behind a brooding abstraction derived from rock
but absolutely aloof from it.
(I made sure PiL and Ut were mentioned,
because they have long been two of my absolute favourites.)
AMAZING.
AMAZING.
Anyway. Something about the way I struggled
to write about post-rock intrigued me. It meant either (a) I didn’t know
anything about it or (b) it was an ill-fitting term or (c) its very elusiveness
was a source of fascination to me. I can eliminate (a) – while I haven’t spent
the last fifteen years listening to Explosions In The Sky knock-offs, I do have a
good knowledge of post-rock dating back to the 1990s. (b), possibly: although (as
I shall perhaps explore in a later blog post) I think the term became more ill-fitting as time went on,
and I’m largely a supporter of its original intent. Thus, (c) seemed the most likely.
I found my post-Seasons period a
chaotic one, both creatively and personally. Eighteen months ago, when the
turmoil was at its very worst, it was post-rock that made sense to me. And I
think it was elusiveness that was the key factor. Often, the music gave you space but it would also suffocate you
with its very potential. As if you were atop a skyscraper, the tremendous city
vista below, while coping with thinning oxygen and aggressive vertigo. Like a
therapist, the best tracks would always chuck your interpretation back at you.
Post-rock never explained anything.
Marvellously ironic, of course: I’m now
trying to write a book explaining post-rock.
