Fearless: The Making Of Post-Rock: Don’t Bend!

Saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor last week. Here I am in my T-shirt.

They were, predictably, phenomenal. They played for close on two hours and the set incorporated both the punishingly physical and the wholly cerebral. Comparing this act to other music is a pointless exercise indeed; rather, their peer group includes blistered titanium and a solar flare. Here’s an obligatory someone-recorded-it-on-their-phone clip from the night and, although clearly ineffective in conveying the set’s majesty, it still makes my muscles convulse.

GY!BE are appealing to me, as I’m sure they are to others, for more than their music. What might broadly be termed their political stance is remarkably consistent: against ‘the man’ (but without the dollop of naïveté that usually accompanies it); questioning corporate culture and the inequalities that follow in its wake; uninterested in self-aggrandisement. This statement, following GY!BE winning the 2013 Polaris Music Prize for Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, is a good encapsulation.

Right down to the Fair Wear Foundation label in my t-shirt, GY!BE are seemingly exempt from the foibles and contradictions that beset the rest of us poor sods. This lack of cracks seems almost beautiful to me today, UK election day, when I feel optimistic for change and hopeful of the majority's goodness.

Like their music, GY!BE’s standpoint is defined as much by space as by presence.

We were proud and shy motherfuckers, and we engaged with the world thusly. Means we decided no singer, no leader, no interviews, no press photos. We played sitting down and projected movies on top of us. No rock poses.[1]

If we can break down image into three parts – how it is conceived, expressed, and then received – the GY!BE approach is worth thinking about a little bit. Artists (and I'm talking of independent artists here) can usually control the first; they can often direct the second; but, although they might influence how their image is received, they can’t control it. GY!BE didn’t want the Polaris Prize, and their felt their work was at odds with everything it represented. Yet they still won.

As the quote implies, GY!BE probably didn’t conceive image in the way we usually understand it. For them, image seems a by-product of their philosophy, as opposed to something at least partially contrived; and the GY!BE philosophy is so staunch that a strident image reflecting it was inevitable. The interview embargo was the perfect way of expressing it, too. The law of human averages suggests that not all of GY!BE are equally proud and equally shy motherfuckers. Someone amongst them will inevitably be chattier, or ruder, or more magnetic, or harder work, than the others.

What we are left with, then, is the almost-unique situation of GY!BE’s image largely being constructed by fans and commentators, but pretty much controlled by the band, even though the band seldom put visible energy into it. When they are not received how they wish (i.e. the Polaris Prize), they do spring into action; but usually they don’t have to, because attempted assaults upon their image won't even dent its steeliness, especially since the fans police such attempted assaults for them. For instance, if I was to put that above photo of me on Twitter, or in The Post-Rock Appreciation Society, with #godspeedselfie attached, I'd be mad. At least some fellow fans would take a very dim view of it, thinking either I ‘didn’t get’ GY!BE or was trolling, rather than genuinely being on a high after a fantastic show by a fantastic band.

From me comparing them to 'a solar flare', to the famous 1999 NME cover…