Author: Chris Barrus

Still feeling sucker-punched from the news about Joe Strummer yesterday. *sigh*. Only saw The Clash once back in the day when they opened up for The Who in 1982 (the bill should have been reversed) and Joe later on the tour for Earthquake Weather, but my favorite Joe memory was from the tour in which he joined The Pogues – possibly the best concert I’d seen in my life. Didn’t hurt that Los Lobos were the headliners too (the show happened the week their cover of “La Bamba” hit #1).

Momus is trying to get his “Screengazer” meme out to the world so in the name of genre maximization here’s his entire essay.

I describe in my current essay Sound Dust hearing a member of a French laptop group called Shinsei talking about how he’s more influenced by My Bloody Valentine than electronica. And Bingo! — it all falls into place. Laptops are the new guitars, glitchtronica is the new indie art rock. Okay, fine, that’s all been discussed on another thread.

But suddenly I realise that a genre term is there for the taking. It’s on its hind legs yapping at me, begging to be used. ‘Screengazer’. MBV were ‘Shoegazers’, these laptop people influenced by them are ‘Screengazers’. The guitar is worn lower than the laptop, so you gaze shoewards. The laptop has an interface that casts light on your face when you gaze at it, so it’s a bit more dramatic. But in both cases, it’s the music that matters, and the concentration and listening that are emphasised by your ‘gaze’. It’s the idea that you’re entranced by the possibilities of sound, and forget about the audience, your own body, your responsibilities as a performer to ‘entertain’.

I googled ‘Screengazer’ and was rather surprised to find that nobody has used the term. Nobody has put these two scenes together in that one handy word. So today I want to use ILM to declare this the term for all indie glitchtop forthwith, and declare myself its baptiser and godfather! Hurrah! By perhaps no co-incidence whatsoever, I am also cited in Simon Reynolds’ discussion of the nascent genre as the aphorist who said ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people’, which is another relevant point about the Screengazers.

There are distinctions to be made. The Shoegazers lived in a specific place: Camden, London. They all drank in the same pub (supposedly). The Screengazers, a mere ten years later, are post-geography, and post-nation state. They live in San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Reykjavik, Rome, wherever. Their community is where we are right now, in the liminal interzone of the net. (Expand distinctions / similarities.)

I’m a little nervous about my new genre term, because it’s satirical. Nobody is going to say ‘I’m Jim, I have a laptop project called O.bso/lite, and I’m a Screengazer’. Just as Shoegazer (who coined that term, wasn’t it some Melody Maker journalist?) was a slightly mocking and hostile term which hastened the end of the delivery style of Slowdive and early Ride, so Screengazer is the kind of mocking, prodding term that will have laptopists stage-diving before long — ie that will shame them into renunciation of the very features that make them important and distinctive, ie their deep, valuable concentration on sound, their avoidance of hoary old rock gestures and the physical staples of entertainment (‘put your hands together, yeah!’).

Googlism on Shoegazer: ‘shoegazer is / was an insult over here’.

So it’s with reluctance that I unleash, in this thread, the viral meme ‘Screengazer’ on a previously unsuspecting world. I suspect that, launched today from ILM, it will have a deadly effectiveness, erasing and effacing other genre terms and becoming perhaps the standard label for the genre, at least for people cynical of the genre’s practises, and that its way of defining a bunch of disparate activities will actually hasten the change and dissolution of those practises. Changes I don’t particularly want to see, although I personally mix dancing and singing with my Sound Dust, and would never think of gazing at my iBook’s screen a second longer than it took to trigger the next mp3.

I know that, if I hit ‘Submit’ now, when I run Google and Googlism searches one month hence, and one year hence, I will find many references to ‘Screengazer’. They will mostly be more hostile and dismissive than references to ‘Laptop’ and ‘Glitch’ (Googlism on Glitch: ‘glitch is definable as a rhythmic offshoot of musique concrete’).

Googlism on ‘Screengazer’, December 20th 2002: ‘Sorry, Google doesn’t know enough about screengazer yet.’ Fine, why don’t I just leave it like that?

So do I hit ‘Submit’ and get that gratifying ‘Success!’ screen, or do I leave the genre to keep growing in its current diverse, organic, shambolic and slow way, protected, like a flower by thorns, by the current mishmash of terms: ‘Laptop’, ‘Glitch’, ‘Sound Mangling’, ‘DSPism’, ‘Mad MAX’…?

— Momus