Chal Ravens: All Kinds of Not Much

Chal Ravens

Acrumpled young man , fresh off a Greyhound bus, is sitting in the back of a taxi and talking – to himself as much as to the driver. ‘Man, I just had the weirdest dream back on the bus there … D’you ever have those dreams that are just completely real?’ In the opening scene of Slacker (1990), Richard Linklater, who also directs the film, plays a version of himself, peppering his monologue on the nature of reality with references to Tolstoy, Frank Zappa and The Wizard of Oz. The movie takes place over a single day in Austin and follows a string of local characters up to all kinds of not much: playing in bands, trading conspiracy theories, bumming cigarettes, ‘just lollygagging around’.

Slacker was an unexpected hit: audiences immediately grasped that it had captured a new strain of youth culture. It wasn’t long before music critics started talking about ‘slacker rock’. Epitomised by Pavement, a band of record shop clerks from suburban California who wrote detached, elliptical songs, this subgenre could be identified by the music’s stripped-back production and the artists’ casual uniform of jeans and sneakers – the shambling antithesis of hair metal, synth-pop and everything that went bang in the 1980s. For this new generation, the burning flag of rock’n’roll rebellion was already just a memory to be recycled on TV. Rock’s liberatory potential – and its destructive shadow – were safely contained in the second-hand bins.

Britain and Ireland had their own muted variant of the slacker archetype: the shoegazer, a shabby, spaced-out creature, more interested in tweaking reverb effects than in making eye contact. Shoegaze bands such as Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine wore the same floppy, anti-showbiz look as their North American counterparts, but their soft, androgynous vocals and loud guitars were dunked in a warm bath of distortion: relax and float downstream.

Simon Reynolds started writing for Melody Maker in 1985. He was 22 at the time, making him a young baby boomer, but one, as he puts it, ‘heavily creased by Generation X’s crippling irony and feelings of futility’. Though Oxford-educated and far from a slacker himself, he shared his cohort’s aversion to the ‘encroaching mundanity’ of 1980s Britain, and remembers feeling ‘stranded after the countercultural tide had gone out’. Reynolds and the other writers at Melody Maker, the self-consciously intellectual rival to the more widely read NME, nevertheless devoted themselves to identifying and celebrating the New and the Now, tending to their walled garden of cult musicians and occasionally elevating them to hero status. Reynolds had co-founded a pop journal called Monitor in his final year at university and after graduating he signed on for unemployment and housing benefits to continue working on it, drawing from the same state coffers that supported various ‘dole-rock’ bands at the time. My Bloody Valentine had relocated from Dublin to the London squatting scene and were living in conditions that were undeniably grotty – and eventually contributed to drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig’s nervous breakdown – but which gave them enough time and space, over several years, to forge a radically new noise. ‘We sat around a lot, sure, but that’s conducive to coming up with ideas,’ Ó Cíosóig once told Reynolds. (‘No one ever said slackers weren’t productive,’ Linklater noted. ‘It’s just that their products often fall outside the market economy.’)

In Still in a Dream, Reynolds identifies dreams as a leitmotif connecting a swell of guitar bands that were heading into new realms of otherworldly bliss, lucid daydreaming and primal transgression, or in some cases harking back to earlier rock music. These groups were musically divergent and geographically dispersed, forming only a loose constellation in the rock underground, points that were connected largely by British music writers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the weeklies were ‘a machine of magnification’. From the pages of the ‘inkies’ a thousand coinages bloomed: miserabilism, cutie, dreampop, oceanic rock, pigfuck, record collector rock, grunge, post-rock, Britpop. The written word was still a crucial node in the analogue network that connected listeners with music, along with record shops, mail-order labels, American college radio and John Peel’s late evening show: a self-sustaining terrarium of ‘indie’ culture; a lost world.

Music and life were indistinguishable for Reynolds in the decade after 1984, an intensely productive period that took in his entire employment at Melody Maker, meeting and marrying fellow rock critic Joy Press, and the publication of his first book, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, an account of the new sounds of the late 1980s. Still in a Dream returns to that era with a tightened focus: guitar bands only, no synthesisers, no industrial music, no heavy metal, though most of the artists are formally inventive in some way. There are some notable omissions: the anti-sellout, post-hardcore band Fugazi, for example, and punk’s feminist offshoot Riot Grrrl, which gets only a brief mention. But comprehensiveness matters less here than Reynolds’s own tastes and experience. The contents of Still in a Dream are dictated by his ear and his interpretations of what sound does to the mind and body. This is also a memoir of a well-spent youth (‘the most exciting time of my life’), though the older Reynolds is occasionally drawn into a one-sided argument with his zealous younger self (‘Who is this deranged boy-man?’).

His first year as a working writer was inauspicious. Reynolds and his Melody Maker colleagues were desperately seeking sonic innovation, some conceptual breakthrough that could finally outmanoeuvre punk’s ‘year zero’ mentality: ‘The scene really needed a severe programme of unpunking, if music was ever going to move forward again.’ Reynolds remembers 1985 simply as the ‘Bad Music Era’, characterised by overly wistful indie pop – by the likes of Dream Academy and Everything but the Girl – and overly earnest rock, led by Billy Bragg’s Red Wedge collective and ‘soulcialists’ such as Paul Weller and the Communards. One important exception in rock was the Smiths, who offered ‘the era’s true dissident statement … without ever writing anything as crass and clumsy as a protest song’. Morrissey’s rebellion against 1980s culture took the form of a wrong-to-work mentality that was starkly at odds with the era’s anti-Thatcher activism. ‘I’ve never had a job because I’ve never wanted one,’ he trills on ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’, a song the band boldly chose to perform at the Jobs for a Change concert put on by the Greater London Council to publicise its effort to tackle unemployment. The Smiths’ taste for indulgent indolence was denounced as ‘miserabilism’ by the sort of critics who backed Red Wedge, but Morrissey’s romanticism struck a chord with Reynolds, who, though politically on the left, ‘didn’t see any point in preaching to the converted’; sound ought to activate sensations and emotions, not provide recommended reading.

Then, unexpectedly, a flood of new bands spoke directly to this sensory urge. Searching for words to describe the potency of Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine, Reynolds reached for the language of dreams – of visions and symbolism, surrender and submission, inner worlds and surreal extremes. ‘Swoon-rock’, as he called the new guitar tendency, sounded like a ‘delicious dereliction of duty’ after the militant years of post-punk, an ‘anti-politics of bliss’. On the nine-minute-long ‘Ecstasy Symphony’, the Midlands duo Spacemen 3 declared themselves ‘wide awake, in a dream’ over a vibrating shroud of organ drone. A.R. Kane – uniquely, a Black duo in the indiesphere – coined ‘dreampop’ to describe their oblique, lunar-crusted grooves, born from a home studio and inspired by LSD and lucid dreaming.

Dreaming was far from unexplored territory in pop music: ‘Daydream Believer’, ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’, Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’. But those songs are about dreams, rather than evoking dreams themselves, as in the maddening made-up language of Cocteau Twins, drifting by like a nocturnal conversation lost to the dawn, or Pixies’ surreal juxtapositions: kissing mermaids and slicing up eyeballs over mutilated surf guitar and spasms of silence. Sometimes songs emerged from dreams. My Bloody Valentine’s noise architect, Kevin Shields, would stay up all night perfecting his guitar’s reverse reverb; Bilinda Butcher remembers being woken up to record vocals and ‘trying to remember what I’ve been dreaming about when I’m singing’.

By the mid-1980s this gathering mood of generational drowsiness started to sound like an active ‘renunciation of post-punk’s sober alertness’. After the barked didacticism of Gang of Four and Wire, how about the dissolving beauty of Elizabeth Fraser’s glossolalia or the translucent head voice of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell? In place of funky basslines, there were the painterly smears of Shields’s open-tuned guitar. Instead of syncopated drums, there was Spacemen 3’s metronome looping towards the infinite: a place where rhythm and blues flattened out, no longer danceable but stiflingly hypnotic. Spacemen 3 knew their rock history. Their squally neo-psychedelia took a deep drag on the most potent strains of proto-punk – the Stooges, the Velvet Underground and MC5 – and rebuilt it with vintage equipment and trippy light projections, but without the confrontational stage presence. The two lead members, guitarists Pete Kember and Jason Pierce, were on a journey inwards – Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to, as their demo collection was titled. They played gigs sitting down.

The Oxford band Talulah Gosh also looked back to the 1960s, but as a safe haven, a time when rock itself was young and innocent. Their selective memory of the decade, focused on the childlike psychedelia of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and girl groups like the Shangri-Las, was foundational to the jangling guitars and sweetly naive harmonies of the subgenre dubbed ‘cutie’ or ‘twee’. But what was the point in these ‘fetishised rediscoveries’, Reynolds asks, if they were ‘severed from the larger adventure of the 1960s’? Without a counterculture of communes, protests, happenings and art labs behind them, the aesthetic choices of semi-obscure indie bands – even the outwardly feminist Talulah Gosh – felt about as politically potent as the badges on their jackets. Beyond the parameters of Reynolds’s survey, the decade’s most overtly political rock artists – including the Red Wedge bands, feminist folk singers, the anarcho-punks orbiting the Essex art collective Crass, and the nascent US hardcore scene – were more focused on radical lyrics and lifestyles than on sonic futurism. But politics isn’t always overt, as Reynolds and his cohort had learned from Raymond Williams and other cultural theorists. A withdrawal into noisy oblivion or back into an imagined past is its own kind of political gesture – an escape from the decade’s hardening spirit, as Thatcherite market logic worked its way into the crevices of everyday life. If the twin horrors of work and unemployment couldn’t be avoided, then perhaps the solution was a retreat into dreams.

Or try another, plainer explanation: just as the 1970s had indulged in nostalgia for the 1950s (T. Rex, Ian Dury, the Cramps, American Graffiti, Happy Days), the 1980s was due a reassessment of the decade before punk broke, when rock’n’roll graduated from teenybopper 7˝s to LP-length statements, a tidy return serve in the pop dialectic. New Wave had arrived at the start of the decade, infiltrating the mainstream through hits such as Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’, Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’ and Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’. The synth-pop takeover of the charts was sudden and total; perhaps overexposure to the brave new world of drum machines and sexual indeterminism was the more obvious reason for the pendulum swing back to the past, and to the woman-free zone of rock before 1976. American bands in particular found rich pickings among British rock dinosaurs such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, reanimating their fossilised riffs with a dash of semi-ironic machismo. Some, like the sandblasted power-pop trio Dinosaur Jr, were more closely aligned with slacker-rock conventions, slipping catchy melodies under a blizzard of guitar overdubs. Others, with names like Scratch Acid, Killdozer and Unsane, unleashed a noise that was primal, earthy and grotesque; Melody Maker called it ‘arsequake’.

My favourite arsequakers are the Butthole Surfers, who combined an honest love of monster riffs with a 1980s playbook of parody and pranks, as perfected on ‘Sweat Loaf’ – a lurching bastardisation of Sabbath’s ‘Sweet Leaf’. The Austin band (whose drummer, Teresa Nervosa, appears in Slacker as the ‘Pap Smear Pusher’, hawking what she claims is Madonna’s lab sample) found a way to extend the legacy of smart-dumb proto-punk – the Stooges, the Fugs, the Ramones – by fusing multimedia experimentation with rock’s animal-juvenile urges and a taste for scatology and gore. ‘We are the kind of band who will go back to look at a car wreck a second time around,’ the guitarist, Paul Leary, admitted. His scorching solos, much like the acid-bright Fender squall of the Dinosaur Jr frontman J. Mascis, lit a path back to the 1970s axe-wielding of Rory Gallagher and Sabbath’s Tony Iommi. The recuperation of rock’s Old Testament even extended to Rolling Stones necromancy, long after the group had been archived as part of punk’s cultural reset. The New York band Pussy Galore covered Exile on Main Street in its entirety, while their offshoot, Royal Trux, channelled the Stones’ damaged, dissolute blues into explosive art-rock. Most blatant was Primal Scream’s re-enactment of the Stones’ louche debauchery on ‘Rocks’ and ‘Loaded’, an acid house reimagining of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.

The Midwest outfit Big Black operated with the lean lucidity of their post-punk antecedents, but their subject matter was harder and uglier – songs about fucking (on the album Songs about Fucking), arson, child abuse and small-town ennui. Big Black’s frontman was the celebrated studio engineer Steve Albini, who once said ‘I hate the human voice.’ After Big Black, Albini joined members of Scratch Acid for a lacerating LP called Two Nuns and a Pack Mule, which might have been one of the great noise-rock records had they not called their band Rapeman. (Another short-lived Albini project was named after the tagline for a blaxploitation film, ‘Run, Nigger, Run’ – anything to ensure he wouldn’t get on MTV.) But as Jeremy Gordon put it when he interviewed a repentant Albini in 2023, ‘if [he] seemed like a prick, he was a prick who defended punk’s credos – don’t sign to major labels, reject authority, say what’s on your mind, make a lot of noise.’

The British shoegazers excelled in their own quest for extremes. The only time I’ve ever been given earplugs by ushers before a gig was at a My Bloody Valentine reunion show in 2008 – pointless foam blobs which I popped in and out during the 25-minute wall-of-noise cadenza in the middle of ‘You Made Me Realise’ while wondering if prolonged exposure to volumes of 120 decibels (as loud as a plane taking off) might spontaneously cause ego death. The performance of extreme noise terror is, I realised, still a performance: a yearning for rock rebellion expressed as self-righteous self-sabotage. ‘Making noise felt like power,’ Reynolds writes, ‘but it masked impotence on a political or socioeconomic level.’

With rock music no longer fuelling a rising counterculture, the ‘sovereign reality’ addressed by these bands was limited to ‘the inner realm of desire and dream’. Even at extreme volumes, the mood was romantic rather than real, ambiguous rather than moralising. In 1992, the New York art-rock unit Sonic Youth offered an exception that proved the rule with their single ‘Youth against Fascism’: ‘You’re an impotent jerk/Yeah, a fascist twerp.’ It misfired, Reynolds says, not because of the sentiment but because it ‘went without saying’. Big Black, for their part, released a single called ‘Il Duce’ with a tongue-in-cheek dedication to Mussolini. ‘We gave ourselves licence to play with this language because we felt no threat from it,’ Albini said.

Only the thinnest membrane seemed to separate the period’s laidback permissiveness from a disturbing embrace of violence and gore. The 1980s was also a decade of blood-soaked action blockbusters, banned video nasties and transgressive musical subgenres such as grindcore and power electronics (led by Whitehouse, who took their name from the anti-filth crusader Mary Whitehouse and wrote lyrics from the perspective of serial killers). Horrors trickled down to the gentler slopes of indie rock: Hüsker Dü’s ‘Diane’ was inspired by the rape and murder of a woman from their native Minnesota, while Seattle grungers Green River adopted the nickname of a femicidal mass murderer.

In 1988, Melody Maker’s David Stubbs declared that it had been ‘the best ever year for rock music’, listing 49 bands in evidence. Hardly any of them had cracked the top ten of the album chart. Three years later, the unthinkable happened: grunge went mainstream, with Nirvana’s Nevermind knocking Michael Jackson off the number one spot in America. The response was ‘disbelief’ – not least that it was Nirvana who had finally cracked the code rather than a more established challenger like Dinosaur Jr or Pixies. They’d done it by breaking a golden rule, making a music video perfect for MTV. The grunge movement became ‘fame’s anti-matter, compulsively vandalising the very medium through which it reached the world’. (‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ now has 2.2 billion views on YouTube.) Four years later, Britpop’s breakthrough triggered a deeper identity crisis for the inkies, as the music they had championed for so long spilled over to broadsheet supplements, daytime radio, even the news, when Oasis and Blur’s chart battle made headlines. By then Reynolds the neophile was moving on, absorbed by the radical new sounds of hardcore rave and jungle, and their potential as ‘a genuinely new social formation’.

Reynolds was born during Beatlemania and grew up in the era of full-colour glam (chronicled in Shock and Awe), followed by the sinewy post-punk of his student days (as described in Rip It Up and Start Again, his guide to the explosive idealism of the period from 1978 to 1984) and the breakthrough years of hip-hop (Bring the Noise, an anthology of clippings) and rave (Energy Flash, his influential account of 1990s dance culture). Since moving to LA in 2010, he has pondered the apparent slowdown in new musical ideas, first in Retromania, a history of retro revivals which doubled as a polemic against the stuckness of 2010s pop, and then in Futuromania, in which he examined his lifelong addiction to the New as a historically contingent, thoroughly modernist impulse.

Echoing the canny timing of Rip It Up and Start Again, published in 2005 as a wave of new bands were finding their way back to the angular jitters of post-punk, Still in a Dream arrives in the middle of a shoegaze and dreampop revival. In addition to the many reunions (Slowdive, A.R. Kane, My Bloody Valentine), the dream-gaze tendency is present in the work of faithful new copyists (julie, Glixen, Wisp) and in more subtle invocations, such as yeule’s queered vision of 1990s alt-guitar heroes, the feminine fuzz-rock of the band feeble little horse and the sensual, grungey blacktronica of Kelela. Writing about the original swoon-rockers, Reynolds speculates that the ‘aestheticisation of surrender must have resonated on at least a semi-conscious level for a generation that felt powerless’. Shoegaze and dreampop seem equally appropriate in the 2020s: a fuzzy blanket loud enough to drown out the world, yet soft enough to thrive on streaming services, where unskippability is paramount.

Meanwhile, music journalism is in a sorry state, with few remaining outlets for paid commissions (Melody Maker closed in 2000) and a dwindling readership. Our waning influence – I am writing myself into this predicament – is the context for Reynolds’s claim that writing was once ‘symbiotic’ with new music: ‘The job of a rock writer, almost a sacred duty, was to make things seem bigger than they were.’ He remembers the descriptions in a review of a Cocteau Twins album – ‘silver and roseate mists’, ‘endless ice-capped peaks’ – that helped him to hear it properly: ‘Suddenly, I had the key to the secret garden.’ If Still in a Dream strikes a melancholy note, it may have something to do with Reynolds’s fear that this work was in vain. MP3s, streaming and algorithmic recommendations have all contributed to pop music’s fading from the front line of youth culture. Songs have been free at the point of use for more than fifteen years, and our investment in new music has hit rock bottom. (Test yourself: this summer, a song spent nineteen consecutive weeks at number one in the UK, breaking a record set in 1953. Can you name it?) Pop music simply doesn’t matter as much as it once did.

The other, quieter sense of loss in these pages concerns dreaming itself. On their 1988 double album Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth grappled with the emergent ‘unreal reality’ of media overload, mixing lyrical snapshots of urban decay, cyberpunk novels and TV jingles with raging guitar dissonance. ‘You’re bombarded from every side by information, 50 per cent serious, 50 per cent frivolous. You start to wander around in a kind of shell shock,’ guitarist Lee Ranaldo told Reynolds.

Where boredom and ennui were recurring motifs in the prototypical punk rock of Buzzcocks and the Ramones (‘Now I wanna sniff some glue/Now I wanna have somethin’ to do!’), by the late 1980s the zeitgeist was becoming frenetic and disjointed – ‘kaleidophrenic’, as Reynolds described Daydream Nation, an album about ‘being carried along by the onrush of images and sensations’. That onrush has only intensified. Young people are increasingly likely to report feeling anxious or distracted; according to one recent survey, only 10 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds say they’re not concerned about their ability to concentrate. Screens and social media quell boredom through restless loops of dopamine and dissatisfaction, and at the bus stop I’m more likely to reach for my phone than let my daydreaming brain take the controls.

Were the early 1990s the last time unproductivity felt aspirational? Successive rounds of austerity and gentrification continue to rob young people of all that subsidised lollygagging around in rehearsal rooms, art schools and squats. Those who aren’t backed by family money find that their creative energy is soon exhausted by the need to pay rent. ‘The real conspiracy,’ Linklater once told Reynolds, ‘is that people don’t have time to really think.’

When I rewatched Slacker recently, what seemed most alien was the uncomplicated enthusiasm for art-making shared by these otherwise unfocused outsiders and twenty-somethings. They’re all starting bands, making sculptures, taking books out of the library and experimenting with Oblique Strategies, seemingly unconcerned whether these activities can be hustled into an income stream. ‘When they’re not meandering through inner space,’ Reynolds marvels, ‘slackers while away their time trawling the detritus of decades of pop culture.’ Now that’s what I call bliss.

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