"_______________"

A few years ago, I wrote a post for my brother in law’s music blog about the surge of “post-rock” bands that seemed to be growing at the time. Even a few weeks after writing that, I was unhappy with it. Looking back at it, it seems as if I was a trendy ass overeager to promote and identify with some new, cool musical movement.

The biggest problem is with that label, “post rock.” Like almost all well-known music labels, it generates unnecessary distinction, as well as a false sense of cohesion. Although Battles, A Silver Mt. Zion, Animal Collective, Liars, Xiu Xiu, Growing, and other bands of their time seemed to embrace a break from traditional pop and rock purism in favor of simply mixing together interesting sounds and textures—which does seem to fit the description of being Post-Rock, or at least Post-Rockism—it should be noted that, while some of these bands were friends and collaborators (like Animal Collective and Black Dice, for instance), there was no official Post Rock Movement among these bands, like the 60’s Flower Power movement, or the 80’s hardcore movement. If anything, there were hoards of stoned out scenesters enjoying a slew of pompous, lugubrious chamber-shoegaze bands that were also labeled post rock. These bands all seemed to sound the same (My Bloody Valentine meets the Kronos Quartet), and were anything but fresh, exciting alternatives to the same old clichés. Not to mention the fact that plenty of earlier bands have shared a philosophy and approach that could be considered to be "post-rock": Faust, The Residents, This Heat, John Zorn, and (later period) Talk Talk, to name a few.I would have been wiser to refrain from using the damn label in my post, freeing my excitement for certain new bands from unnecessary baggage.

But it’s not just post rock. It’s the same for “punk rock.” This term can be used to represent a general philosophy, a specific sound, or a member from a scene of a certain time and place. And a lot of confusion can result from this ambiguity. I was always drawn more to “Punk as Philosophy,” and so my collection of punk heroes came to include early outcast pioneers like Captain Beefheart and the Shaggs, but these are obviously not punk rock to most people.

How to distinguish the “punk” from the “new wave?” My, what a task! Was New Wave the original term for what later came to be known as punk rock (like Richard Hell or the Dead Boys), or was New Wave a cynical attempt by record execs to capitalize on the punk movement with a more marketable pop sound (like XTC and Oingo Boingo)? Who is more punk, the Talking Heads or the Exploited?

Were the krautrockers German proto-punks, or were they hippie jam bands, or prog-rockers? What does it even mean to be krautrock? Most people think of the minimalist, hypnotic rhythms of CAN and Neu! when they reference krautrock, but Faust, Amon Duul II, Cluster, and other 70’s German bands sounded nothing like that. Additionally, this prototypical krautrock sound can be found on Yoko Ono albums from the same time as CAN and Neu!. Is Yoko more krautrock than Faust?

Humans use labels. It’s part and parcel of our use of language, and it also helps us to simplify complex situations. But I often feel that, nowadays, our labels are no longer used to help us. These abstractions have taken a life of their own, not unlike Plato’s Forms. We are now bending over backwards to preserve the integrity of these Forms, and our communication suffers in the process. This is seen in other domains (“Is this film really novelle vague?” or “I can’t understand how one species can change into another”) but it’s gotten quite out of hand in the music world.

I don’t really care if something is Post-Punk rather than No Wave, or if something counts as Industrial, I simply want to use words to describe the sound, attitude, and maybe the affiliations of a band I'm talking about. I’ll use any word or combination of words to get my ideas across, as long as they work.

So, I must retract my past endorsement of so-called Post Rock bands. I retain, however, my admiration for Bands-Who-Make-Unique-and-Hard-to-Classify-Music-Usually-Fusing-Unlikely-Sounds-and-Moods-for-the-Sake-of-Self-Expression.

Check out some of these guys if you haven’t: Faust, This Heat, Pere Ubu, Mars, Animal Collective, OOIOO.