Well, I told myself I was going to write more here. Why not start now? Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m into a lot of obscure, niche music. Particularly from the 1990s and belonging to a genre often called shoegaze.

If you’re a person with normal interests and tastes, you’re probably wondering what the hell shoegaze means. And really, fair question. The honest answer is that it means something different to everyone. Ask 10 shoegaze fans what the archetypal shoegaze band is and you’ll 11 different answers. There’s not really a totally clear definition as to what counts as shoegaze, but in general the genre is marked by guitars with heavy distortion and reverb, mumbled (often incomprehensible) lyrics, and often a sort of ill-defined “spacey” feel.

The shoegaze I really like is even more specific, though. It includes songs like Mind Crossing by Light, Bedhead’s cover of Golden Brown, and Ophelia by Egor i Opizdenevshie (also known as Egor and the Fuckups). There’s a vibrant strand of psychedelia, a lineage that traces back to punk, and also a very clear folk influence. It’s something that straddles the line between modernism, anarchism, and pastoral nostalgia.

Dave Pearce of Flying Saucer Attack once described this balance as “rural psychedelia.” While there’s a bit of pretentiousness in that label, I think it really gets to the core of what I really love about this subgenre. There’s a longing for a simpler time, but not at all in the same way that reactionaries and online “trads” cling to. It’s a rejection of what Egor Letov once called “the plastic world.”

I can’t remember where I read it now, but there was a really interesting article floating around awhile back about how the rise of shoegaze in the early 1990s was strongly tied to the “end of history” and the (temporary) triumph of neoliberalism. There’s a leftist lineage to rural psychedelia that rejects not social progress, but the creeping commoditization of every aspect of our lives.

Pearce has long been critical of brit pop and glam rock, even including a mockingly distorted cover of Suede’s The Drowners in FSA’s first album. Letov chose the profane name “Egor i Opizdenevshie” specifically so that popular press couldn’t cover his music after becoming disillusioned with how his earlier band, Grazdanskaya Oborona, had become somewhat commercialized. Matt Jones of Crescent, an FSA-adjacent band from the early 90s Bristol scene, shrieks “it’s not 1969, it’s now!” at the end of their self-titled album’s opening track. Rural psychedelia didn’t simply rehash the past or lament that the world is changing; it challenged capitalism and commercialism when it was arguably at its most triumphant moment.

There have been a few books published in the past decade that talk about how punk fits into this time period, but I think there’s very interesting questions about where rural psychedelia and the larger genre of shoegaze fits into this time period that are begging to be answered. Shoegaze in the 1990s was a niche genre with a relatively small fanbase, but it says something important about what people living through the “end of history” thought as it was happening. Letov was an opponent of the Soviet government, but he was no fan of capitalism. Pearce’s insistence that “home taping is reinventing music” was a rejection of the apparent corporate and commercial control of music.

Nearly 30 years later, we’re still dealing with these questions and their repercussions.