More on post-rock (music) (*bang bang*)

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a total poser. I like to sometimes talk like I know stuff. But I don't know stuff. This hasn't stopped me from talking about stuff, and it probably won't stop me from talking about stuff any time soon, but hopefully we can still all have some fun despite my ineptitude.

I recently went ahead and rocked the literary world to its very foundations by inventing a brand new literary genre, "post-rock lit". I picked up the music world's "post-rock" movement in one hand and Steve Erickson's oeuvre in the other hand and banged them together as hard as I could until both came out slightly dented, then I dropped them on the table and called it genius. In that post I mentioned a few modern-ish post-rock bands, which I really do think are worth checking out. But for those of you who skipped the opening paragraph of this post, let me fill you in: I'm a poser and an idiot and don't really know anything about anything.

Luckily, the hyper-indie-otakus at Pitchfork immediately came to the rescue with this week's feature article, "The Lost Generation: How UK post-rock fell in love with the moon, and a bunch of bands nobody listened to defined the 1990s".

Excerpt You! Black Emperor:

"They were an indie band that didn't want to be an indie band": That's how Paul Cox, co-founder of the Too Pure label, described Seefeel, one of his acts. That one sentence might be the single best summary of the post-rock project-- a crew of underground guitar bands who suddenly got the idea that they could play much more than rock, and spent the next few years trying to break free into whatever that "much more" might turn out to be.

"Indie bands that didn't want to be indie bands," though-- it's kind of a mouthful of a genre name, and the critic Simon Reynolds quickly stepped in with something more concise. His first use of the term "post-rock" came in a review of a Bark Psychosis record; the one that counted came in a 1994 issue of The Wire. One album does not a genre make, and in that '94 article, Reynolds went about lassoing together the bands that made the scene: Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Stereolab, Pram, Moonshake, and others.

It's a fun article, and it comes complete with a "recommended listening" list, so if you're the kind of person for whom the term "post-rock" holds a certain allure, you know right where to go to find out where it all started. And if you're me, you know right where to go so you can earn yourself some learnin' on the roots of the movement so you can bang art-forms together to greater impact and general non-poser-ness. Elitist nature, here I come!