Generally when you get a crop of intentionally lo-fi and distortion it is because music has become become too bloated on its own production. That is not what is happening here. Critical tastes and mainstream tastes have never been further apart in the rock music world. It its highly likely that you have lost all contact with Saliva and Puddle of Mud thanks to your mp3 player. More likely we have become tired of the embarassing parade of excellent music. Two Dancers, Flying Lotus, Hyperdub, The Animal Collective, Sincerely Yours, Grizzly Bear, all of them to refined and well put together for our palates. Better to listen to Nodzzz and Times New Viking decent music oversalted to oblivion. If this is the case, then it is a simply a matter of taste (bad taste) and there is nothing more to say. The other, more pathetic, reason is that lo-fi is an artistic statement. A destruction of rock n'rolls convention, where nothing is sacred not even the mass opinion that too much volume is bad fucking news. A pointless endeavor, because rock music has become universalist in its message. Why mock rock when it is already meaning less to begin with? Rock music for the sake of a message is ALWAYS bad, the music comes first, if the music isn't good who cares. If you would listen to Wavves for artistic 'ideals' like that, then it isn't really music you like, its social messages. In that case I don't care for anything you have to say on the subject of music because you are simply not a fan.
What is infuriating here is that the music underlying shitgaze isn't that bad. For that matter noise and lo-fi aren't inherently awful either, because it comes down to a matter of proportion. The Smith Westerns fall short of the shitgaze movement, but are still defintively lo-fi. But the lo-fi acsthetic doesn't do them any favors sonically except to add a nice to effect to the singers (probably) poor vocals and to give them a cool 'indie' feel . And this is the mistake with lo-fi, it has this position in the minds of music fans as being something authentic. The position arises out of hobbyist long-time dominance of GOOD ROCK MUSIC since 1979 and which is continuely getting stronger as we press into 2010. However it wasn't lo-fi production work that made Sonic Youth fucking awesome, it was their excellent music and had they had the same studio and equipment as Bon Jovi they would have made even better music. Now is a golden age for indie rock: the entire history of pop music is effectively stored for study on the internet, the mainstream is rapidly imploding causing a flood of cheap studio hardware to appear on the market, and gigbytes of excellent recording software waits for us in torrents. We should be encouraging artists to be making clear and better sounds music, rather then celebrating their mass mutilation of it.
Its important to note "this has all happened before and will happen again." In the early 2000s the Strokes' Is This It manages to be really good IN SPITE of its horseshit and rightly condemned production work. Throughout the 1990s indie rock was infected with numerous 'lo-fi' bands who produced awful music and tried to cover it up with muddy production work. The only band of note to make it through this clusterfuck being Guided By Voices and their melted tape shenanigans were more of a gimmick then anything else. And most famously the 1970s birthed the punk movement which proved if nothing else that you can't just slap some distortion on a simple pop song and make good music. This is why Lodon Calling stomps all over the Ramones and Sex Pistols. The Clash realized that when all said and done you need to get back in the studio and start making real interesting music again.
All this shitgaze and lo-fi wankery is just as pretentious and pompous as the proggy hi-fi music it supposedly attacks.
--Justin
