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Do You feel every second band nowadays tells their bandis psychedelic. You do, don't You? Not only has the mindblowing alternative become popular and brought up lots of such bands. It has just become too hip trendy tag not to be used by every second new band.

Am I being TOTALLY UNFAIR if I claim 75% of the bands calling them self psychedelic is just indie/ metal/ rock whatever with some echo-delay


There IS a definition for the term psychedelic, and to the classical psychedelic rock. Shouldn't modern psychedelic then be something related to that sensibility?You don't have to be a postgraduate to have the skills to check the definition and the scope of the concept as it is traditionally used. But because the term is used so vaguely, should the scope of modern psychedelic rock actually be re-defined? Or should I just keep to practicing altered states of consciousness instead of bothering myself with semantic issues?

What is psychedelic to You, by its nature? What makes music psychedelic, to You and why, if You care to elaborate?

Discuss, argue, quote Your spiritual guide, and strangle the hippies/hipsters if needed.

you don't even want to get me STARTED on this topic.

dubkitty wrote:you don't even want to get me STARTED on this topic.

I'm actually pretty interested in what you have to say on the subject

...you do realize you could say the exact thing about the term "metal"...

i know what it means to me and i know it when i hear it. i don't adhere to a rigid formula and time limit. i was around when it surfaced, and i feel some of the best psychedelic music is being made here and now. the psychedelica compilations on northern star records are a good example.

cheesecats wrote: i was around when it surfaced ...

When you say this, do you mean 1967 or thereabouts?

Chankgeez wrote:

cheesecats wrote: i was around when it surfaced ...

When you say this, do you mean 1967 or thereabouts?

yes--even earlier. the 13th floor elevators' you're gonna miss me, the beatles' tomorrow never knows and the byrds' eight miles high came out in 1966. some even earlier--the sitar in norwegian wood was in 1965 as well as the yardbirds' heart full of soul. it was a very experimental and exciting time for music, but so is now.

cheesecats wrote:

Chankgeez wrote:

cheesecats wrote: i was around when it surfaced ...

When you say this, do you mean 1967 or thereabouts?

yes--even earlier. the 13th floor elevators' you're gonna miss me, the beatles' tomorrow never knows and the byrds' eight miles high came out in 1966. some even earlier--the sitar in norwegian wood was in 1965 as well as the yardbirds' heart full of soul. it was a very experimental and exciting time for music, but so is now.

Yeah, I know there were elements of psychedelia in place prior to '67, but from what I understand it didn't really hit the mainstream until '67. It always takes a little bit of time for things to filter into mainstream consciousness. So, yeah, a lot of what may be remembered as pioneering psychedelic rock may simply be the earliest commercially successful stuff. The true pioneers are sometimes sadly historically overlooked.

I think I may've posted this link before somewhere on here, but I think this website is a good resource:

http://psychevanhetfolk.homestead.com/

Chankgeez wrote:

cheesecats wrote:

Chankgeez wrote:

cheesecats wrote: i was around when it surfaced ...

When you say this, do you mean 1967 or thereabouts?

yes--even earlier. the 13th floor elevators' you're gonna miss me, the beatles' tomorrow never knows and the byrds' eight miles high came out in 1966. some even earlier--the sitar in norwegian wood was in 1965 as well as the yardbirds' heart full of soul. it was a very experimental and exciting time for music, but so is now.

Yeah, I know there were elements of psychedelia in place prior to '67, but from what I understand it didn't really hit the mainstream until '67. It always takes a little bit of time for things to filter into mainstream consciousness. So, yeah, a lot of what may be remembered as pioneering psychedelic rock may simply be the earliest commercially successful stuff. The true pioneers are sometimes sadly historically overlooked.
I think I may've posted this link before somewhere on here, but I think this website is a good resource:
http://psychevanhetfolk.homestead.com/

it was a lot more difficult for local and regional bands to be heard back then--no internet. and the successful tunes were broadcast on am radio, which was not format driven--it was all jumbled up. so you would hear dave clark five followed by johnny rivers followed by petula clark followed by sam and dave followed by the kinks and so on. it's interesting to look at the charts from the mid 60s. this is pretty much a typical am radio station playlist in 1965:

http://longboredsurfer.com/charts/1965.php

cool website

Yeah, there're a lot more bands now than there were back then and the music "industry" has changed drastically as well (due in part to technology among other things).

Man, fuck bands that call themselves "psychedelic" these days.

what folks call "psychedelic" music nowadays often has very little to do with "psychedelic" music as it was originally defined or the very concept "psychedelic" in its original literal etymologic meaning of "mind-manifesting." this isn't necessarily to say that everything which was originally lumped into the rubric of "psychedelic music" in the 60s and early 70s was about manifesting the mind's untapped potential rather than trying to follow trends of the day, especially in the 1966-69 period when people put on Carnaby Street hipster gear and then Woodstock street gear like they put on punk gear in 1978 and flannel in 1991. but in the early era there was a strain of music that truly did mean to use sound as part of an attempt to alter brain function in the same sense as some of the pioneers of psychedelic drugs wanted to use substances. sometimes this was done in direct combination with drugs, as in the Ken Kesey "Acid Tests" and Bill Graham-promoted Trips Festival with the Grateful Dead immortalized in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels; other times the music and other multimedia were the only stimuli supplied.

often the bands which were most engaged in this activity were quite open and explicit about it. if you read interviews with the Dead, Hawkwind, or Can, for example, they're quite explicit about their intent to alter consciousness with sound. Dave Brock and Lemmy talk gleefully about the effect of the strobes and projections in combination with the band's relentless attack, and when the GD electronic-music side project Seastones was released in 1974 it was blurbed as having been created specifically to get you high just by listening to it. it worked, too. Can did an interview in the 00s for MOJO where they talked about how Jaki's drumming was so powerfully metronomic that he could focus on audience members and make them dance or make them so ill they would vomit.

the will to psychedelia didn't die out with punk. to the contrary, the influence of a lot of the weirdest psychedelia--from the brittle Byrds tracks to Hawkwind to Hendrix to Krautrock to Quicksilver (and their left-hand-path doppelganger Television) and the later Airplane to "Maggot Brain"--was firmly embedded in Mission of Burma, PiL, Hüsker Dü, and R.E.M. From there it was passed along: from Burma to Fugazi, from PiL and Levene's clattering echoes to U2, from Mould to everyone worth a shit in American alt-rock, and from R.E.M. to My Bloody Valentine (clock the Strawberry Wine and Ecstacy EPs if you don't believe me). and it showed up in places where you wouldn't expect it...Lee Ranaldo's favorite live band was the Dead, 40 of whose shows he saw. again, some of the later players have been quite vocal about their interest in sonic derangement...Kevin Shields has talked about the importance of preposterous amounts of volume at length, and Mould's Sugar show i saw on their first tour was the loudest thing i'd seen since the 70s until the MBV reunion tour. SY, and Glenn Branca before them, were also very into the concept of sonic overload as a means of altering consciousness.

you also had the beginnings of an underground folk- and pop-influenced psychedelic movement happening in the later 80s and early 90s, with Flying Saucer Attack's pioneering and fearless home recordings joined by Amp and other British groups and folks like Yo La Tengo and Galaxie 500 in the States in combining melodic songs and roaring, vaguely Velvets-influenced drone jams.

but the biggest manifestation of the psychedelic impulse in music--and in many ways the biggest disappointment--of the post-80s was the electronic dance music (hereafter "EDM") or "rave music" scene. having started from an already ecstatic impulse to alter consciousness via dance, early house music, descended from disco, rapidly mutated into a minimal electronic form with a rigorous buildup/breakdown/reprise track structure designed to create repeated emotional and physical peaks in dancefloor crowds. many of the characteristics of EDM tracks for club use are almost dictated by principles of psychoacoustics, and effectively constructed dance tracks can raise the hair on the backs of your arms like almost nothing else because of the basic, elemental nature of their construction...everything is assembled in fairly simple subdivisions of 4/4, so it has to be really well done to be compelling.

unfortunately, the ubiquitous usage of club drugs allows music producers to get away with lazy record-making; i remember a very famous UK DJ saying in the early 00s that her style of music didn't work unless the audience was all E'd up. this, and the over-promotion that always attends a scene when it hits the public eye, pretty much killed the rave scene dead by the mid-00s...once a scene gets known primarily for drugs, it's doomed. it's too bad, because when the music was good it was really great, and it really worked as a portable repeatable consciousness-alteration system. notably, some old-school psychedelic people got involved and in some cases are still involved in EDM, most notably Steve Hillage of Gong who's been doing the System 7 project with his partner Miquette since the 1990s. there was also a brief fad of shoegaze bands getting EDM remixes...i have a couple e.g. the Slowdive remixes on the 5 EP and the Chapterhouse remixes by Irresistable Force i think?

i would certainly class at least some of post-rock as psychedelic in intent. what else are you going to call "Djed" by Tortoise with its 1970 underground-radio edits, or the first Labradford album with those huge roaring drones, or the Rome LP? you could make an argument for gybe! as psychedelic in some sense, as they certainly mean to mess with your head with their cinematics. somewhere nearby live the drone artists like Windy and Carl, and their ambient neighbors. if Eno isn't psychedelic in intent, who the fuck is? the New Agers are over on the other side of the tracks, but we can't throw 'em out of town...it wouldn't be right. and then there's the more recent, obviously psych/prog-inspired stuff that sits somewhere between post-rock and indie, like Yume Bitsu, the Landing albums, and Surface of Ece(y)on. which brings us around to the psych/prog-inspired "jam bands," which ironically are often the least psychedelic descendent of "psychedelic music" despite hewing most closely to the form of the San Francisco bands in general and the Dead specifically. some folks adore one "jam band" or another; the only one i really enjoy is Phish, whose discursive extended jams make for enjoyable woolgathering background music and are just plain fun when taken on their own terms.

nowadays most of the rock bands that package themselves as "psychedelic" are bullshitting IMO, or at least that's true of the newer American bands. the Japanese bands seem to mean it...i've met Kawabata briefly, and he's a lovely fellow but dead serious, totally present. and some of the US experimental bands seem serious, but they don't call themselves "psychedelic." when i hear the word "psychedelic" any more i reach for my revolver, or at least check to see that my wallet is still there. it's like someone saying "i'm honest" or "i'm spiritual"...if you're telling me, i don't believe you.

that's what i think about what i know about. of course, i've left out all kinds of shit, like the influence of Indian music, the Beatles, Sandy Bull and John Fahey, A Love Supreme, "Eight Miles High," but give me a break...it's 2 in the morning.

note: nothing above should be taken to disparage artists or work excluded.

theavondon wrote:Man, fuck bands that call themselves "psychedelic" these days.

Honestly, I call Crotchthrottle psychedelic just because people understand it as "weird shit, maaaaaaaaan," so I don't have to go deeper than that.




Although, if it seriously comes up in conversation, I usually do end up going deeper than that.

EDIT: also, that was a great explication on the subject, Dubkitteh.

dubkitty wrote:nowadays most of the rock bands that package themselves as "psychedelic" are bullshitting IMO, or at least that's true of the newer American bands........... when i hear the word "psychedelic" any more i reach for my revolver, or at least check to see that my wallet is still there. it's like someone saying "i'm honest" or "i'm spiritual"...if you're telling me, i don't believe you.

i'm not sure i agree with you here--i think it's just a matter of semantics and marketing, and most people need to have some sort of music classification scheme in their mind. i think a case can be made to consider most new music as derivative or regenerative, as it is informed by its predecessors. and all music has some sort of "mind-manifesting" effect. several studies have been made on this point, some only considering classical music. but a label is just a label, and i just listen to the sound. i think many of the new bands that call themselves whatever genre sound good in the context of their influences, whether they merely copy the style or push it a bit further. at any rate, i enjoyed reading your post.