The term “shoegaze” has become a catch-all phrase for any music that is dark, dreary, or alternative. The shoegaze genre originated in the post-punk scene when certain guitar players used so many floor pedals to get that dreary distortion that supposedly they were always gazing at their shoes.
Unfortunately, bands such as Deftones and Vs. Self have both been lumped into the shoegaze genre by trend hoppers who are trying to blend in to what’s cool and hip right now.
Calling Deftones a shoegaze band is a little disrespectful to the band, since Deftones is actually a nu-metal band.
Chino Moreno’s vocals are by far the most troubling issue for those who call them a shoegaze band. Moreno sounds kind of like Chester Bennington of Linkin Park or an emo Fred Durst. His vocals are higher pitched with a lot more aggression compared to the slow, melancholy sound of shoegaze vocals.
Self, meanwhile, is actually a skramz or screamo band. Their music is mainly composed of long, screaming vocals and math rock-style riffs and breakdowns.
People started incorrectly calling them a shoegaze band after their song “Mourn” began to blow up on TikTok.
This terrible trend of calling everything shoegaze has now spread to other aspects of popular culture, including video games.
There was a TikTok video promoting a rug shaped like the PS2 disk for Silent Hill 2, with a caption calling it shoegaze. What does a rug for a video game have to do with a genre of music?
Shoegaze is nothing more than a sub-genre of music. The overuse of it on the internet has begun to obscure the original meaning of the word.
The trend of trying to appear alternative by using underground music buzzwords like shoegaze has gone too far. It is contrary to the idea of music subcultures that this term has become trendy.
