Baggy and Shoegazing

New enlighten-me-please answers here.

They're quite different things. Shoegazing mostly revolves around the cathartic guitar swells and the squalls of noise and haze and such -- sort of guitar impressionism -- whereas baggy falls with the Madchester dance scene, the shuffling danceable beats and more straight-across funk-based guitar twiddling. Obvious-obvious examples: My Bloody Valentine versus Happy Mondays or Stone Roses. Baggy sort of came first. I'm sure the English here can give a better sense of them at the time (and a better explanation of why "baggy" is more a descriptive tag than an actual genre-naming thing), but it looked to me like they wound up as semi-competing but semi-cooperating scenes, with the artists in each sort of clued up to and occasionally influenced by the other.

The most fascinating example of the split, as far as I'm concerned, is the first, heavily derivative Blur record, which wanted so desperately to play both sides of this: if I'm remembering right the first two singles were "There's No Other Way" (a little baggy) and "She's So High" (a little shoegazey).

NB I could be completely wrong about all of that.

Yup, pretty much on. Baggy was the wider description of the sound of the Madchester scene, but you couldn't exactly call a London band aping the Stone Roses/Happy Mondays sound Madchester, could you? Hence the broader term, baggy. Baggy was supposedly all about casually mixing dance and rock, but often just sounded like bad funk.

The term baggy refers to the voluminous clothes, especially flared trousers and baggy shirts, that The Kids would wear. Bell bottoms of 22" or more were not uncommon.

I once had to teach a drummer to play a song with that distinctive shuffling "baggy" beat, and he just couldn't do it. Thought for a moment, then told him "OK, play me the Funky Drummer beat, but then imagine you're wearing 24 inch bell bottom flares." He proceded to play it perfectly.

Confusion comes from the fact that many proto-shoegazing songs adapted the baggy beat in order to appeal to The Kids - such as Chapterhouse's "Pearl" or Blur's "There's No Other Way" or even debatably, MBV's "Soon".

i'm not sure how anyone could confuse these 2! i don't think there was much crossover at all (although kates mention of chapterhouses pearl makes me think, ok, maybe theres a little - but even then, its a shoegaze record)

baggy - centred on manchester, but not exclusively by any means. more working class (or, at least, pretensions to). more 'laddy' (but not necessarily 'blokey'). more 'fun'. big trousers (baggy duh). supposed crossover with dance music, but this is debatable, well, complicated at least. possibly acting as gateway from indie to dance, with screamadelica being final exit point.

shoegaze. centred on southeast. middle class. stereotypes of tarquins and ruperts and harriets. perceived as studenty (at a time when not everyone was a student). cardigans and black jeans. despite 'druggy' sound, not really seen as having a drug audience (bit of dope for the students. more stereotypes of ineffectual wimps

both, of course, were great!

northside v. slowdive

FITE

Baggy and Shoegazer can't be the same thing...if you're pants are too baggy, you won't be able to gaze at your own shoes!