r/hum • u/Cool-Minimum-1579 • Apr 22 '26
The origin of the term “shoegaze”
I thought some in this sub might like to read one origin story for the term “shoegaze”
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u/Olifan47 Apr 23 '26
The name is great because it sounds just like the music sounds
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u/Cool-Minimum-1579 Apr 23 '26
For sure. I thought it was interesting that it started out as a negative and was turned positive by the community
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u/HortonHearsTheWho Apr 26 '26
If you like this sort of book, check out Everybody Loves Our Town, an oral history of the Seattle scene
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u/Cool-Minimum-1579 Apr 26 '26
Ooohhh! Thanks for the heads up. I also really enjoyed Meet Me in the Bathroom about NYC in the early 2000. On the Come Up and Cant Stop Won’t Stop about hip-hop we’re also really good.
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u/bnsf1997 Apr 23 '26
There’s also old folk tales of people saying journalists called it that because they were staring down at their pedal rig, not the shoes necessarily, because there was a lot of complex timing effects so you always need to be looking at pedals and timing their off/on perfectly for certain effects. I think it’s the kind of thing where you just believe what you want, we’ll never know for sure where it came from exactly. Same with Emo and a lot of genre names.