“No singer, no leader, no interviews…”: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Get ready to witness the sound and fury of GY!BE, playing Istanbul’s Zorlu Center on 17 November.
Text by Chris McLaren
Who/What
Godspeed You! Black Emperor are as enigmatic as their name suggests. To even define what GY!BE is presents a conundrum: band, group, collective, idea? All of the above? None of the above?
Whatever GY!BE is, it began in Montreal, Quebec in 1994, initially the project of guitarist Efrim Menuck. He soon added two other musicians and released the All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling cassette—in a limited edition of 33 copies—later that year. It was a short collection of ringing guitar chords and a tape hiss. Efrim welcomed the contributions of other musicians, a policy which saw the membership swell to 15 by 1997 (it since stabilized at nine members, give or take). Now orchestral in scope, the group possessed a sonic palette unheard of in range: drums, percussion, guitars, bass, keyboards, cello, violin, bagpipes, accordion, harpsichord, French horn, tape loops, as well as members dedicated to providing accompanying visuals for live performances.
The release of 1997’s F#A#∞ signaled the beginning of what would be the band’s most active period, producing the Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP (1999), Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000), Yanqui U.X.O. (2002), and extensive touring worldwide. Exhausted and with individual members being pulled to family and other creative and business ventures, GY!BE entered a deep sleep in 2003, though never officially disbanding.
The band only reemerged in 2010, called on to curate and perform at the 10th anniversary All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, for which they recruited similarly challenging artists like Neurosis, Deerhoof, Black Dice, Scout Niblett, and Wolves in the Throne Room. Reinvigorated, GY!BE released their first full-length in 10 years,Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! (2012), followed by regular touring (including, perhaps strangely, an opening slot on Nine Inch Nails’ 2013 “Tension” tour). No longer holding themselves to punishing lengths on the road, the band allowed itself to breathe before regrouping for 2015’s Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress and its subsequent touring cycle.
Politics/Ethics
Post-rock is not known for its politics. For most bands, the decision to forgo catchy sloganeering is an artistic, aesthetic choice, leaving the music to speak for itself. For GY!BE, post-rock is more than moving beyond the song structures of rock, but also discarding the cult of personality, the glamor, the decadence, the “rock star.” The group has long-operated on a policy of “no singer, no leader, no interviews, no press photos”—in short, no bullshit.
The reality of the music industry for the past 15 years is that artists can no longer rely on record sales for their base income. As such, the line between art and commerce has understandably blurred, with artists like the Postal Service gladly licensing their music for car commercials. Post-rock in particular has experienced a surge in interest, as film and television music directors realized that this genre is perfectly tailored to guide the audience’s experience through emotional montages. Explosions in the Sky have lent their music to the Texas high school football drama Friday Night Lights, Mark Wahlberg’s heroic Navy SEAL based-on-a-true-story Lone Survivor, as well as the trailer for the video game-based Street Fighter V. This Will Destroy You—one of the genre’s current top contenders—has similarly licensed their music to numerous projects, including the trailer for Clint Eastwood’s revisionist history, cinematic glorification of America’s military righteousness American Sniper. TWDY’s Jeremy Galindo openly addresses the band’s position, explaining, “we definitely wouldn’t work with certain organizations and things based on religious or political views.” Considering that Chris Kyle, the real life American Sniper, had a crusader’s cross tattooed on his bicep and stated that his only regret was that he wasn’t able to kill more Iraqis during his tours of duty, this is a potentially damning statement,
In stark contrast, GY!BE has accomplished an impressive feat for a band with no mouthpiece or lyric sheets in outlining and operating by their own politics and ethics. Accompanied by album cover art depicting bombs falling, Yanqui U.X.O. takes aim at the military-industrial complex: “Yanqui is Spanish for “Yankee,” a somewhat derogatory term used internationally to refer to Americans, and “U.X.O.” is an acronym for “unexploded ordinance”—essentially, American bombs. The liner notes conflate yanqui with “multinational corporate oligarchy” and contain a diagram illustrating the corporate ties between the major record labels and military arms manufacturers, as well as a description of the song “9-15-00” as “Ariel Sharon surrounded by 1,000 Israeli soldiers marching on al-Haram Ash-Sharif & provoking another Intifada.” Perhaps proposing one solution, the back of the Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP includes instructions for how to assemble a molotov cocktail.
GY!BE has also—as best a band of their stature is able to—clung to the peripheries of the music industry. The band was awarded Canada’s esteemed Polaris Music Prize for 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, an honor most would consider a career crowning achievement. GY!BE, however, are not most, and boycotted the event. They subsequently issued a statement decrying the frivolity of such competitions as not serving “the cause of righteous music at all.” The missive went on to condemn the expenses of holding such a “gala in a time of austerity,” as well as the sponsorship of Toyota “during a summer where the melting northern ice caps are live-streaming on the internet.” Taken as an arrogant, ungrateful “fuck you,” this did not win GY!BE any friends among the industry elite, though that was likely the band’s intent.
The Music/Post-rock
To understand the context of GY!BE requires a brief history lesson in post-rock.
While generally rooted in the guitar/bass/drums instrumentation of rock, post-rock—as the name suggests—moves beyond the verse/chorus/verse conventions that serve as the framework of rock songs. Post-rock is not concerned with sing-alongs—vocals are often entirely absent—or packing the dance floor; instead, the instruments are tools to color and texture, and the songs create space for the listener to meditate on and forge her or his own relationship with the music.
While the roots of the genre can be traced back to the droning experimentation of the Velvet Underground, much of today’s post-rock derives its lineage from Louisville, Kentucky’s Slint. The band’s second album,Spiderland (1991), provided the blueprints for the angular, skittering rhythms of Don Caballero, the grooves of Tortoise, and the crashing climaxes of Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, and GY!BE.
Music journalism is one of the most inherently-limited styles of writing. There are only so many arcs to a band’s career, only so many angles from which to view an artist’s creativity, only so many adjectives to translate sounds into words. To write about post-rock of the GY!BE variety is especially daunting: it is mostly a one-trick pony (though it is a very good trick), a sequence of loud/quiet/loud (or quiet/loud/quiet, depending) movements. The descriptors are trite and oft-recycled: shimmering guitars, marching percussion, swelling strings, and so on (see the above paragraph). While contemporaries like Mogwai have diversified from those “crashing climaxes” of their early years to embrace electronics and hooks, GY!BE have held the course: essentially, they do one thing, and they do a hell of a job of it. In Menuck’s words, “We tried to make heavy music, joyously.”
Witness the sound and fury when GY!BE play Istanbul’s Zorlu Center on 17 November.
