Nov. 4, 1631: Mary, Princess Royal/Princess of Orange (mother of William III, future monarch of England) is born.
Nov. 4, 1677: William III marries (the future) Mary II of England; they would eventually rule as “William and Mary.”
Nov. 4, 1847: Felix Mendelssohn passes away.
Nov. 4, 1916: Walter Cronkite is born.
Nov. 4, 1969: Sean Combs (P. Diddy, Diddy, Puff Daddy) is born.
Nov. 4, 1991: My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is released.
Is it possible to make art no one else can make? William Faulkner believed that, in the absence of him, someone else would have written his works. He also applied that principle to Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and William Shakespeare.
Applying that rationale to music, could anyone besides My Bloody Valentine, in their absence, have made Loveless?
These are difficult questions to reckon with—impossible questions—mainly because there’s no metric for measuring what hasn’t happened and what hasn’t been done. Speculation and imagination may offer models of nonexistence and “never dones” but even this constitutes creation, not negation.
That said, we’ll look at Loveless as a case study of “could anyone else have made this?”
I’ve always felt that Loveless is strangely canonical. In terms of music history, it’s held as the pinnacle of “shoegazing,” a genre—or subgenre, depending on who you ask—that emphasizes heavily distorted guitars and a zoned out posture. I couldn’t tell you much beyond that.
Loveless has exerted its own influence on musicians. The Smashing Pumpkins, Hole and Achtung Baby-era U2 have taken inspiration from My Bloody Valentine as a whole, but from Loveless in particular. Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have praised it and taken cues from it. Most critics’ lists, be they “Best 90s Albums” or “Best Albums of All Time” lists, can’t help but include this album.
Yet, I’m convinced Loveless is strangely canonical. I consider it, in most aspects, a fluke. It is, however, a strange and beautiful fluke.
I can’t give you a simple description of this album. If you haven’t heard it, you aren’t going to have many good signposts. The instruments are what you’d expect—guitar, bass, drum, with maybe some flute and synth, but I haven’t found any verification of that—but they’re performed in such a way as to be almost untranslatable. It’s like describing vertigo to someone who’s never had vertigo.
The riffs are thick and inexorable. Most of the drums are composed of samples curated by lead guitarist/wellspring Kevin Shields and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig. I can’t even default to describing Loveless as “oneiric” because, in this context, you would at least need to know the contents of the dream before you could call it such.
But, just because Loveless is strangely canonical doesn’t mean it isn’t bona fide canonical. Canons are defined by what they let in far more than what they leave out, and the inclusion of Loveless more or less signifies the beauty of flukes and their necessity towards an institution like art.
When William Faulkner said anyone could have written Shakespeare, in the grand scheme of things, he didn’t mean it as disparagement towards the works of Shakespeare. He meant it was an admirable fluke that a 16th century Englishman managed to eke out some of the most preeminent, luminous writing the world has ever seen.
Likewise, it’s an admirable fluke that a collection of Irish musicians managed to make an album so singularly great and inimitable. Whether or not Loveless could have been made by any group besides My Bloody Valentine, we’re all the better for its creation.
Think Shakespeare could have written Loveless? Let Sean know at sreichard@wisc.edu.
