JOHN’S GUIDE: RAINBOW ROCK

IT HAD TO BE DONE

Some genres start as a joke but eventually transcend that joke to the point where people forget that the whole thing was kind of a joke to begin with. Rainbow rock never moved past the first stage. The genre title, coined by the legendary musician Twig Harper to describe a brand of neon-blasted noise popular in the 2000s, was an in-group gag that didn’t reach any serious public visibility. There is a reality in which a writer from Vice or Pitchfork got wind of the name and wrote a scene-defining piece, which led to another wave of artists. But that didn’t happen. For the most part, the story of this music starts in the early 2000s and ends in the late 2000s. The genre name was only known by a select group, mostly people who directly participated in it.

Rainbow rock was bright and life-affirming and annoying. It had a hypercolor sensibility that was as indebted to electronic music as hardcore, as much to chiptune as noise. Rainbow rock was distorted arpeggios played on both stringed instruments and synths. As my friend Alex points out, there is a throughline that connects Terry Riley to “Baba O’Riley” by The Who and AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” to the bands that were coming out of Providence’s Fort Thunder collective. Rainbow rock could sound like no wave Van Halen. It could also sound like Throbbing Gristle covering a pop trance track. This pliability was in part due to the visual aesthetics that guided these bands, many of whom had members that doubled as contemporary artists. 

There’s a reason this shit was called rainbow rock, people! Visually, it combined primitive tech play (8-bit graphics, garish Photoshop gradients, poorly-coded HTML, and psychedelic Flash animations) with a crafty sensibility: handmade packaging, masks, colorful afghans, and string necklaces. In this subculture, if you want to call it that, there was a sense of confused millennial nostalgia, the kind that permeated many undergrounds in the aughts: ‘80s and ‘90s aesthetics reappropriated and shot through an aggro lens. If I may slip into the vernacular here, picture My Little Pony surfing a strobing wave of bad trip neon. Rainbow rock could be cute, but it was always too fucked to be twee. 

Below are ten examples of the style, with a few nested deep cuts—it goes without saying that if these videos came out today, there would be a strobe warning on a good portion of them—and I hope they get you all excited for the inevitable Numero Group rainbow rock compilation that will come out in 2029.

Lightning Bolt “13 Monsters”

I don’t think anyone is going to argue that Lightning Bolt is not the ur-rainbow rock band. They have a record called Wonderful Rainbow. The masked bass-and-drums duo’s sound, a combination of noise and post-hardcore with a fist-pumping melodic sensibility clearly in conversation with classic heavy metal, seemed to lend itself to being a jumping-off point for other more electronic-minded rainbow rock acts. It makes sense. Brian Chippendale’s drumming always reminded me of chopped jungle breakbeats, and Brian Gibson’s bass arpeggios can have the churning majesty of a great happy hardcore tune. Lightning Bolt is from Providence and incubated in a space called Fort Thunder, the ur-noise warehouse of the aughts. It was filled to the brim with cultural detritus and hosted wrestling events and, in many ways, served as a transitional point between two eras: the earnestness of ‘90s punk and the psychotic poptimism of rainbow rock. Created by members of the collectives Dearraindrop and Paper Rad, the frenzied video for “13 Monsters” is a prime example of the style in motion. The song itself sounds like a sneaky gremlin storming a digital castle. How’s that for a rainbow rock sentence!

Forcefield ZMTRX

Also coming out of Fort Thunder was the art collective Forcefield, whose visual sensibility was a tangle of psychedelic patterned knitwear and flashing colors. They were a little bit Mike Kelley and a little bit Japanese children’s television. Though their music was maybe too harsh to be considered proper rainbow rock, their contribution to costuming alone puts them on the Rainbow Mount Rushmore. It’s probably not a coincidence that they ended up in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. There were a lot of masked bands and duos from Providence, but only some of them I would consider to be rainbow rock. In fact, there were many things back then that were almost rainbow rock but not exactly rainbow rock. Hella had the sound but not the visuals. White Mice wore masks but leaned too hard into gore aesthetics. Electroclash and especially chiptune could almost rock in a rainbow sort of way but were not quite noisy enough. It’s a slippery term, and I invite discussion in the comments section.

Extreme Animals “God Jam (Blow Your Pants Off)”

For a time, Extreme Animals—yet another duo; I just realized that every act on this list is either a solo act or a duo—were the Paper Rad house band. For those unfamiliar, and I should probably get a John’s Music Blog glossary going at some point, Paper Rad were a multimedia art crew who emerged in the wake of Fort Thunder and took that sensibility to a more overtly technology-aware, pop-focused space. The collective made music videos for Beck and staged art shows at fancy galleries but also played basements and warehouses. Their use of ‘80s childhood signifiers transcended hipster nostalgia and ended up being both spiritual and disturbing. Back then, Extreme Animals were rocking with a tri-headed monster of a style, a synthesis of noise, electro, and pop trance. Another rainbow rock sentence: they sounded like acid-laced frosted flakes spilled on top of an army of levitating troll dolls.

Neon Hunk “Live In Chicago 3/29/2003”

My gateway to the rainbow rock universe was a band called Neon Hunk. Hailing from my home state of Wisconsin, they were another masked two-piece playing an alien style of synth-and-drums music that I once heard referred to as “Pokemon grindcore.” Like Lightning Bolt, they put out records on the great Providence label Load Records. Also like Lightning Bolt, they rocked in a variety of contexts. Neon Hunk’s crossover into the contemporary hardcore universe was how they got onto my radar; the links page on their quick-blink Angelfire website had enough information to change my life forever. This video is taken from an important event that happened in 2003 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The show was part of a larger traveling package called the Totem Tour, which featured contributions from Paper Rad, Dearraindrop, Forcefield and beyond. In fact, at the end of the clip, you get a glimpse of a performance from Barkley’s Barnyard Critters, a chaotic fursuit side project of Lightning Bolt’s Brian Gibson that featured a roving cast of characters, a couple of whom ended up being blue-chip painters.

Dan Deacon “The Crystal Cat”

If you want to simplify things, you could break down rainbow rock into a series of waves. The first wave was centered around Providence and Fort Thunder. The second wave had to do with the acts and collectives that came in the wake of Fort Thunder: stuff like Paper Rad, Dearraindrop, and Neon Hunk. For the third wave, the focus migrated to Baltimore, where Dan Deacon and the Wham City collective pushed the style into the larger indie rock conversation. You should say those last few sentences with a British accent. Anyway, Dan Deacon is a one-man dayglo electronic supershow. “The Crystal Cat,” both the video and the song, represent a peak of the genre, a sharpening of previous iterations of rainbow rock into a battle-ready sword. It came out in 2007, the same year that Paper Rad performed at the Museum of Modern Art. (I guess in the interest of completeness, I should note that there was a West Coast rainbow rock contingent. The crews Hooliganship and Collective Jyrk come to mind. The concurrent Los Angeles microgenre known as ravesplotation, while not rainbow rock, was also part of a larger wave of post-noise party music that crested around the same time. Aren’t you glad you are spending your precious free time reading this?)

Videohippos “Narwhalz”

Baltimore was so rainbow rock crazy that even the electronica legends Matmos had to throw their damn hat in the ring. Another key Bmore player was Videohippos, a duo who jammed with projections behind them and had a sound somewhere between rainbow rock and the wild style pop punk of Japanther, a RR-adjacent band at the very least. Videohippos member Kevin O’Meara, may he rest in peace, was also a member of the duo Butt Stomach with Dan Deacon, who served as the Baltimore analog to Mindflayer, a collaboration between Brian Chippendale and Forcefield member Matt Brinkman. We all miss you, Kevin.

Narwhalz Pom Redneck Snoopy

There is a three-way Venn diagram that exists somewhere on the internet. In the image, one circle contains an example of rainbow rock (Dan Deacon). A second represents juggalo culture (Insane Clown Posse). The third is saved for trip metal, another barely real noise genre, this one created by the legendary John Olson (his band Wolf Eyes fills the spot). In the middle of all three styles there is one name, the correct name, the person connecting all the dots: Narwhalz (Of Sound). Brian Blomerth is now known as a high-level comics artist who made a best-selling graphic novel about the invention of LSD. Before that, he was making gabber on a Gameboy and screaming about Pomeranians over it. Brian has been a major consultant on this list—we once did a podcast together about rainbow rock; good luck finding that shit—and hit me with more deep cuts than I could possibly get into here. I’ll do part two next year.

Unicorn Hard-On “Hellebore”

Narwhalz was from Richmond but moved to Baltimore. Valerie Martino, also known as Unicorn Hard-On, went to the same school as Brian but ended up in Providence. And that’s what I like to call a tale of two rainbow rock cities. I just drank a cherry cola-flavored Celsius. Unicorn Hard-On’s style of hardware rave music was definitely ahead of the noise techno curve, and it still sounds sick today. The video for “Hellebore” is maximum RR damage: there are cats; there are kittens; there are flashing lights; there are primitive MS Paint graphics. What more do you people want?

Dr. Doo “Live @ Allston’s Obriens 2006”

Back in the day, former Paper Rad member Ben Jones, who is now a successful animator and television executive living in Los Angeles, had a solo project called Dr. Doo. The above video is somewhat notable if not only for the reason that, in the performance, which sees Jones playing drums to prerecorded music and an adjoining projection, there are jokes about grunge music, which I guess you could say was a somewhat “forward thinking” kind of joke to be making in 2006. A drummer playing along to an animated video projection: that’s rainbow rock.

Geocash “Correction (Live at The Borg Ward, Milwaukee 2009)”

Geocash were an obscure Midwest RR duo who went off like a teenage version of Extreme Animals. Their output is almost entirely wiped from the internet. Though the genre was small, my knowledge of Geocash makes me wonder what other forgotten rainbow rockers are out there, waiting to be discovered for a Nuggets-style retrospective. I wasn’t even able to touch upon all the heads that I’m up on. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again—I am, after all, simply a humble, stupid music blogger—if you have any rainbow rock tips, sound off in the comments. Let’s give Numero Group some fodder for that boxset!