The modern world ended in the 1980s-not with the bang of nuclear war or an economic catastrophe, but with a whimper heard throughout the culture. The march of modernity, once considered inexorable, had faltered in a world where everything had been done once and tried twice, where there were no new shores to discover, only new sand castles to build. Postmodernism can be a comfortable perch from which to view the rubble of modern beliefs, which hardly anyone believes in anymore because everyone knows how badly they failed. Postmodernism can be a license for irony, which can become a license for smugness over anyone who ever believed in anything enough to die for it.
Postmodernism can be humble or hubristic.
It can mean anything or nothing in a society that has lost its common definitions of meaning. Which brings us to the subject of postrock, a critic's term if ever there was one and a label that adheres uneasily to the musicians asked to wear it. It implied that rock, like modern architecture, had exhausted itself and hardened into dogma. Postrock was applied to such venturesome performers as Bjork and Stereolab, who combined dizzying mixtures of influences. It was the British press who first decided that Chicago bands such as Tortoise and the Sea and Cake formed an unlikely postrock bridgehead in America's heartland.