hey just as a piece of housekeeping this is probably part 1 of a few essays i’m going to write about music from 2010-2014ish. it’s a period of time when i actually knew what people were doing because i was the intended target age so i have a lot of thoughts about it. anyway:
god, can you try to imagine being in 2011 again? i’m living in the same city and interacting with much the same landmarks, buildings, bus routes, but 2011 is a foreign land. for the purpose of this essay i’d round it up and say 2010, but i hadn’t moved up here then. in 2011 i was 18, living on my own for the first time. a first year in university, unsure what i was doing or why i was doing it, tearing through media at a frenzied pace trying to catch myself up to where i perceived everyone around me to be. everyone around me was of course doing the same thing. it was easy, then, to get into conversations:
“hey you heard the new uhh washed out single”
“no but you should put it on”
“oh fuck theyre playing das racist itll have to wait”
followed by everyone in the basement of a college house sing-screaming along to Rainbow In The Dark. now it seems a little childish- in hindsight ⅔ of das racist were not good rappers (heems’s verses hold up somehow) and 3/3 of them were not good people. this was before the r. kelly shit hit the fan, so we’d play remix to ignition constantly and wonder in the same breath “where’s the original ignition? why is it always the remix?”. grimes was on no matter where you went, though half of that may have been due to some hometown pride at play. i keep telling people my elbow’s in the music video for oblivion. (it kind of is. i’m out of frame, but i was there! i swear!) i remember going to the clubs and hearing rihanna’s initial stabs at more straightforward club bangers, as if pon de replay wasn’t a banger enough. there were guitar tapping bands and non guitar tapping bands. my friends and i would sit outside on an old couch and do gravity bong hits and talk about said guitar bands.
it was a bright optimistic moment for music: a lot of people doing a lot of different things, bedroom pop becoming more and more distorted and dreamlike, dance music either frenetically reaching for its nadir or becoming a loopy, drugged-out version of itself, guitar bands doing a lot of guitar band things. it was dirty and messy. nobody really knew what they were doing in any concrete way. there was a lot of shrugging and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck.
outside the realm of music, there was quite a bit going on to be excited about: the wall street occupation was in full swing, the student protests in montreal had me and many others walking the streets together shouting “so-so-so, soli-dari-te!” and pinning tiny red squares of felt to our backpacks. the us was still under the obama regime, and their ability to frame the government as a positive force while continuing the long tradition of bombing the middle east held strong for the time being. or, more likely, i was just too young/naive/hopeful to look at any of it with the cynicism necessary to see the real situation. it was the 10th anniversary of 9/11. we were firmly in the post-something era. what the something was had yet to be defined.
to me, the genre that encapsulates this moment the best is chillwave. this was a phenomenon of electronic music that was crucially lo-fi and laughably easy to make if you knew how to a) open FL studio, b) put some synths with a lot of reverb down and c) apply a sidechain compressor to the kickdrum. it originally started off as a name coined by ancient and now defunct blog hipster runoff (much loved, much hated) to refer to electronic music perceived as “chill”- usually 80s inspired, usually full of Korgs, kind of beachy. over time it became more and more associated with getting really stoned and lying in a hammock. (there is even a chillwave song called hammock. it’s fine.) a lot of these bands were just people in their bedrooms, which helps slot chillwave solidly under the bedroom pop overgenre.
this was music made solely for the activity of chilling. nowadays i look at what people listen to in the same circumstances and i see even more of a return to perceived tradition- lots of steely dan, lots of classic rap, a lot of more cynical-minded shit. it’s hard to relax nowadays knowing what’s going on in the world. hard enough that listening to music made solely for lying around and getting stoned with friends seems trite, maybe even decadent. there’s too much hope in it, even the more serious-minded songs.
a few formerly-chillwave bands did survive over time, like neon indian and toro y moi, but they survived primarily by pivoting to making other kinds of music. they also were the more unique bands among the milieu: neon indian for example had a more “drugged-out” vibe to it and made my mom mad whenever i played it at home. (apparently, the higher synth frequencies hurt her teeth somehow.) chillwave didn’t have a lot going for it once shit started getting more grim out there. from my memory it sort of petered out around 2013 at latest, which is also when things began to feel a little less hopeful. i mean, the occupy movement failed utterly, police brutality began to get somehow even worse as a response, shit overseas was uhhh Awful…
i don’t think the hope intrinsic to chillwave is necessarily all connected to macro world events. this was also a genre made and circulated before spotify or other streaming services became big. the closest thing we had was pandora radio, and nobody used that once it became apparent that its algorithm kind of sucked. people used last.fm, but more for its social media and play-tracking abilities than anything else. this meant that there was still a chance to make it big without having to also market oneself, without having to depend on a service that pays less than a penny per stream for potential exposure. you could put your stuff up on what.cd, post about it on tumblr, get your music talked about on blogs that people actually read. it wasn’t quite the angelfire days of online but it was closer to it than we are now. there were a lot of jokes about chillwave sounding like instagram filters because at the time a) yeah it did and b) that was topical.
there’s a few bands that stand out to me during this time simply because there’s no way they could’ve existed or put out the music they made at any other time.
first is purity ring, who i saw open for neon indian in 2011 at sala rossa. the venue is one of the “godspeed venues”, owned by the members of godspeed you black emperor because montreal is a self-propelled parody of itself. it’s a nice one. i hadn’t heard of purity ring previously but they were a version of “chillwave” that had a lot more bite to it. still slow, still stuck with the sidechained kick, borrowing their trap hi-hats from xxyyxx but with soaring high vocals. a lot of people are probably mad at me for calling them chillwave but the vibe was there. they performed with a giant pvc tube structure that lit up whenever smacked, the spectacle of which immediately endeared me to them. i helped my friend alex decorate his room in a house affectionately referred to as “the dillhole” while we listened to their first album and i think that was about as perfect as their music was gonna get. everything about them screamed 2011-2012 montreal, which is probably why none of their later work has done anything for me.
second is home, who is a guy named randy that got really big on tumblr but who is also probably the longest-lived chillwave maker. he did that song “resonance” that got insanely popular via vine clips of like bart simpson driving around with the colours all wonky. it’s a solid song for chillwave, has all the necessary parts, but hearing it in 2015 was so profoundly weird that even now it sounds somehow off. maybe it’s because i can only ever think of people posting and reposting the bart simpson video. maybe it’s because this was one of the first times someone who made something Big had cultivated a juggernaut of a personal brand that i actually interacted with and knew. that was new for the time, and a herald of what was to come.
last is washed out, who is probably the defining artist for chillwave and who is, somehow, still making music. (i haven’t listened to any of it.) they came out with “high times” in 2009, which is insanely early for an album that defines a genre that got big in 2011, and which (incredibly!) holds up pretty decently. the really important album though and the one that i think cements the whole “vibe” is within and without, which is seared into my brain for eternity. i remember walking to the cd store near mcgill campus and getting a copy, because this was still a time when physical media wasn’t a curiosity or something for vinyl freaks. it blew my fucking mind. it’s got so much delay on it the echo rivals that of the grand canyon. it’s got incredible pop sensibilities: the hooks work, the instrumentation is appealingly vintage, it’s fun without being too cheesy. it’s polished but not too polished- there’s still artifacts of it being made in a bedroom alone, one of which is how horny the damn thing is. it swells to impossible peaks in every song and then breaks in a spectacle of synth washes and pads that fills every available frequency, like a blue-and-pink lit wall of sound. it is still perfect music to get high to.
listening to these bands, these songs, now feels like a peek into an alternate universe. a universe that i lived in, sure, but one that’s so removed from the current world that it feels foreign. it makes me ask myself how much of my thoughts about these songs are because of me getting old and how much comes from the world around me growing more weary. it makes me wonder when i started finding the massive walls of reverb dated. it makes me wonder if we will, as always, eventually return to this decadence. like it was an answer to 90s pop, what is the answer to chillwave?
my gut reaction is to point to hyperpop, but i hesitate. hyperpop is everything about 90s pop taken to its logical extremes, yes, but it’s not decadent in the same way. it’s people looking back on that era having never really experienced it and feeling like they might have missed something legitimately good, legitimately innocent. it’s polished and clean and turns its production value as high as it can, both in terms of the music itself and its visuals. while chillwave was based around simple aesthetics- usually shapes, bright colours, a sort of neo-psychadelica- hyperpop is unnaturally clean and perfect. its aesthetic is too much because everything about it has to be too much; now in the age of instagram-as-person, the aesthetic is more crucial than it ever has been. hyperpop is hyper- everything for a reason, and i think that reason is spite.
one of the only pop artists right now that gets that is george clanton, who combines the effortless breeze of chillwave with the hard-edged yearning that hyperpop has running through it while still keeping the sound of it just lo-fi enough to resonate. it’s wrapped up in a complicated nostalgia for the boy bands of the 90s, and makes me feel the same ache that “you and i” (one of, if not the best washed out tracks) does, even now. his music has struck a curious balance and one that i want to see pushed to its logical end.
while chillwave has essentially been aged into nothingness, its influence can still be heard in the music that surrounded it. M83’s midnight city came out of left field and smacked everyone around the head in 2011, which was a big fucking deal because they were Established and all of a sudden made a hit that sounded like something marrying the gritty synths of...synthwave with the languidity of chillwave. it was as if kazinsky had taken a couple tabs of klonopin and laid down to nap. that feeling was further extended into the twin genres of vaporwave and future funk, which took 80s staples and anaesthetized them into stuttering, echoey ghosts of their predecessors. obviously these genres had their own unique Things that propelled them further than chillwave had (vaporwave especially), but i think the common thread is strong enough to point out. i feel though that while chillwave took the sounds of the past and rewove them into something to put on the background at a party, vaporwave and future funk took them and created a more cynical, dark nostalgia that suited their years of prominence.
what’s the conclusion here? is there one? chillwave lived and then died and is now destined to be reborn in some future time as a zombified version of itself, like all other media. such is the hell we’ve entangled ourselves in. at least we can look forward to some distant time (2024 or so i’d imagine) where we can once again get very stoned to music made to get very stoned to. assuming they dont make weed evil or something idk!