By Devon Geyer
When musical classifications like The Fugue, The Minuet, and The Opera reigned supreme, they relied on form and structure for their differentiation. But as composers like Beethoven entered the scene, form was no longer enough to accurately categorize musical differences.
Fast-forward a century or two, and the music listeners of the world stand on the precipice of using the word “Chillwave” in a sentence about a type of music. This begs the questions, “What the hell is Chillwave? And why do I care?”
You care because you either talk about music a lot with your friends and having another handy-dandy term like Chillwave might increase your chances of being understood.
Or because you heard someone talk about Chillwave and you think it’s disgusting that a guy with a Radiohead tattoo can invent a genre while sitting at his MacBook.
Chillwave “is characterized by its heavy use of effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines,” according to Wikipedia.
This debate is difficult because it represents a larger shift.
Musical understanding has been taken from the hands of its most laudable and respected critics, and placed into the seething masses of Gen Y listeners on the Internet. Along with this shift comes the effect on the music itself.
When the term Rock and Roll was used by an Ohio radio broadcaster and then continually used in description, it caught on, and now we have a workable term for Rock and Roll. But this argument doesn’t apply to Chillwave.
The similarities between Chillwave artists are lacking when compared to their obvious differences. The instrument choice varies from band to band, such as the preciseness of electronic drums in a band like Neon Indian versus the bedroom quality of Julian Lynch’s acoustic drum kit.
But even calling Chillwave a genre would give credence to the idea that there is an underlying macroscopic reason why these bands are similar and deserve a name to define them.
Proponents will claim that Chillwave is like Nu-Wave, an imposed label to describe new processes being applied to familiar sounds. This is to say that there was never an internally created genre called Chillwave, but rather an externally-identified string of allegedly like-minded bands.
If this definition will placate Chillwave fans, then what has happened to the genre? Has the Internet turned websurfers into flighty thrill-seekers looking for the next wave of musical genius, only to let excitement subside and move on to the next thing?
Is the fear, then, that this transient “understanding” of new “waves” will in actuality destroy art’s ability to create lasting change?
I’ve heard many respected critics, musicians, and fans say that the days of movements like The Blues, The Beatles, and Punk are now gone due to the fractured nature of the Milennials’ Internet mindset.
Others disagree, adamant that the 20th century was simply a remarkable period in human history with rapid structural change that pushed new musical forms to their artistic limits.
Will we overcome our “waves” of the blogger-assigned subgenre and transcend once again to create original art?
I don’t know. Until that day, new “Chillwaves” will continue to crop up and challenge our sensibilities about what is or is not to be a genre.
But don’t talk to a music historian about “Chillwave” because when he asks you where it began, you must remember that the Internet is not a real place.
Photo by Mira Shemeikka
oh cmon, get over yourself. “The Internet is not a real place”; please provide ANY evidence of this not being a discourse. Foucault would SCOFF at you. Durkheim would scoff as well.
“Transcend once again to create original art”?????? What the hell does that even mean?? All art is original; nobody has ever made it before. Why are music critics more capable of labeling genres? Consider “post-rock”: people still complain about Simon Reynolds’ term. Culture produces and produced genre names, before the Internet, such as emocore/emo–but those became highly debatable. Chillwave has proven strangely coherent; people have intentionally followed in the others’ “footsteps.” In fact, some bands have already descibred themselves as “post-chillwave,” which entails a conscious acknowledgment of the genre.
Chillwave ascended with not just blogs. Wire Magazine attempted to define the generally cohesive movement, before it got grouped into the more-Best Coast/Washed Out bands and was more Ferraro/Nite Jewel–they called it “hypnagogic pop.” That would be JUST as debatable as chillwave or glo-fi, but that’s a music critic after all?
Clearly, you only know entry-level chillwave and the wikipedia page. There is something distinctively not synth pop or indie electronic about, say, Blue Hawaii or Elite Gymnastics or Monster Rally. Pseudo/Faux-lo-fi sample-based fuzz music.
You HONESTLY consider “rock and roll” a “workable term”?!?!! Likewise, Blues is considerably interlocked with Vocal Jazz and Vaudeville. No genre has ever had anything beyond “allegedly like-minded artists,” so get over it. This is just the new musical discourse, with hipster runoff, heavy irony, and possible failures. However, chillwave has proven not to be a failure, and I see it going far. Too bad you disagree… we’ll see.
Look up “based,” I’m sure you’re even more worried about this goofy distinction. And since when did chillwave artists give any credit to Radiohead?? What a generic hipster cheapshot. You missed your age, that was 10 years ago buddy. Give up, hipsters have moved on bud. You can’t write for hipsters anymore. Just start reading hipster runoff or hipinion and occasionally posting paraphrases, because you’ve lost it =/ The competitive world of big-money and journalism and pharmaceuticals is no less “unreal” than the Internet; sexism, nonsense, mistakes, personal initiatives abound.