Good things come in threes, as they say. (They being people who enjoy things that come in threes, I suppose. In writing three articles about three genres, I’ve become one of such people, at least for now This post is the opening salvo in a trio about several interconnected microgenres I fucking love: chillwave, synthwave, and vaporwave.
Chillwave was the first of the three to come along, and its influence is obvious on synthwave and vaporwave, so it’s only natural to write about it first. I initilly heard about it in 2009 but I didn’t end up checking it out until a full two years later.
This is typical behaviour for me. I’ve been late to the party my whole life. I got into Nirvana in 1997, at which point Kurt had been an urn of ashes for three years. VH1’s incredibly entertaining Behind the Music special on Oasis got me into that band in 2000, right around the time of their artistic nadir, the LP Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. Seriously, if you’ve got a singer as good as Liam fucking Gallagher in your band, and you open your album with an instrumental and deny him two other songs so that he sings just 7 of a possible 10…you’re an asshole. But everyone knows Noel’s an asshole, so why am I complaining? Because as long as you deliver the goods, people will take your shit (up to a point). But the fourth Oasis album is fucking atrocious, so bad that the Gallagher brothers were no longer seen as an edgy homage to the Beatles, but an obnoxious pair peddling hokum. Still…I spent the tenth grade playing the shit out of Definitely Maybe, (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory, Be Here Now, and The Masterplan. Years after they were good, I got fookin mad fer Oasis. (Fun fact: I lost my virginity a few days after seeing them open for the Black Crowes @ the Molson Ampitheatre on May 22 2001 on a tour titled the Tour of Brotherly Love because both bands had brothers. For the Toronto show they added Spacehog, yet another band comprised of brothers, because good things come in threes.)
The only Black Crowes song I’ve ever liked is “Lickin” from 2001’s Lions, a full decade after their popular debut album Shake Yer Money Maker.
I began to like Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” just last year. I didn’t much like The Weeknd until “Starboy” came out. Just last month I heard Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” for the first time. (And then my buddy Mike showed me not one, not two, but three punk covers of the song by Forgotten Rebels, The Dickies, and D.O.A, cuz good things come in threes. The latter rendition by D.O.A. is my favourite.
I’ve been this way my whole life. I’m just not all that hip to contemporaneous cultural artifacts and/or expressions until they begin to sink in much later. I didn’t get enthusiastic about Beck until 2007.
So I didn’t get into chillwave until summer 2011, two years too late. The sketch comedy show Portlandia chose Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around” as their theme song when they debuted in January 2011, which I’m sure had a lot to do to do with Ernest Greene becoming chillwave’s principal avatar and “Feel It All Around” becoming the genre’s signature song. Like the genres it would inspire, like synthwave and vaporwave, there was plenty of emphasis on the visual aesthetic of chillwave.
For example, the front cover for the Life of Leisure EP, capturing a woman just as she's about to snap her fingers, is a perfect representation of the sounds inside. Even Washed Out’s record label at the time, Mexican Summer, fits the aesthetic. Would a chill wave artist likeSeek Magic
Washed Out fit on say, London Records roster? Nah. He didn't really fit on Sub Pop either, which might be why he signed with Stones Throw before releasing his third full length, a Xanax-influenced opiate dream called Mister Mellow (tongue slightly in cheek…Greene is aware of his reputation as a drugged-out slacker).
Though Ariel Pink was actually the first artist to be called “the godfather of chillwave,” and you can certainly hear a yacht rock influence in songs like “Can’t Hear My Eyes,” the man is far too erratic, sexist, psychotic, and mean-spirited to be associated in any way with the word “chill.”
I’ve never liked Pink as a person, and he’s been such an asshole recently that he’s had to embrace the alt-right because his liberal, left-leaning fans won’t support him anymore. I used to think he was simply a contrarian, as evidenced by the way he covered Alice In Chains “Man In The Box” when I saw him @ The Phoenix on February 15 2015. Usually indie darlings with grunge leanings, bands like Yuck and P.S. I Love You, tend to reference the Dinosaur Jr. end of things, distorted guitar and minor key melodies, not the knottier, more blues based fare from Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. So I used to think Pink was just being ornery, but I was wrong. He’s not being ironic, he’s sincere in his assholery.
I won’t support Pink anymore, and that’s the last time I’ll ever link to him. I only did so above because of how obviously chillwave/yacht rock that particular song is. This boycott will be largely symbolic, as nobody actually reads my blog. But hey, most boycotts are symbolic. You can ask Philip Anschutz if picketers have ever affected his bottom line, if you can get by his security guards.
Where was I?
Oh yeah. Portlandia and Washed Out.
I like Portlandia but I don’t love it. To my mind, many of its skits shamelessly rip off Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job! The show even hired the same editor, Doug Lussenhop. After three seasons on Portlandia he jumped ship for The Eric Andre Show and immediately set about putting his unique stamp on a third show cuz good things come in threes.
In the blogosphere (remember when the internet had destinations other than social networks?) “Feel It All Around” went viral immediately upon its release, which secured Washed Out’s sole member Ernest Greene a two-album deal with Sub Pop. When the song became the theme for Portlandia, Washed Out became known to the wider waking world.
“Feel It All Around’s” lyrics read like a mission statement:
You’ll feel it all around yourself
You’ll know it’s yours and no one else
Have you ever felt kinda bowled over by the intense beauty of the world but been incapable of describing both that beauty and how it made you feel?
Then “Feel It All Around” is for you. You know it’s yours and no one else’s.
It was weird to me when vaporwave came along and was pilloried for essentially taking existing songs and slowing them down so that they had a watery, glacial vibe, because that is exactly what Ernest Greene did for “Feel It All Around.” He didn’t write his biggest song. He simply slowed an existing song down without changing the key it’s in, and he sang those reverb heavy vocals over the music.
The original is a song called “I Want You” by Italian singer Gary Low. Greene cut the extra chords changes and dispenses with the chorus (not unlike what another Sub Pop artist did years earlier on his first Sub Pop release, Nirvana’s “Love Buzz” single, a Shocking Blue cover.)
Borrowing music is not business as usual for Washed Out though. Taking existing music and slowing it down is more of a vaporwave trademark. Most chillwave songs are originals.
Here is Neon Indian’s “Polish Girl” from Psychic Chasms.
This is Memory Tapes’ “Bicycle” from his incredible debut Seek Magic.
Unlike Neon Indian, who are the virtual definition of a single band (nothing they have done since has even approached the sexy evil disco jam of “Polish Girl) I heartily recommend the Memory Tapes whole album. Not only did songwriter/producer Dayve Haek find himself tied for Washed Out for Band Name that Most Accurately Represents A Specific Genre and/orSound, Seek Magic is a strange, underwater, otherworldly piece of music. The haunting “Plain Material” seems to be a deliberate effort on Haek’s part to explicitly connect the shoegaze-y guitar techniques of My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields and his downbeat lyrics, with the feel-good vibes of chillwave’s sun-kissed sonic volleys. The song begins with "Haek clearly and plaintively singing the word “suicide” and ends with him crooning “it was such a beautiful dream…we heard the sound of a voice crying out…” Perhaps the long dead ghost utterances of long forgotten servicemen of the Krushchev era, an era with some glasnost but that also saw the Soviet military detonating the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated?
The mushroom cloud of Tsar Bomba seen from a distance of 161 km (100 mi). The crown of the cloud is 65 km (40 mi) (213,000 feet) high at the time of the picture.
For Haek, it seemed merely a matter of finding the right crane to lift some heavy sonic tonnage, music freighted with dense overdubs and orchestral arrangement, from their watery graves, via claustrophobic trips underwater, deep divers moving steadily down the aluminium falls of lost Soviet submarines, the heavy sonic tonnage, and lifting it up and out of the water and into the sun (weather permitting of course). His Seek Magic project was more akin to Howard Hughes Project Azorian, a front used by the CIA to try to recover a Soviet submarine that had sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Again from Wikipedia, although the public was told that Hughes was “mining manganese nodules” from the bottom of the Pacific, a front story with no credibility whatsoever but which still led to a stock market frenzy as people from all over the globe tried to invest in these nodules. No nodules were ever recovered, nor did they have any applicable use as a resource. Hughes may have deliberately picked such a useless natrual formation, hoping that people would this his eccentric nature had really taken a turn toward irrevocaerable senility. Didn’t work out that way. Hundreds, if not thousands of overexcited investors trying to get in on the ground floor of a short ended up with worthless stocks that cost them thousands, if not millions. The whole thing reminds me of inveterate gambler Norm MacDonald’s story about a certain Long SHot Louie, who cost him a quarter of a million dollars.
Project Azorian did not
recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from the Pacific Ocean floor in 1974, using the purpose-built ship Hughes Glomar Explorer,
but it did recovered many dead and well-preserved-because-of-salt-water bodies of Soviet servicemen, but no missile codes, and no information that was worth the sheer expense of Hughes’ Glomar Explorer, which was sold and resold from one transnational company to another despite the public availability of a late 1970s Congress session in which scores of experts in Marine law and ship building and operation gave
sworn testimony in United States district court proceedings and in appearances before government agencies, maintain[ing] unanimously that the ship could not be used for any economically viable ocean mineral operation (emphasis mine)
But people bought the useless thing anyway. Sigh.
Cultural exchange works so much better when the medium of that exchange is music. For example, there is a Soviet synth-pop band from the much more real glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev called Alyans, loosely translated as Alliance, who have a song called Na Zare, which I think means “At Dawn,” which blows my mind because At Dawn just happens to be one of my all-time favourite albums by the American rock band My Morning Jacket.
It just goes to show you, cultural exchange should occur on the lower levels of human contact. The trading of songs and music, a samizdat for our new Century. Fuck these secretive and astronomically expensive Project Azorians funded by the wealthiest private American citizens, which tend to give a null result.
The CIA needed Howard Hughes for a project that didn’t work.
Now NASA needs Elon Musk for a bunch of shit that won’t work either.
But meanwhile, the beeps and boops, the synths and sounds of the decade in which our optimistic, anti-communist, anti-union President Reagan promised space travel to be within reach of the average citizen, a claim that was true for roughly 73 seconds after the Challenger liftoff.
Then it exploded.
Then, Americans being Americans, the global joke network sprang into action and disseminated crude jokes all over the globe within days (this was 1986, kids. Getting a joke from Washington to Florida could take three days unless you used the phone, and the price of that phone call, even on the best plan, would run you $20, MINIMUM)
The most famous joke went like this:
Dude #1: Did you hear about Christa McAuliffe, the social science teacher who went into space on the Challenger?Dude #2: *chuckling in anticipation* Yep.
Dude #1: Yeah. She used to be social science but now she’s history.
The Soviets responded to the tragedy with their own bizarre concoction, something called Sovietwave, which is either a joke begun by bored suburban kids in Pittsburgh and a little Garage Band know how, or actual Soviet synth musicians. Either way, I like it:
ANYWAY, with yet another of my famous digressions over, let’s get back to the chillwave. The rest of Memory Tapes’ discography is underwhelming but Seek Magic is a towering achievement. Its titular magic is immediately apparent. You won’t need the aural equivalent of a magnifying glass to hear all the little bloops and beeps and ear candy. It’s a love letter to 1980s recording techniques filtered through a kind of folky sensibility.
Toro Y Moi’s “Blessa” is a gauzy, hazy pretty little thing.
It wouldn’t be long before rock critics declared chillwave dead, a flash-in-the-pan like witch house. Frank Guan @ Vulture wrote:
It couldn’t have been too surprising that the genre known as chillwave faded out of conversation a couple years after being formulated: After all, it was never a particularly stable term to begin with. Chill — at least in the sense the bands grouped under the label could be said to be chill — is vague and situational, something you know when you see it and not before; wave implies fluidity, inconstancy.
I don’t buy Guan’s argument. I think the so-called “decline of chillwave” had more to do with the authors who had championed the genre feeling jilted by what they saw as rock star pretensions in it most visible stars. As far as cocky music writers were concerned, they had given chillwave life, therefore they could take it away. As proof of the genre’s death, they cited the fact that several of chillwave’s most prominent representatives had mutinied, with Memory Tapes releasing a rock album called Player Piano that sounded like if Black Mountain met Black Sabbath. And although 2011’s Underneath the Pine was a landmark album, chillwave or not, Toro Y Moi’s 2015 LP What For? seemed to owe a greater sonic debt to Weezer than Giorgio Moroder.
But music journalists were finding out they were the naive Dr. Frankenstein to chillwave’s was their monster, as artists called Million Young, Keep Shelly In Athens, Wild Nothing and Small Black made their own contributions to the allegedly dead genre. I couldn’t decide if my favourite Wild Nothing song is “Live In Dreams” or “My Angel Lonely” so I’m just gonna post the whole Gemini album and let you choose a favourite for yourself, okay? Okay.
“My Angel Lonely” if you had a gun to my head.
My God doesn’t the second half of that song make you wanna pump yr fist? Too bad they put that ”break it down” part in there, which makes it sound like 2 Unlimited.
You’d be hard pressed to find a more ambitious bassline, or one with more notes, in the chillwave genre, than the one in the above song.
A gorgeous song. Should be on a soundtrack for a film about wasted youth. Marfa Girl. Dragonslayer. Marfa Girl 2.
What are the common denominators?
Lyrically: references to dreams, drugs, feeling good, night, the moon, driving, the desert, vast open expanses, sleeplessness, that strange feeling of seasickness after staying up all night, empty streets, traveling spontaneously.
Musically: Drum machines, plenty of reverb, weak and whispered vocals, a very economical use of the guitar, a tendency toward beta-male passivity. What’s weird to me is that there are no strong singers in the chillwave genre but the Million Young guy is clearly the worst, followed by Teenage Reverb, a band I’ve written about for, then Wild Nothing. But the genre works because it is about evoking a feeling of nostalgia, basking in sun-soaked memories. Some bands play more traditional pop, like Beach House and Still Corners, but they have particular efforts that belong in the genre as much as anything else here.
Attitudinally: These bands all cite the same progenitors, usually Cocateau Twins, the Twin Peaks soundtrack, and our reluctant king of his own crusades, a sonic Richard II, they cite Washed Out himself.
Washed Out’s debut full length in 2011 was greeted with lukewarm reviews, but I thought it was a lovely album. The title, Within & Without was taken from The Great Gatsby, and the songs were mostly odes to love and intimacy. Greene has recently gotten married, and his album’s front cover made it clear where his mind was.
The album rewards repeated listens for its subtlety and lush production and warm sound and Greene’s eternal endearing mumble. The album even has a song called “Soft,” a favourite of Greene’s. Here’s a live performance:
Time and time again in my life I’ve returned to this song, when things have gone wrong, whenever I am lonely, whenever I doubt myself. When I relapse. When I disappoint myself. The lyrics:
Through the sunbeams, you cry
All you've wanted will work out fine
The world is soft.
“The world is soft.”
“You’ll feel it all around you now.”
There has not yet been a better utterance than these two lines for a genre that pushes a propulsive hypnotic momentum in service to a sensual, dream-like hypnotic happiness?
This is chillwave. Open the door. Come on in.
The world is soft.
Up next: Synthwave. I’ll leave you with a few artists who bridge both worlds. This is XXYYXX with “Letter 23,” taking one of the most famous intros of all time and making it his own, a sample-laden, bass-heavy, drugged out opiate haze. But you can get high on it without being on drugs. Dig those Quincy Jones-style handclaps coming seemingly at random on various snare hits.
And of course, more Washed Out. My only complaint with Within & Without is that this song was somehow axed from the tracklist. What was Greene thinking not leaving this one on the album? Ugh, the way the song changes to minor and doomy a 2:40 with that synth line. Gotta love that arpeggiator, and the fan video fits the music really well and is so lovingly rendered.
Nest time: Synthwave. Kavinsky (from the opening scene of Drive), Power Glove, College & Electric Youth, and more.
See you there and then. Prolly tmrw. It’s time for me to call it off.
Night nite.