Leave the Chillwave Backlash alone!
Contemporary western culture is a pile of 5hit. Making fun of it is a lot more rewarding experience than actually having to consume it.
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Leave Chillwave Alone
In defense of the nostalgia-steeped genre Ariel Pink both invented and abandoned
In "Hardcore Pops Are Fun," from 2006's House Arrest, Pink provided a kind of hymn/manifesto for this generation's ahistorical omnivorousness: "Pop music is free/For you and me . . . Pop music is wine/It tastes so divine." But he still had a foot in '90s irony ("Hardcore Pops" was actually recorded in 2001). Archness gets burned off completely in the music of those that came after him, replaced by an earnestness that aspires to spirituality. You can see the sensibility in both the music of key figures like James Ferraro and Sun Araw, and in the writing of Altered Zones contributors like 20 Jazz Funk Greats: hyper-referentiality without irony. From a distance it looks like postmodernism, but really it's something else: a mystical merger of Pop Art and psychedelia.
Earnestness is one of the defining attributes of "digimodernist" culture identified by the theorist Alan Kirby—other hallmarks are "onwardness" and "endlessness." On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there's no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one's name out there. Stimuli streams in, largely via the Web; creativity streams out, largely via the Web. Today's musician is a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence. (That's me echo-jamming Eighties Baudrillard, by the way).
Courtesy Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
Ariel Pink, already past it
Details
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
"Round and Round"
(#8 single),
Before Today
(#16 album)
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"Round and Round"
(#8 single),
Before Today
(#16 album)
Pazz and Jop 2010
Rise of the Douchebags
Kanye West and James Murphy turn their private flaws into public triumphs
By Zach Baron
Never Forget
Cee Lo Green sums up 2010 in two little words
By Rob Harvilla
Little Pink Polos for You and Me
Wallowing and/or reveling in social anxiety with Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend
By Eric Harvey
The Wayward Crucifixion of M.I.A.
On the dodgy, opportunistic, truffle-fry-fueled campaign against both Maya and Maya
By Charles Aaron
Attack of the Singing Rappers
On Drake, Nicki Minaj, B.o.B., and the art of the debut-as-pop-crossover
By Clover Hope
The Great Gay-Pander-Off of 2010
Katy, Nicki, Ke$ha, P!nk, and Gaga taste the rainbow
By Rich Juzwiak
The Internet-Rap Atomization
Odd Future, Lil B, Wiz Khalifa, et al. build tiny kingdoms, and rule them
By Tom Breihan
Justin Bieber, Twitter Casanova
The Most Popular Boy in the World rules the only voting bloc that matters: pre-teen girls
By Camille Dodero
The Top Ten
From Kanye West to The Suburbs
Stuff We Like
Rick Ross Lies, the Rolling Stones Plunder, And Taylor Swift Triumphs
The Personals
Industry Woes, Cultural Theories, Polite Suggestions, and Calls of Bullshit
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Which brings us back to Pitchfork's decision to create a sibling site. Why couldn't they just process the output from all these zones themselves, sort wheat from chaff? The answer perhaps is that there's just too much of the stuff, and that filtering doesn't seem to be quite the thing to do with it. This scene is about being engulfed and enthused, carried along by the currents of the new. Drifting not sifting. Before Today made the Top Tens of most of the blogs that make up this restless circuit, but, one senses, mostly out of sentimental loyalty to the forefather. Signed to a big label, touring to promote his big album, praised and profiled by big magazines, Pink no longer really belongs to the underground. Whether that now puts him in limbo, and whether any of his chill-dren (the most promising, Toro Y Moi and Neon Indian, both add Daft Punk to the mix) will follow him there, remains to be seen.
5 comments
Everything loses momentum when it doesn't evolve. Chillwave had a tenuous place in blogger's hearts because it had that faint nostalgic quality. But the genre didn't end up being very flexible, all things branded "chillwave" sounded exactly the same. The sounds will remain but I'm glad the term is being given the proverbial gtfo.
To descend into the same stodgy critic(al) urge that Simon attributes to Pitchfork, I don't think it makes sense to label Ariel Pink as the father of chillwave. It's pretty obvious that the genre has coalesced into '80s-influenced electronic pop. Its other line of con-/divergence is more the psych/tape noise of Ducktails and Animal Collective, rather than the '60s Nuggets and '70s AM radio that Ariel Pink stems from. It's too late for wish-fulfilling reassignment to guide the evolution of the genre; the night bus is already leaving the station.
Not so much the specific sound that current chillwave artists are mining stems from Ariel Pink, but the method and approach to their music certainly does. And at the end of the day, it all boils down to hazy, psychedelic pop filtered through whichever genre the artist chooses to use as their foundation.
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