Chillwave
Chillwave (originally considered synonymous with glo-fi and hypnagogic pop) is a music microgenre that emerged in the late 2000s. It is characterized by evoking the popular music of the late 1970s and early 1980s while engaging with notions of memory and nostalgia. Common features include a faded or dreamy retro pop sound, escapist lyrics (frequent topics include the beach or summer), psychedelic or lo-fi aesthetics, mellow vocals, slow-to-moderate tempos, effects processing (especially reverb), and vintage synthesizers.
Not to be confused with Cold wave (music).Chillwave
Chillwave was one of the first music genres to develop primarily through the Internet. The term was coined in 2009 by the satirical blog Hipster Runoff to lampoon microgenres and indie acts whose sounds resembled incidental music from 1980s VHS tapes. Prior to this, the music would have been labelled as shoegaze, dream pop, ambient, or indietronica. Leading acts included Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Toro y Moi, who gained attention during 2009's "Summer of Chillwave". Washed Out's 2009 track "Feel It All Around" remains the best-known chillwave song.[19]
Many artists exploited the style's low-budget simplicity, which led to an oversaturation of acts that contributed to the original scene's demise. The phrase "chillwave" came to be used as a pejorative due to the music's perceived shallowness and reliance on nostalgia. Detractors also criticized the term for having been contrived by media publications. It heralded the early 2010s proliferation of Internet music microgenres, including vaporwave, which originated as an ironic variant of chillwave. By the mid-2010s, chillwave had faded in popularity, with most of the original artists and listeners of the genre shifting focus to other music styles.
Decline[edit]
Chillwave reached its peak in mid-2010,[35] the same year it was received with widespread criticism.[27] Some of the common descriptors used for the music in reviews or blog posts became clichés, including "soundscapes", "dreamy", "lush", "glowing", and "sun-kissed".[63] The Village Voice's Christopher Weingarten remarked in December 2009 that "90 percent of writing about glo-fi mentions 'the summer' in some fashion. And summer's been over for, like, four months now."[64]
The chillwave scene ultimately "withered and died". One major reason was a sudden oversaturation of artists, which came as a consequence of its simple production process.[51] Writing in the New Times Broward-Palm Beach, Reed Fischer referred to Pitchfork's negative review of Millionyoung's "perfectly fine album" Replicants (2011) as a declaration of the genre's demise.[65] Explaining why the genre fell out of public favor, Bundick surmised that chillwave "did its thing, and once it became a thing, people stopped caring about it, even the artists [making it]."[66]
In 2015, Fitzmaurice reflected that the "holy triumvirate" of Washed Out, Toro y Moi, and Neon Indian had maintained their careers in spite of the genre's decline.[51] Tom Hawking predicted that the "chillwave era will most likely be a footnote to musical history, a faint flaring of middle-class angst in a frightening time for everyone. But that doesn't mean it's not worth examining regardless, because its simple existence says far more about a generation than the music itself ever did."[32]
Bibliography
