WAS CHILLWAVE REALLY DEAD?: Of Music Fads and the Internet Age
It’s that kind of special thing that happens sometimes nowadays, having acclimated to the Internet in every aspect of our lives… We remember a time when we got our culture other ways, we just can’t seem to remember how it felt.
I started getting into music at critical - read: “weird” - time, somewhere in the mid-aughts. Hype Machine was gaining momentum, and MySpace was definitely becoming a thing.
It was exciting to discover new remixes and club tracks trending on Hype Machine, a music streaming site that scoured a carefully curated list of blogs to aggregate the best new MP3s, which were then voted up a chart by users. As basic as it seems today, it wasn’t that far from Spotify, with an added thrill of immediacy and interactivity.
The tracks were made recently (sometimes the day of), and they more often than not used pirated samples of pop hits, or they mashed together 2 cool artists - say, Justice and Ratatat - to create something that could be Saved As to your hard drive and DJ’d that night if you had a gig.
At the time, it was still hard to post a sound file online. YouTube was still figuring itself out, while SoundCloud wasn’t on anyone’s radar yet. MySpace was a valuable option to share music with your friends or your fans, but its player was still clunky when came time to embed it outside of the social media platform.
To post a song on a website, your best bet was still to have a WordPress with a host and a bunch of costly bandwidth. That’s how musicians and bloggers formed an unlikely alliance. It totally changed the way underground music evolved from that point on.
There was such a steady flow of good music, that listening to the same song twice became redundant. Suddenly, music nerds wanted to hear the new tracks, and the new genres, which pushed artists to invent their own category, or at least identify with a super niched subgenre.And things just got more nuts when SoundCloud and YouTube kicked into full gear.
In electronic music, french touch gave way to dubstep, which quickly became a mainstream phenomenon, paving the way to EDM. Chillwave incorporated elements of hip hop and EDM to lo-fi indie pop, spawning the career of artists like Toro Y Moi and Neon Indian. Vaporwave was a reaction to the mind-blowing (or mind-numbing) action of EDM, offering hissing samples and slurring drums in an ironic spin. Future funk was an uptempo version of that style, which evolved in parallel to future bass, which opened the door to even more styles…
And so on, and so forth.
With each new trend, a movement was immediately outdated. A music producer could ape the aesthetic of Vaporwave one day and find it relegated to the backroom of the Internet (e.g. Reddit) the next. A tide which often took legions of producers with it, never to be heard from again, unless you remembered to follow them on social media platforms which in turn also became outdated within the spawn of a few years.
But while genres where a little one note (pun intended) or they quickly became a caricature of themselves, like dubstep, the musicians who survived were those who had the levity of rolling with the punches. Skrillex became a pop mogul in his own right, Saint Pepsi - once dubbed the Prince of vaporwave - turned to singing and signed to Carpark Records, Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick multiplied artistic projects and Neon Indian’s songs evolved into full blown retro-futuristic masterpieces (albeit, after some growing pains).
But chillwave itself, as a genre, became a punchline moments after it’s inception. It was ridiculed by the artists who championed it and mocked by the same hipsters who, months before, hailed it as the future of music.
Today, looking for user generated chillwave playlists on streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify, you will find a few entry desperately stuck in 2011, with the same mix of tracks from albums such as Life of Leisure EP, Causers of This and Psychic Chasms. If those playlist are to be believed, chillwave, still born, died the same way languages do, to tired to evolved.
But listening to those playlists, the overplayed tracks appear surprisingly current. Cultural trends have always had a short lifespan, but one can only wonder what chillwave could’ve become given a couple more album cycles.
If all the Internet music genres and subcultures died of natural causes, maybe we’re due for a couple resurrections.