Editorial: Cooling Off Chillwave

Ernest Greene AKA Washed Out

There has been a tremendous amount of discourse regarding the sub-genre of music that hopped onto the underground/blog music scene early Fall 2009. Dubbed “Chillwave” by one of the larger music blogs, it’s the new “it” music of the uber-hipster.

I was asked last week by a local musician to explain what Chillwave was, exactly. It was a good question, and one I found a little hard to put into words. I know it when I hear it, but trying to describe it accurately was a bit of an issue. Part of the problem is the most common artists lumped into the category are, in my opinion, too diverse to be molded into this Chillwave phenomenon.

For the record, if you are either unfamiliar with the sub-genre, or are curious as to where I am going with this, the artists I most frequently associate with Chillwave are: Washed Out, Toro Y Moi, Neon Indian and I’ve even heard Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti name tossed into the fray.

Their greatest commonality, in my mind, is that they all use aspects of low-fi or no-fi and they, at some level, sample beats and/or re-formulate beats from pop-songs of days gone-by.

Just as I took particular issue with the buzz that surrounded Girl Talk in 2007 – because he was only re-creating the samples-as-songs concept that British father and son act Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers did in the late 1980′s – there seems to be a failure of today’s music blow-hards to recognize that the core base for Chillwave was done with great mainstream success by the solo act Primitive Radio Gods with “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” in 1995.

Most recently the Dance-Punk movement of 2002-2004 created similar hype and hysteria. It was a great sub-genre that catapulted acts like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Rapture to mainstream success. But it, in itself, was not creation of a new music genre.

Since Indie’s demise in the mid-2000′s, the search has been on to find a new way to label the same popular-yet-not-yet-too-popular music that College Rock and Alternative previously defined in past generations. Whether described as Blog Rock, Emerging Rock, Post-Indie, or whatever quickly-phrased term catching fire, the definition doesn’t fit a sub-category such as Chillwave. The increasing buzz around Chillwave has people clamoring for it to be the new “it” music genre. It’s not.

Let me make a couple of things crystal clear. First, I do think “Chillwave” is a great way to simply and quickly define the music. It’s a perfect blend of musical and visual descriptors. Second, I do like the most of the artists associated with the movement – my personal favorite is Washed Out, the project by Perry, Ga. resident Ernest Greene, whose music I first heard last Fall when it was feature on the now defunct KissAtlanta.com (now KissBrooklyn.com) Web site.)

At the end of the day, here’s the deal: Chillwave is a nice, new way of hyping a new (or mostly new) number of DYI laptop artists who are creating great pop-songs that are different that what has been popular for the last few years. But Chillwave isn’t the next music-shifting movement – it isn’t 1977′s punk movement. It more in common with Dance-Punk and Shoegaze than Alternative or Indie.

In the grand scheme of things it’s great, but just a blip.