sanchopanda asked: Your post about Catherine Wheel got me thinking: is “Chillwave” (mandatory scare quotes!) our generation’s equivalent to Shoegaze? Both were coined by journalists/bloggers, essentially as pejoratives for describing a loose collection of bands trading in a similar aesthetic, all of whom basically hate(d) the terms and don't/didn't identify with them at all. Stylistically, both describe music which relies heavily on obfuscation through reverb and delay effects and emphasizes a nostalgic reimagining of the past.

Getting to the point: does Indy culture just cycle through periods of commercialization followed by willful recessions into obfuscation, or is there something bigger at play here?

Huh: shoegaze vs. chillwave! I’m not sure: I think the first part of that comparison could apply to just about any scene, right? It’s always a loose aesthetic, made up of individual acts who’d rather be judged on their own. The second part seems right, but I think the two styles shoot for very different moods and feelings. I posted here about the emotions shoegaze is good at: mixed feelings, confusion, catharsis, frustration, a kind of pained beauty. Chillwave is a lot warmer, more comfortable, and more playful. It’s escapist in the pleasant way instead of the pained or confused one. If I were going to compare it to anything in the past, I’d compare it to the acts I was talking about here, who had the same kind of sound, light trippiness, warmth, whimsy, nostalgia, the same digging through the past for hazy sounds to pair up with pleasant rolling beats: Casino Versus Japan, Flowchart, Darla’s “Bliss Out” series, etc. That’s always how I hear them, anyway.

As for the cycling, it’s tough to say. I talk about trends and rhetoric a lot, but I’m always afraid it gets reductive, even when you’re just talking about trends at a specific moment. Talking about cycles of trends gets to a whole other level of simplifying the complicated. But I guess I do think there are times when an “indie” audience develops a certain trend or sensibility, and if that sensibility winds up becoming popular in a more mainstream way, well … the audience it came from has often been hearing it long enough to get bored, right? It seemed like this happened with certain alt-rock sensibilities in the 90s, and it seems like it’s happened with certain Ben Gibbard-y sensibilities now. I don’t know that it’s any big predictable cycle, though, and I don’t think it’s unique to people who like indie rock. Every audience moves on from one thing to another — try tracking it for dance music! — and it seems like there are a billion ways things can fade in or out, a billion different dynamics that can be involved in where they’re going.

6 notes | | Apr 9, 2010
  1. youngmanhattanite said: I don’t care.
  2. agrammar posted this