In a summer riven by financial meltdown, a niche trend for lo-fi retro pop couldn’t have seemed more trivial. Yet it was the first sign of a generation fleeing to the past to escape a bleak future

When I think of the so-called “summer of chillwave”, I remember sitting at a desk in a giant office in midtown Manhattan, shivering in the air conditioning and listening to songs about the beach. It was June 2009 – the summer after the sub-prime mortgage collapse had precipitated what was then the largest single-day point drop in Dow Jones history – and I was a recent graduate, working an entry-level temp job in the library of a corporate law firm. Whenever I wasn’t helping summer associates (or secretly updating my music blog), I was listening to Sun Was High (So Was I), a shoddily recorded love song full of fried guitar chords and easy-breezy rhymes by a little-known Los Angeles rock band called Best Coast fronted by stoner Bethany Cosentino. At a time when I couldn’t stop worrying about the future, its apparent effortlessness was soothing, like a blurred dispatch from an endless teenage beach hang where all you have to worry about is the sand getting in your fries and your crush not returning your texts: “Watched the cars go by / The sun was high / And so was I.”

It was the first song to give me that sensation. By the following month, it had a name. “Feel like I might call it ‘chill wave’ music in the future,” proclaimed the pseudonymous blogger Carles in a 27 July post on Hipster Run-Off, writing in character as the microgenre-obsessed creator of an mp3 blog that doubled as a satire of the proudly amateurish music writing bubbling up at the time. The tag described a new crop of melodic dream-pop artists such as Washed Out, Neon Indian, and Memory Cassette – artists that on paper were very different from a rock group like Best Coast, with an emphasis on cheesy-sounding old synths, vintage drum machines and an expressively degraded, echo-and-reverb-laden production aesthetic. But the spirit of the music – its delirious lo-fidelity, its fondness for the obsolete formats of our youth – was the same: “Feel like chillwave is supposed to sound like something that was playing in the background of ‘an old VHS cassette that u found in ur attic from the late 80s/early 90s,’” Carles wrote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neon Indian. Photograph: Ben Ritter

Carles later dismissed the whole thing as a joke, something even the genre’s supposed pioneers – Neon Indian, Toro y Moi, and Washed Out – seemed to suspect all along. But as soon as we had a way to describe it, chillwave seemed to take on a life of its own, deluging the blogosphere with washed-out vintage vacation photographs, neon palm trees, and songs with titles like Terminally Chill, Surfin/Body in the Water and Waves. For a moment, the music of the future had the look and feel of the past.

There were a number of ironies about chillwave from the start. As the Pitchfork critic Mark Richardson noted, this was music that celebrated having fun in the sun just as we were noticing the unhealthy amount of time we were spending in front of our computers. And it had the funny particularity of laying claim to outmoded technologies (the eight-track, the cassette tape) just as digital audio workstations like Pro Tools and Ableton Live were making it possible to make professional-sounding recordings at home.

It was a “return to the womb” at a time when there was plenty for my generation to be upset about. Between 2007 and 2010, the recession would put 8.7 million out of work in America, and millions more abroad, making it impossible for many of my peers to imagine a life of gainful employment. In the summer of chillwave alone, General Motors filed for bankruptcy, Bernie Madoff went to prison for defrauding thousands of investors and, to top it all off, Michael Jackson died. Writing for Flavorwire in 2012, Tom Hawking decried chillwave as a distinctly “middle-class” music, the cultural equivalent of “placing of your hands over your eyes and ears and imagining your happy place”. Looking back I am struck by this music’s preoccupation with the trappings of suburban middle-class life, or some remembered version of it: pizza and Slurpies and microwave TV dinners; tropical beach vacations and sepia lake-house memories; moving back in with your parents, smoking weed with your friends and embracing your inner “slacker”, with all the unspoken privilege that entails.

At the same time, chillwave’s rise represented an internet-fuelled apotheosis of some of the more embarrassing aspects of the hipster ethos: its obsession with minute distinctions of taste and with all things retro (2009 was the year that Hipstamatic debuted in the app store, making it possible to “age” digital photos with elegiac, Polaroid hues). As early as 2005, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy had produced a definitive text on that endless cultural one-upmanship in Losing My Edge; already in 2005, he was worried about the “kids … coming up from behind,” a younger generation of music lovers with an infinite archive of music at their fingertips and “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s”.

By 2009, the fragmentation and specialisation of taste was beginning to feel a little out of control. Even the New York Times seemed bewildered, noting that indie rock, once shorthand for a certain kind of bookish guitar music, had evolved into “an ever-expanding, incomprehensibly cluttered taxonomy of subgenres”. As the majors adjusted to flagging record sales and a wave of corporate consolidation that had begun in the late 90s, the independent music world was changing. Bloggers whose sites had names like Cocaine Blunts, Rose Quartz, Transparent and 20 Jazz Funk Greats were trawling the internet to uncover the next great bedroom producer, internet rapper or hyper-specific musical trend. They eventually became the unpaid A&Rs of established publications that amplified these artists and movements still further, and an entire cottage industry of tiny labels and underground-focused publicists rose up to fill the demand.

In many ways, it was an exciting time: there was the feeling that my generation of listeners was becoming more open-minded, and that the internet was enabling weird underground artists to connect with fans and earn a living without having to compromise their output. But chillwave – a movement that began as a joke and which Carles described as “a genre created by the internet, 4 the internet” – felt like an example of the hype cycle going too far. It was as though culture was stuck in a feedback loop – tastemaker flag-planting followed by a music-industry feeding frenzy – that had become an organism with a will of its own.

This was unfortunate, because the chillwave era produced some pretty good music, and its central cast was markedly diverse compared with the white male-dominated indie rock of the time. On his 2009 debut, Psychic Chasms, Neon Indian (AKA Alan Palomo) established himself as one of his generation’s finest synthesists, pulling quirky but beautiful sounds out of temperamental old machines in a manner that was not entirely serious. Toro y Moi’s Leaving Everywhere, from 2010, wrangled blown-out surf guitar and a classic girl-group stomp into one of the period’s most irresistible pop songs, at once a sharp departure from the classic chillwave sound and an unerring encapsulation of its emotional appeal: “I’m leaving everywhere / To go back home / I need a good heart to keep me well.”

Besides, music that uses nostalgic older sounds as its source material doesn’t have to be apolitical. In August 2009, a month after the original Carles post, the Wire’s David Keenan coined the term “hypnagogic pop” to describe a new wave of psychedelia growing out of the American noise scene. According to Keenan, musicians including James Ferraro, Spencer Clark, Ariel Pink, Oneohtrix Point Never, Zola Jesus and even Pocahaunted – Bethany Cosentino’s other project – were excavating the trash culture of the 80s and 90s, refashioning the dollar-bin one-hit-wonders and workout video jingles of their youth as the building blocks of a new generational consciousness. Though he stopped short of saying that this “deliberately misheard and degraded pop” was anti-capitalist, the idea was that these musicians were using these remembered sounds to dream up another world. Or as Clark put it: “To recognise the essence of the past is to imagine the future.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trash-culture connoisseur … Oneohtrix Point Never.

By the end of 2010, that retreat into the past was beginning to feel as pointless as a pair of vintage glasses from Urban Outfitters. In January 2011, Keenan lamented the rise of chillwave and hypnagogic pop, writing that “in the reductive glare of mainstream media”, the latter had become “shorthand for a cheap form of revivalism and a valorising of bad taste”. His jab at Best Coast for leaving behind Pocahaunted and starting a “simplistically twee-pop group that seems to exist solely to dance to whatever tune her current corporate sponsors – Converse, Target, Eskuche – care to call” was pretty cruel, but he wasn’t wrong in thinking that lo-fi music was becoming a piece with the industry to which it once represented an alternative.

That same month, Washed Out’s chirpy Feel It All Around became the theme song of IFC hipster-parody show Portlandia. By summer 2011, MTV had launched an indie music web show called Weird Vibes, replete with garish neon animations and a pilot titled It’s Not Easy Being a Buzzband, featuring a two-minute segment titled Don’t Call Me Chillwave. I had begun work as an editor for Altered Zones, a short-lived Pitchfork experiment designed to bring a number of tastemaking mp3 bloggers – many of whom were covering hypnagogic pop, chillwave and other emergent genres – under the same roof. It shuttered in late 2011, a sign that blogging about underground music from your bedroom was only ever going to be a labour of love.

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Eventually the chillwave era evaporated into the ether, though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when. Some say the end was nigh in February 2011, when Toro y Moi released a second album, Underneath the Pine, recorded entirely with “real instruments” and when Pitchfork dealt a crushing 3.8 album rating to blissed-out Florida producer MillionYoung. For me, it was October of that year, when James Ferraro released Far Side Virtual, a half-joking reclamation of the laptop that sounded so egregiously, deliberately cringeworthy – Skype sounds, muzak synth melodies and all – that it made me realise how out-of-hand the whole lo-fi conceit had become.

Still, it’s no stretch to say that we’re still hearing the reverberations of that eerily prolonged summer in our headphones. Though critics have called chillwave “the dying gasp of the blogosphere”, it was also the internet electronic micro-genre that launched a hundred internet electronic micro-genres (think: vaporwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, distroid, hard vapor), not to mention its corollaries in this decade’s internet rap, which largely shared its collagist, hyper-referential approach to sound. Writing for Vice in 2015, Larry Fitzmaurice highlighted chillwave’s convergence with a number of the trends that have come to represent our generation’s “overground alternative music” at large: “An increased embrace of sampling and electronics, a de-emphasising of guitars … an unabashed love of all things retro, from Tangerine Dream to fruit punch Gushers, that has defined this decade’s youth as a people that find the present too painful to exist in.”

A decade since the recession began, it’s hard not to notice the extent to which that longing for escape has become part of the fabric of everyday life, one where we compulsively post tinted Instagram photos of our last Aperol Spritz bender and listen to Spotify playlists with names like Chill Vibes, Young and Free and Boho and Chill – not just for fun, but as a means of psychic survival in an increasingly stressful world.

Which doesn’t mean chillwave itself has aged particularly well. During a summer filled with non-stop reminders of the children imprisoned in cages at the Mexican border, of state legislatures stripping women of their reproductive rights, of the imminent demise of the very beaches chillwave droned on about, it’s hard to imagine an artist being so celebrated now for writing a song about putting her head in the sand. Over the last decade, we’ve grown a little more inclined to question where that need for escapism comes from, even when it is being sold to us as counterculture. Now we revisit our favourite chillwave songs and ask ourselves who gets to be nostalgic, and what for?

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