The sound emerged toward the end of the ’90s, as DJs in Munich and Paris and London began cobbling together stylish new hybrids of old Italo-disco, new wave, acid house, and EBM. “To be famous is so nice,” purrs Miss Kittin in “Frank Sinatra.” “Suck my dick/Kiss my ass/In limousines we have sex/Every night with my famous friends.” Wryly hedonistic, the song is a nihilistic manifesto streaked with traces of caviar and coke, a statement of no purpose at all-and as such, a perfect distillation of the electroclash era. Origin Point: The bathroom stall of a Munich nightclub Key Artists: DJ Hell, Miss Kittin, Fischerspooner, Chicks on Speed Crucial Listening: Miss Kittin & the Hacker - “ Frank Sinatra” Fischerspooner - “ Emerge” Tiga - “ Sunglasses at Night” I-F - “ Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass” Further Reading: “ DFA and the Defining of Electroclash” Incredibly, Attack Attack! are still running with crabcore, but should their fame ever wane, they can always get jobs as professional movers-after all, they already know how to lift with their legs. Their shtick went viral almost instantly, as other groups embraced Attack Attack!’s admixture of chugging guitars, demonic growls, Auto-Tuned choir-boy choruses, and Eurodance synths-not to mention, of course, their manspreading moves and insouciant scene hair. Though few artists actively identified as chillwavers, and the scene’s pioneers quickly moved on, the sound proved one of the past decade’s most influential and enduring aesthetics, paving the way for everything from Tame Impala to lofi study beats.ĭate Range: 2008 to 2010 Origin Point: The parking lot of a Columbus, Ohio, Red Lobster Key Artists: Attack Attack!, Asking Alexandria, Jamie’s Elsewhere Crucial Listening: Attack Attack! - “ Stick Sickly” Asking Alexandria - “ The Final Episode (Let’s Change the Channel)”Ĭhugging, drop-tuned metalcore mixing blast beats and Cookie Monster vocals with crunk and dance music was not especially novel in 2008, but Ohio’s Attack Attack! brought something new to the table: a squat, waddling stance-feet splayed, knees at right angles, bottoms practically bumping against the ground-that made them look like scuttling crustaceans holding aloft electric guitars. Hipster Runoff popularized the term “chillwave” in posts doubling as parody, and a million mp3 blogs ran with it. As America reeled from the collapse of entire sectors of the economy, young folks across the country burrowed into their bedrooms, fired up their laptops, and worked out their nostalgia with woozy new-wave synths, tape-warped samples, narcoleptic drum patterns, and hazy vocals hiding more than a smidgen of ennui beneath all that blissed-out reverb. But back in the doldrums of the late ’00s, it was a novel proposition, not so much an aspiration as an escape. Today, chill is everywhere-as an aesthetic descriptor, a vague lifestyle goal, an overall behavioral imperative. Taken together, they tell a story about culture’s development in the new millennium, with each one inching us a little closer to the gloriously chaotic musical landscape of today.ĭate Range: 2008 to 2014 Origin Point: The malaise of the financial crisis Key Artists: Neon Indian, Nite Jewel, Washed Out, Toro y Moi Crucial Listening: Washed Out - “ Feel It All Around” Neon Indian - “ Deadbeat Summer” Further Reading: “ How Chillwave’s Brief Moment in the Sun Cast a Long Shadow Over the 2010s” Others, like chillwave, rewired the collective psyche in their own small ways, tweaking how we think about popular music. Some were fleeting ideas that lasted for a season or two before they were replaced by other equally ephemeral notions (looking at you, seapunk). These stylistic dividers, on the other hand, were often fanciful, capricious, even outlandish (though few were as silly as donk or skramz). You won’t find hyperpop or SoundCloud rap or even depressive black metal here-all of those things are more or less stable entities with fixed meanings, however much fans may argue about their nuances. To commemorate Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary, we’ve gathered 25 such microgenres, great and small, that help illuminate music’s evolution over the past two and a half decades. Genre terms came to function almost like memes-totems passed along from mouth to mouth, keyboard to keyboard, text field to text field, both reflecting and shaping the cultural landscape they attempted to describe. A lot, too, probably has to do with the fact that in the era of forums, blogs, and finally social media, the discourse around music spun giddily out of control. Much of this factionalization is undoubtedly a function of how the internet facilitates like-minded individuals’ ability to seek each other out.
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