page_title: Chillwave
section_title: Criticism and decline
hierarchical_section_title: Chillwave / Criticism and decline
caption_attribution_description: Toro y Moi at the Hard Rock Cafe, Makati on 15 February 2013
context_page_description: Chillwave is a music microgenre that emerged in the late 2000s. It is characterized by a faded or dreamy retro pop sound, escapist lyrics, psychedelic or lo-fi aesthetics, mellow vocals, low-to-moderate tempos, effects processing, and vintage synthesizers. The term was originally synonymous with "glo-fi" or "hypnagogic pop".
  Chillwave loosely emulates 1980s electropop and engages with notions of memory and nostalgia. It was one of the first music genres to develop primarily through the Internet. The term was coined in 2009 by the satirical blog Hipster Runoff to describe indie acts whose sounds resembled incidental music from 1980s VHS tapes. Its most prominent artists were the acts Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Toro y Moi, who gained attention during 2009's "Summer of Chillwave". Washed Out's 2009 track "Feel It All Around" remains the best-known chillwave song.
  The term was criticized for being nebulous and contrived by various media publications, while the music was often derided for its reliance on nostalgia. Some artists rejected the tag, while many exploited the style's low-budget simplicity, which led to an oversaturation of acts.
context_section_description: Chillwave reached its peak in mid-2010, the same year it was received with widespread criticism. Some of the common descriptors used for the music in reviews or blog posts became clichés, including "soundscapes", "dreamy", "lush", "glowing", and "sun-kissed". The Village Voice's Christopher Weingarten remarked in December 2009 that "90 percent of writing about glo-fi mentions 'the summer' in some fashion. And summer's been over for, like, four months now." One unnamed Pitchfork writer opined: "This music isn't easy to write about. It takes a lot of work to get past 'soundtrack to the summer' and 'makes me want to hit the beach.' So much of this summer-obsessed lo-fi is about atmosphere and feel that it can seem weird to scrutinize it." George McIntire of the San Francisco Bay Guardian described chillwave's origin as in the "throes of the blogosphere" and called the term a "cheap, slap-on label used to describe grainy, dancey, lo-fi, 1980s inspired music" and a "disservice to any band associated with it."  In 2011, Carles said it was "ridiculous that any sort of press took it seriously" and that although the bands he spoke to "get annoyed" by the tag, "they understand that it's been a good thing. What about iTunes making it an official genre? It's now theoretically a marketable indie sound."
  The chillwave scene ultimately "withered and died". One major reason was a sudden oversaturation of artists, which came as a consequence of its simple production process. Writing in the New Times Broward-Palm Beach, Reed Fischer referred to Pitchfork's negative review of Millionyoung's "perfectly fine album" Replicants (2011) as a declaration of the genre's demise. Grantland's Dave Schilling argued that the term was created to reveal "how arbitrary and meaningless" existing labels such as "shoegaze" and "dream pop" were. He explained that chillwave "was a parody of a scene, both a defining moment for the music blogosphere and the last gasp. Sites like Gorilla vs. Bear and Pitchfork bought into it for a while, and sincere think pieces in traditional media publications like The Wall Street Journal asked, 'Is Chillwave the Next Big Music Trend?' It never could have been a proper trend, because it was transparently manufactured."
  As of 2015, the majority consensus was that chillwave was a fabricated non-genre. In 2016, Palomo described labels like "chillwave" and "vaporwave" as "arbitrary" and that he "couldn't have been more happy" about the "chillwave" descriptor falling out of favor. Toro y Moi's Chaz Bundick publicly expressed ambivalence toward the genre, saying, "I like the fact that I'm associated with it. It's cool. Not a lot of artists get a chance to be a part of some sort of movement, so I guess in a way I'm super flattered to be considered a part of that."  In 2015, Fitzmaurice reflected that the "holy triumvurate" of Washed Out, Toro y Moi, and Neon Indian had maintained their careers in spite of the genre's decline. Tom Hawking predicted that the "chillwave era will most likely be a footnote to musical history, a faint flaring of middle class angst in a frightening time for everyone. But that doesn't mean it's not worth examining regardless, because its simple existence says far more about a generation than the music itself ever did."
caption: Chaz Bundick (Toro y Moi, pictured in 2012) felt that chillwave "did its thing, and once it became a thing, people stopped caring about it, even the artists [making it]."[61]
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