So, how do you get out of your head? Isn’t that what we all desperately need as respite, a way to escape the incessant weight of being under your own ceaseless observation? Perhaps, as the Handsome Family put it:

“This is why people OD on pills/and jump from the/Golden Gate Bridge

Anything to feel weightless again”

Let’s go to a concert.

Except you cannot escape yourself if you are, or ever were, a music journalist. Then, some part of your consciousness remains aloof in a corner, notepad flipped back, choosing with agonizing precision what pithy phrase to tag, to shape, to wrestle the performance into an ill-fitting sack that might capture some nuance of the experience. Except, of course, you can’t really write about music, not in any way that equates to the merest act of standing there in its presence. Dancing about architecture. So, the old tricks come back, the tropes of reference and imagine-if and RIYL. Is the singer a modern Prometheus, carrying the spark that will set fire to the seething worshipful throng desperate for conflagration, or just a stumbling mumbling schmo who shouldn’t have given up a steady job at the Guitar Center? Can you lasso this latest concoction of creative thievery and, whip in hand, break it and tame it and make it answer to a single label called genre? And, ego beating like a fevered pulse and forever demanding due, can you let pass any opportunity to play the Grim Eater, make the sly background insertion, reveal erudition through deft mythological allusion and ironic tabloid mimicry? And underneath the hubris, itself hidden behind a veil of attempted egalitarian “ahead of the hype machine” appreciation, is there the base truth that “all critics are failed artists”? Nah, wingman W is in a band. Maybe it’s just a surfeit of love, the kind that makes you talk off random ears about the latest unheralded masterpiece. We’re part of the memetic engine that replicates fandom. Preach, and perhaps, next time, more will not miss out on the revelation. Also, the blog needs page views.

So, the opening band. Low expectations, not a familiar name, Toro Y Moi has still come a long way traveling from hipster hinterland South Carolina to play in a dark box in front of a crowd of strangers for what cannot amount to much more than hamburger money for 3 fashionably underdressed look-like-kids. Wikipedia posits the style of founder Chazwick Bundick as being “identified with the chillwave movement of summer 2009,” which despite sounding like a description of 19th century French history is at least a place to start. Having dared to proffer a category, however, no sooner is the box drawn than its borders are rubbed out in dispute. Chillwave is “sonically disparate,” relies on a diagnostic menu of “often characterized” elements that boil down to a list of effects pedals and electronic instrumentation used by scores of non-member bands since their invention. This vague approximate definition then comes under assault on philological grounds from the vaunted perch of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and (er) Gawker. The story unwinds back to Hipster Runoff blogger Carles coining the term and dragooning a handful of acts to support its existence. Carles’ inauspiciously-titled post “Is WASHED OUT the next Neon Indian/Memory Cassette?” comments on the familiar lament of the indie-gone-mainstream, leaving the underground faithful left to seek out the next new thing to replace the now overexposed colossi (cf. the ‘real fans’ of practically every band, forever).

More specifically, he explores the problem space of how to position oneself in the correct orientation for pre-breakout success in the undergrowth now left behind by the likes of Animal Collective: the ‘brand’ cannot be too personal; members cannot be too dweeby, or ‘too’ serious; ‘conceptual’ material and ‘artistic’ live shows both delay audience burnout. And indeed here is enough material to undertake a serious study of the market dynamics of band popularity, the sort of arcane brinksmanship with fickle consumers that sends A&R agents and coolhunters and, nowadays, indie scene bloggers into conniptions of professional anxiety and partisan fervor. For the moment, however, scroll back and notice what Carles does not say about this proposed new collective noun – namely, anything about what its members should sound like. It’s a market designation (e.g. microcap stocks) with PR chaser (e.g. socially responsible funds), not a musical reference. A band can be not ‘authentic’ enough, or too dweeby-looking, but thus far they can sound like anything that authentic non-dweebs with pop sensibility can come up with. And before ending up with ‘chillwave,’ Carles first throws out a laundry list of 31 other pastiche terms mostly referencing shoegaze and new wave, and name-dropping tastemakers Pitchfork. Nevertheless, he crowns ‘chillwave’ the winner of the one-member poll of 32 flavors and then inducts its founding members as the post title indicates. A ’summer of chillwave’ is invoked, and ergo, must exist.

Gawker’s “How to Invent a Music Genre” covers some of the end-stage backlash as the mainstream culture press first consumed, then regurgitated the term in spite. NYT’s Jon Pareles gets credit for providing the ‘microtrend’ (his term) with an almost-usable circumscription of an actual sound in common, while also managing to tie it into the current socioeconomic milieu:

“They’re solo acts or minimal bands, often with a laptop at their core, and they trade on memories of electropop from the 1980s, with bouncing, blipping dance-music hooks (and often weaker lead voices). It’s recession-era music: low-budget and danceable.”

Pareles’ report on this year’s SXSW also carries on the theme of bands as market players, eschewing the former coy elusiveness of last year’s indie rock for a new come-hither catchiness, marketing immediacy and availability since “bands weren’t counting on a second glance.” Recession-era music, indeed. But it’s WSJ’s Speakeasy that focuses on the label, calling the question whether it’s truly a trend to watch. Carles and Washed Out’s Ernest Greene both put forward positive descriptors, while Josh Kolenik of Small Black mentions joking with Neon Indian about creating a scene “that never really existed.” And Alan Palomo of Neon Indian gets to the core idea – “now it’s just a blogger or some journalist that can find three or four random bands around the country and tie together a few commonalities between them and call it a genre.” Was it ever not thus? Yet somehow this ‘made-up’, placebo genre seems to work just as well as a real one, in terms of getting press, gigs, and even a section in that modern-day Tower Records, the iTunes Store. Speakeasy backfills an origin story, with chillwave being a reaction to “over-produced Italo-Disco and French house records of recent years” much like the story of indie rock to Britney pop, grunge to glam metal, punk to disco and prog rock. Write your own rock history here, of dirty/sloppy/raw following refined/tight/glossy, until raw grows up and starts making Target commercials. And then, viva la revolution!

The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey digs into Toro Y Moi’s place in this hallway of mirrors and finds Chaz Bundwick shrugging sheepishly at being at the center of something with a name but little else to define it. Self-defined as a singer-songwriter, he concedes its ancillary benefits but asserts he was in fact going more for “My Bloody Valentine hip-hop” and when writing the debut album Causers of This, drew from the infinite well of “trying to get over this girl.” On stage, Bundwick held mostly to the standard shoegazer stance of focusing mostly on gear, his frequently onomatopoeic vocals – already passed through layers of reverb, distortion, and looping – troubled by a cold. As the set began, buttressed by guitarist and drummer, Toro built up a torrent of interwoven, fuzzy samples that might actually fall under the thumbnail sketch forwarded by chillwave theorist Carles, “like something playing in the background of an old VHS cassette that you found in the attic from the 90’s.” Indeed, this retrospective perspective is prominent in the most curious part of the ‘chillwave’ entry on Wikipedia: “The overall aesthetic of chillwave is generally influenced by the idea of hauntology. In this case, nostalgia of 80s synthpop is filtered through a distorted lens, re-envisioning the era in a more vague and lo-fi sense.” Hold on, ‘hauntology’?

While sounding like something from the voluminous liner notes of DJ Spooky, this offhand reference actually invokes the ghost of Jacques Derrida, and pulls the whole debate on genre into the philosophy of history, Continental assaults on the basis of meaning, and a somewhat glum prospect for an artistic event horizon in music. For hauntology, as put forward in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, is the state of a somewhat Zen phantom, who consists of both being and non-being. Lingering on after death, the spectre haunts its future and thus prevents history from truly moving forwards, as it continually looks back in comparison. Striking a parallel with Francis Fuyukama’s “end of history,” the hauntological music critic sees time at the end of natural genres, leaving only room for music to refer back to prior movements and thus defining itself only by the ghosts of past vibrations. So as chillwave is a gauzy nostalgia for rundown 90s guitar shoegaze played back on laptops and pawn shop synths, thus might we see all new music as a kind of mashup, rehash, or hyperlinked recombination of what has come before. You could just as well view all music criticism as différance, Derrida’s symbol game of reference, each review tying this band back to that, in endless chains that never ground to referents in actual experience. Thus emboldened by having no regard for saying anything, we return to Toro Y Moi slowly stirring rhythmic bullets of melody into the murky soup, and piece to piece moving from Flying Saucer Attack-scale assault sonics to compositions comprehendible as indiscreet but discrete songs. And then, perhaps as microcosm of Carles’ thesis, they suddenly devolve from art futurists to retro-funk cracked frat-pop in their final three selections. Finally joining full in, the neck-high crowd of striped shirts and too-shiny faces emerges exultant from its steady nod-hop forbearance to prototypical party gyrations. And the ghost of Art of Genres Past claims another too-serious dweeby trio for its spectral mantel.

Oh, and Caribou were great.