Toro y Moi is an artist that I’ve long been a fan of. In fact, his 2019 album Outer Peace was one of my favorite albums of that year. On the Bandcamp page for the album there is a review left by supporter Brian Miller that reads:
“a lot of people talk about ‘vibes’ but I think that few people understand them and really get deep into grooves like Chaz”
I found that sentence interesting to read as I have been thinking a lot lately about “vibes” and what “vibey” music is. If we are talking about vibes without a descriptor being placed before the word, or if we are to use vibe as a verb, the word most often is used to describe a chilled, relaxed, and generally positive feeling. It encompasses a wide variety of contexts, as one of the many features of “vibing” is the breadth of situations it can be prescribed to. Its vagueness gives it its specificity, because you don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty details to pick up on the vibe you are feeling. If anything, thinking too deeply may pull you out of the vibe. If the intention is just to vibe, then we don’t want to do any more than just that.
A vibe is a feeling that doesn’t require deep reflection or analysis to pick up on, hence as Brian Miller observes that talking about them is accessible for many people. But Miller asserts that as a musician, and therefore as a vibe conjurer, Chaz Bear has a deeper knowledge of the vibe. He can grasp it, shape it, bend it to his whim, but most importantly he can pick up on the larger vibe and make art that resonates with a large audience. In an ideal scenario, their respective vibes are all operating with similar wavelengths, and achieve synchronicity when the musician plays their records.
But as experienced vibers, we can recognize when the vibes are right, and also when the vibes are off. Sometimes the attempted creation of a musical vibe doesn’t sync up with that of the larger contextual vibe or that of our own subjective experience. Perhaps the vibes have shifted for some people in a way that is different than how they’ve shifted, or haven’t changed, for others. In the case of the lead-up to Toro Y Moi’s upcoming album, I’ve noticed an incongruence between the vibes of this record so far, and my ability to receive, synthesize, and share in them.
Regarding the singles leading up to this new album, I found “Postman” to be a little underwhelming. Its centerpiece is a funky bass line with a thick juicy tone and very groovy rhythm, but apart from that and a rippling waterfall of keys that appears at one point midway in the track, I find the song offers very little for me to latch onto. The lyrics repetitively check in with the postman to inquire whether any mail has come. None has, but in the bridge it is revealed that Bear is expecting some from his mother.
When stuffed within this funk track with its enthusiastic yowls and danceable rhythms, there doesn’t seem to be anything linking that lyrical content to the musical content. Many times before artists have mixed dissonant combos of contradictory musical and lyrical moods, but perhaps my biggest take away from the song is the vague nothingness that it instills in me. It feels flat and devoid, as if Bear had this great idea for an instrumental and felt any collection of ambiguous words would sit fine over top of it. Maybe it is intended just to be fun, and not analyzed too deeply, but frivolous carefree energy alone isn’t what I usually want to get out of my listening experience.
“The Loop” also frustrates me, but it appears more revealing of the current Toro Y Moi mindset. The lyrics express a desire to kick back, which clashes with a felt need to stay informed and in the know regarding current events. I do find the second verse’s observation of critical opinion clouding subjective enjoyment of music to be clever (and I might be playing into this critique through my writing of this blog post), yet I pick up on a mocking or ironic air with Bear’s cyclical mantra of “staying in the loop.” His constant reminders to stay in it (delivered through an especially grating hook) prove the ease with which he can fall out of it. Thus it would be more convenient for someone else to keep him up to date rather than him having to do so.
I don’t know how deeply to read into these lyrics because after all, these are only words. And it would be ridiculous to expect an artist to live and die by every single line that they write. But what I pick up on is that Bear has the freedom to opt out of the loop, whereas others may not have the ability to do so. Not that I know Bear’s financial status, but he has been a relatively popular act within indie music in the last decade, has 4 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and fills mid-sized venues while on tour, so if anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bear was able to quit that job he found but didn’t like doing on “Blessa.”
The early work of Toro y Moi and his chillwave contemporaries of the late oughts and early 2010s have often been linked with the fallout of the 2008 stock market crash and the millenial desire to escape reality to an idealized nostalgia-driven day at the beach. Tracks like “Blessa” demonstrated how this sought-after polaroid sunshine fantasy world fell short of truly delivering on relief from existential angst and financial hardship. Bear remark on finding employment, albeit an unfulfilling one, reflecting a defeated acceptance of young adults realizing that in adult life they’d experience downward socioeconomic mobility and although they might be able to get by, live as comfortably and happily as they did in their childhood seemed out of reach. On “The Loop”, however, it feels like Bear is coming from a more comfortable class position in which economic and political conditions of the modern day afflict him less than they did a decade ago, and he can truly kick back in a way he hadn’t before.
Mahal’s other single “Magazine” differs greatly in tone from “Postman” and “The Loop” and I find it to be a much more compelling tune. It’s a woozy cut of psychedelic pop, with warbly keys that streak down like raindrops on the other side of the bus window we gaze out while riding home from yet another uneventful day at work. Bear laments the cutting of trees, how images in magazines are idealized representations of what we want ourselves to appear as, and the exasperation of being caught up in current events. In the chorus, Salami Rose Joe Louis speaks on the inability of getting out of bed while overthinking and replaying past conversations that cannot be fixed. The icing on the cake is the exhausted moan of Chaz in the tail end of the track that signifies an exasperation with his state of affairs.
To contradict “Magazine” and “The Loop,” it seems as if Bear is examining both sides of the coin – the ignorance bliss of being uninformed as opposed to the heavy dread and exhaustion that can set in when being bombarded with too much (negative) information. I haven’t yet heard the entire album to see how everything plays out in sequence, but with Magazine, immediately preceding “Postman” and “The Loop” in the tracklist it unfortunately seems as if Bear is taking a tune out, turn off, drop out approach to escape the ills of the modern world.
I can’t connect with this approach and the sunny no-worries energy being put forward on “The Loop” and “Postman.” On a personal level, I am at a place in my life where I am in my “Blessa-chillwave” phase – having graduated from university four years ago and spending the following years in a field with limited career prospects and earning potential. Concurrently, I’ve seen the cost of living continue to increase as wages stagnate and fall short of the standards for a liveable wage. It’s not often easy to vibe and be chill, when you can’t afford to go to the dentist and only make enough money to continue feeding yourself and paying rent for another month.
Although I’ve been able to do so in the past, I can’t seem to find myself in the head space to enjoy carefree and fun music very often lately. And as more artists I like appear to move towards these directions, I find myself connecting less with their music.
Take Glass Animals for example. I was head over heels in love with their early EPs and debut album. I came across them right at the time I was making my first forays into alternative music and was struck by the mysteriously vivid jungle in the heat of the night soundscapes they made with their unique brand of tripped-out yet intensely catchy R&B-influenced indietronica. The follow-up record How to Be a Human Being traded in a good chunk of their mystique for bigger hooks, and saw the progression of Dave Bai\yley’s increasingly more zany lyrical tendencies. Bayley’s quirky quotables would be ratcheted up to even more distracting and unfortunately off-putting extremes on 2020’s Dreamland, alongside instrumentals that sounds like little more than the dime-a-dozen lightly quirky trap-influenced electropop stylings found on many major label releases poaching from colourful indie pop aesthetics.
Reaction to Dreamland was mixed. Some critics hated it, and many other longtime fans were disappointed, but “Heat Waves” also became the band’s biggest hit via viral success on TikTok. I’ve come to contend with the fact that this album just didn’t sound right for me when it dropped in August of 2020. I couldn’t jive with a record with such a goofy and zany lean to it at a time during the pandemic where I couldn’t meet up with family and friends, lost a significant portion of my income and plunged me further into financial precarity. Sure, the album had been recorded in 2019 and Dave Bayley had no way of predicting what would come the following year. But I have vivid memories of spinning the album for the first time while skateboarding on a sunny day, knowing that this should be a near ideal context to listen an album that sounds like this, but ultimately feeling such a hollowness wafting through my earbuds as “wavy Davey” squealed about “big dicks and big ol’ titties on the sly.” To listen to something so ridiculous while I was out of work, seeing my savings bleed away, and hearing repeatedly about death in news coverage of the pandemic felt so inappropriate and out of touch with reality. For me, 2020 especially wasn’t the time to hear such a record, yet I also have no compulsion to return to it because that first listen left such a sour taste in my mouth.
Another artist whose new work I could not jive with at all was the latest record from Lorde. Lorde was once at the vanguard of change in the pop music landscape, with “Royals” playing a crucial role resetting the top 40 from maximalist dance-pop decadence to the muted melancholic alt-pop that would be huge at the tail end of the decade.
After a five year wait from her incredibly acclaimed Melodrama album, Lorde returned with the sunny Solar Power. The album was met with mixed reception, and some noted what seemed to be a failure by Lorde to read the room. Lorde was on a beach dancing, throwing her phone into the ocean, and living a streefree life at a time when most people were still deeply in the grips of the pandemic and the other forms of doom and gloom that have permeated existence for many so far in the 2020s. This existence did not seem to match with Lorde’s, and thus for some she no longer seemed to be a conveyor of an authentic experience that could be identified with. What I find most striking about the album is how the climax that the title track incrementally builds towards falls flat in its attempt to deliver the rush of endorphin-infused euphoria that Lorde feels and wants to spread to us. The paradise of the white sand beach she floats on in the “Solar Power” video feels so distant and unattainable, and I feel the criticism that the single received was a rightful expression from those who lacked the material conditions to attain such an experience. It felt much like footage from the “pretend things were normal” vacation the Kardashian family took. Lorde wasn’t as explicit as Kim was in gloating about how privileged her life is, but after having once proclaimed that she’d never be one of the “Royals,” Solar Power felt very much like a betrayal through its embrace of bourgeois decadence at time when the divide between the rich and poor continues to grow into an ever-more massive chasm.
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Although it’s been difficult to enjoy “feel good” music lately, there is music that I enjoy that feels good to listen to. I like to revisit tracks that I was crazy about in years past, shout along to anthemic emo cuts on the latest Anxious and Alien Boy albums, and risk tweaking my neck while bobbing my head along to the ice cold flows of Gangsta Boo, Koopsta Knicca, and Project Pat over insanely hard and eerie beats produced by DJ Paul and Juicy J. None of this stuff seems like a conscious effort to conjure “positive vibes only” through the medium of song – especially not the mystic stylez of the Triple Six Mafia. To oversimplify things in an attempt to latch together my appreciation of the varied sounds listed above, they conjure up such intense feelings or vivid atmospheres that feel much more tangible and powerful in creating a world of their own, than trying to put a positively-spun soundtrack to one’s current predicament.
To connect with Lorde, Glass Animals, and some of these recent Toro y Moi singles would just feel too forced. Vibing has been hard to reach for many people within the last few years. You can’t conjure good vibes out of thin air. Your ability to experience positive vibes is an expression of your material conditions of living, and those who are exploited, alienated, and left uncared for under capitalism are going to have a much tougher time surviving, let alone living carefree and happy. Until the proletariat’s material conditions, financial security, and trust in government leaders to prioritize equitable standards of wellbeing amongst those on this earth drastically improve, we are justified in our rejection of don’t-worry-be-happy-good-vibes-only-core-music.