raw lounge power
new capitalist dystopia and the need to chill
i’ll say it…ambient music is punk af.
there’s no loud, gritty guitars. no snotty, snarling, lip-curling singers. no lyrics about youthful rebellion or sarcastic adoptions of fascist personas. (in fact, classically there’s no lyrics at all). yet, somewhere along my transition from my 20s to my 30s, most of the punk i had grown up with more or less completely lost its “edge”. all the posing and spectacle that i had once taken very seriously, suddenly looked like a big joke.
i was never really a hardcore kid. it was too serious and preachy. i didn’t much care for the dark stuff. too brooding. and i could not impress upon you how little i cared about the politicized stuff.
my favorite was always happy punk. power pop gems like the exploding hearts and the undertones wrote songs that were so irresistibly catchy, yet still had an incredibly raw and frenetic energy, and absolutely no high-gloss production. i guess it was that dichotomy that really moved me, especially as a songwriter that was always very pop-oriented, but also relentlessly lofi-obsessed. to me, there are few higher musical peaks than a soaring, inspiring lead riff or a bodacious sing-along chorus. but especially, if not just the image of the band but the entire musical aura and ultimate mythmaking can somehow toe the line between sugary bubblegum exuberance and hardened street poetry - only then will it get the zak aria seal of approval. it turns out, walking this line is like the razor’s edge that seemingly very few have ever historically pulled off without falling victim to commercialism or poserism in one form or another.
maybe it’s just a natural part of growing up for some of us. i’m not here to bore you with the overt cliche that “we mellow out with age”. and in 2024, it’s also a belabored trope to talk about the death of guitar-driven music. ambient music becoming more punk than punk has less to do with aging eardrums and more to do with a zeitgeist pole shift.
we could site this shift as happening around 2009 with the birth of chillwave, or perhaps even earlier with the birth of hypnagogic pop. but i can see swells or reverse echoes of it happening as early as 1992 with the debut of pavement, or maybe 1997 with marcy playground’s “sex and candy”. the top google result for the origin of the slang term “chillax” (a portmanteau of the words “chill” and “relax”) places it as early as 1996. the late 00s/early 10s was also, subsequently, a time of the passing of the baton of young and hip cultural trendsetters from the punk-saturated gen Xers to the millennials, as millennials began to come of age.
where gen X had serious and dark goth and hardcore, millennials had laid-back slacker-rock and drab indie. the down-home simplicity of something like twee felt like the antithesis of glam and hair metal. and then there’s dream pop to consider. even everything about grunge fashion and later indie sleaze fashion prophesied a desire to return to more comfortable and casual styles and attitudes until we ultimately reached the normcore heights of a mac demarco or a boy pablo. whenever exactly it happened, at some point almost an entire generation realized they needed to stop rocking out and just chill. and they needed to do it, while experiencing certain nostalgic retro elements as well. chill and retro are inextricably linked.
part of the reason for this is due to a prevailing sense that you can’t chill if you’re in the present. i don’t think i need to bring up anything socio-political in current events to convince you of this. you just know you need to go back to the past. how many chill hip hop songs have you heard that use the word “reminisce”? “reminiscing” and “vibing” go hand in hand. our relaxation level is directly tied to our ability to recall good memories.
the unavoidable dominance of lofi hiphop is a major factor. somewhere down the line, artists like j dilla and nujabes felt like they became utterly eclipsed by the flooding of youtube with Lofi Girl videos. endless variations of “lofi/chill beats to study/relax to” videos just seem to refuse to die.
but what makes all this “punk”? well, when you realize it’s the establishment that’s “harshing your mellow”, sometimes the solution isn’t to grab your torch and pitchfork. sometimes the solution is to practice wu wei - the ancient Chinese philosophy of “inexertion”. this is actually a much more mature approach than the bratty, reactionary punk of yesteryear.
generational wealth decline, housing crisis, longer work hours, slumlords - many of the woes of late stage capitalism have also left some people too exhausted and overworked to muster the energy to slam-dance.
which brings me to one of my personal favorites: the lowercase movement.
from Wikipedia:
Steve Roden stated this about the lowercase tendencies which he began to develop in his later works: “It bears a certain sense of quiet and humility; it doesn't demand attention, it must be discovered... It’s the opposite of capital letters—loud things which draw attention to themselves.”
for a long time i have been enamored with this artistic approach. extreme forms of ambient, as well as many other cousins and offshoots that i feel are all coming from the same spirit - be they elevator music, muzak, bossa nova, smooth jazz, etc.
the intro track on my album “amerasia”, entitled “welcome”, features a sample i recorded when calling my pharmacy for prescription drugs, and being put on hold. the sample is then put through progressive levels of reverb and pitch shifting. “on hold” music, to me, also falls within this lowercase category, because it’s almost the ultimate form of background music - music that is actually specifically designed for you *not* to listen to. furthermore, you’re even forced to listen to it/not listen to it, whether you like it or not, while you’re waiting, in a kind of limbo state, to do what you actually intended to do.
the juxtaposition of how even the most non-offensive, flavorless or generic piece of music, when placed in a certain context, can be used as a nagging tool for coercion and an extremely subtle form of psychological torture is actually one of the most punk statements i can think of.
in the words of Thelonious Monk, “the loudest noise in the world is silence”.