THE REST IS METAMODERNITY

Bedroom Pop and the Post-postmodern Affect

July 2015 — Perched at a drum set, I contorted my body forward while Sam held an iPad as far as my headphone’s cord extended. I needed GarageBand’s metronome in my ear, but the short cord length had forced us into a stationary gymnastics routine. In search of an optimal recording angle, a push-pull of the cable between my head and Sam’s hands ensued. We twisted around, following the iPad's internal microphone while I attempted a steady tempo. Earlier that day we had decided to make our own song on a whim, but the process was slow with each take ruined by our laughter over the janky recording method.

With summer in Minnesota as a backdrop, our listless high school ennui was in full swing. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were trading jabs in the early stages of the Democratic primary, the US Supreme Court had ruled same-sex marriage a constitutional right, and Donald Trump had just announced what critics were derriding as a longshot presidential canidacy. With only drumline practice and Sam’s Jimmy Johns delivery job on the schedule, we had a great deal of time to kill.

I mumbled some lyrics about the seasonal languor, and turned up the reverb until the song became a wash of major seventh chords. We had no audience or promotional outlet, but the creative process was cathartic. This was music for our aimless drives past the cornfields which skirted our hometown. We shared the track online and continued collaborating as the decade elapsed.

July 2019 — Around 11 PM, we walked on stage in Los Angeles, eight dates into a national headlining tour for that same project. I had just returned from The Roxy’s green room to grab my in-ear monitors, taking note of a framed photo of Bob Marley standing in that same space. He was grinning, unphased to be playing one of the Sunset Strip’s historic venues. After all, I realized, it was only historic thanks to legends like him. The gravity of that stage was hard to ignore. Vansire, the random-word-generator name for our small-time project, didn’t seem to belong on a list boasting the names of Bob Marley, Frank Zappa, and Bruce Springsteen. Sam’s brother Isaac passed me a setlist from stage left where he helmed bass. The curtain rose to reveal a big crowd, and I counted off our opening tune.

The show was plagued with poor on-stage sound. Sam couldn’t hear his synthesizers the entire performance, culminating in an arm-swooping TURN IT UP gesture that went unnoticed by the person running monitors. Tensions with the staff were already high after our openers had been stuck with a line check due to a communication error (a hastier, undesirable alternative to a full soundcheck), followed by a mishap where one of their guitarist’s amps had been left in an alleyway unattended after a stage change.

The show finished, and employees began hollering at the crowd to clear out. Fan hellos were cut short and we started the load out, eager to head towards our final destination that night, a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles where our friend Warner lived. We were going to sleep in a massive pillow fort. It was suspended from the ceiling, and according to Warner it had a human capacity of “twenty chilling, ten sleeping.”

Mid-gear schlep, Sam heard a burly stagehand mutter to another, “I don’t know what the fuck kids are thinking these days,” seemingly baffled that a venue’s-worth of attendees would come see our performance. When Sam came into earshot, the guy clammed up. All parties were silent until our gear was back in the trunks of the minivans we were using to travel.

In a completely different, less personally insulting way, I shared the same question as the stagehand. What the fuck were these kids thinking?

May 20th, 2020 By Josh Augustin; Vansire

When the crowd sang back my lyrics, I couldn’t help but wonder how music that was so insular could amass a following in an entirely different locale. The inexplicable surreality of the situation--hundreds of Californian strangers chanting back descriptions of southeastern Minnesota’s topography--was astounding. It could, however, be partially explained by tracing musical trends in the preceding decade. In the intervening years from the time Sam and I first cobbled together a song, we had unwittingly been swept up in the rise of bedroom pop.

Not quite a “genre” but notable enough to warrant a name, the style hit its peak around 2018. Young creators in the late 2010s began saturating the internet with ethereal low-fidelity music in such increasingly prevalent numbers that it came to be grouped under one umbrella. This nomenclature was previously reserved for a brand of guitar-centric lo-fi twee pop whose development could be traced to the no-fi stylings of Olympia’s Beat Happening, the minimalism of Young Marble Giants, the outsider qualities of Daniel Johnston’s work, and the jangly sensitiblites of artists featured on NME’s seminal C86 compilation. While the creative ethos of these artists endured, the late 2010s found bedroom pop undergoing a sonic shift from guitar-centered constructions to funkier synth-laden underpinnings. The term’s etymological shift from jangly to woozy was a culmination of musical trends that had been transpiring the entire decade, marked by the “summer of chillwave” on its front end.

July 2009: Tracing bedroom pop's origins

In 2009, University of South Carolina graduates Ernest Greene and Chaz Bear were at their respective homes, experimenting with spacey, loop-based compositions. Greene, who had recently completed a Master of Library and Information Science degree, had been unsuccessful in his search for work as a librarian. After moving in with his parents, he built an online following with a steady stream of fuzzy musical offerings. A chopped-and-screwed sample of Italo Disco star Gary Low became the track Feel it All Around, a standout on his second EP which he released that fall as Washed Out. Chaz Bear was layering crackling drum samples atop sidechained synthesizers that would ultimately land him a deal with Carpark Records and spark an influential run of albums across the decade as Toro y Moi. In that moment, both had captured generational malaise in a bottle, becoming the soundtrack for millennials grappling with the nation’s worst economic crisis in recent memory. 2009 found these creators inadvertently laying the groundwork for the subsequent decade’s obsession with reverb and vintage synthesizers, adding to an ever-expanding patchwork of Dillaindebted, Boards of Canada inspired musical influences that would constitute a starting point for the internet’s propensity towards a somewhat nihilistic brand of nostalgia expressed in analog warmth and 35mm aesthetics.

In response to their work, The Wire critic David Keenan coined the term “hypnagogic pop,” one of the first formal nods to the deliberacy of the tape-warbled aesthetic choices made by these artists. The blogger Carles of the satirical blog “Hipster Runoff” invented the term “chillwave” as a descriptor for the music, an increasingly popular microgenre boasting innovations from figures like Neon Indian and Nite Jewel, with additional stylings from a steady slew of similarly titled projects like Teen Daze, Summer Heart, Memory Tapes, and Work Drugs. Beachier analogs Beach Fossils, DIIV, Real Estate, and Best Coast dropped projects that maintained a reverb-laden atmosphere, all of which consistently won critical acclaim from Pitchfork. The nascent rise of the indie-industrial-complex had not yet collapsed under its own weight in the first half of the decade. This meant that blogs and labels had a wealth of resources to put behind small bands, and by extension, corporations like Urban Outfitters were happy to cash in on the associated coolness of the blog-born microgenre brand with advertising and promotion. Acts like Youth Lagoon or Unknown Mortal Orchestra could be plucked out of obscurity after posting a single track, covered by major outlets, signed by a small to mid-sized independent label (Fat Possum, in their case) and launched into the festival circuit. The same aesthetic shift and increase in blog-driven scale was unfolding in hip-hop, as A$AP Rocky dropped his first single Purple Swag, SpaceGhostPurrp released the murky Mysterious Phonk, and Clams Casino stormed the internet with a series of dreamy

beat tapes (all of which bolstered the recognition of cloud rap, indebted to the pioneering work of Houston’s DJ Screw, and to the outsider rap of Lil B’s Clams Casino-produced I’m God and Viper’s You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Smoke Crack).

Most bedroom pop practitioners were in middle school during the Great Recession: now we’re graduating college amidst our own recession. It was the middle years between these economic calamities where we witnessed a new vanguard gradually usher in an aesthetically-minded approach to hipness (Sam once aptly described it as “cool music for awkward people”). Those of us currently in our early twenties spent formative years hearing Mac DeMarco’s Juno-60 on Chamber of Reflection soundtracking parties, watching Tyler, the Creator shift from shockingly homophobic horrorcore to nuanced reflections on his own queerness, housed in increasingly sleek pop-leaning structures. His fourth album, Flower Boy, dropped July of 2017. Only two weeks later, Claire Cottrill uploaded the self-produced music video for her song Pretty Girl, positioning herself for a viral rise to fullblown celebrity status. Putting music on digital streaming platforms like DistroKid and CDBaby, a new crop of young creators took the stage outside of mainstream apparatuses, a creative extension of previous trends but free of the structural trappings that characterized the preceding blog-first years.

This type of music is decidedly pleasant to the ears, which largely accounts for its mainstream appeal. Coffee shops, fast food chains, and clothing retailers piped bedroom pop through their in-house speakers in a recent time when brickand-mortars could still be physically frequented. Breezy in its sonic quality and light in its lyrical content, it’s background music for what noted Marxist Guy Debord dubbed the “diffuse spectacle,” a hypnotic reverie of mass media which he describes as emblematic of an affluent economy, paradoxically personal and commodifiable. I find this phenomenon fascinating because beyond vaporwave, it’s the first truly post-geographic artistic movement to take place, one whose practitioners were born recently enough to mostly preclude pre-9/11 and pre-internet memories. Situated in a late-capitalist regime, bedroom pop signals a philosophical shift to a post-postmodern or “metamodern” emotional affect, a concept loosely alluded to in the last Vansire single that I’d like to expand upon. It’s a blueprint for contextualizing critical theory in today's world. On its face, this may seem like an esoteric exercise, but I think it provides helpful insight in terms of how we got here.

Post-Structuralism in a post-blog world

Photo: Melisandre Martin

In February of 1969, French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered a speech at the Collège de France which shook the academic world, positing the existence of an “author-function.” He took umbrage with the notion that the author precedes a text's existence as an all-encompassing source of meaning and significance. Authorship, he argued, is a culturally contingent fallacy, one that only developed in a societal context when names had to be attached to transgressive texts that warranted punishment in the eyes of a government. In his view, calling the author the originator of a work was a simplistic understanding of creativity, one that aligned with the historical fascination surrounding “genius,” glorifying the artist as a singular font of wisdom. Foucault’s author function shifts emphasis from the individual author’s ideas to a general discursive reality, suggesting that it’s more useful to contextualize texts as a product of institutional conditions, related studies, and popular mythos. In other words, Foucault would say that you are not the author of your own work.

He didn’t consider the author-function to be limited to texts, writing “Certainly, the author-function in painting, music, and other arts should [be] discussed...” Foucault theorized an eventual moment in which structural changes would lead “the author function [to] disappear... in such a manner that fiction and its polysemic texts will once again function according to another mode,” where texts would be exchanged freely without concern of authorship. It’s my belief that the consumption and dissemination of bedroom pop in 2020 signals the arrival of this moment. Buried beneath the academic jargon, the arguments made by pioneering structuralists like Foucault are as pertinent today as they were four decades ago.

The first time I read the essay, the concept of an authorless society struck me as an implausible and somewhat aspirational afterthought. Under a late-capitalist regime, how could fiction “not be limited by the form of the author”? The commodification-by-dispersion of any cultural text is arguably intrinsic to its existence insofar as any consumer’s means of access are characterized by their position in an economic context. Consumers are situated in relation to the author, a “regulator of the fictive,” a role which Foucault calls “quite characteristic to our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property.”

However, a closer look at the vehicles for discovery and distribution of bedroom pop songs does in fact reveal a de-centering of the author. During the movement’s 2017-2018 heyday, the most notable platforms for discovery were YouTube channels with large followings. Anonymous curators would post songs to their channels bound by an aesthetic of low-fidelity production and a sonic quality wrought with nostalgia. Comments on the videos engaged in a consumer-centered fictive, where viewers would describe scenes the music conjured in their mind, writing anecdotes about their own lives. Some of these YouTube channels were known for re-editing visual ma-

terials into new music videos. Found footage, grainy VHS recordings, and various movies were (and continue to be) indiscriminately spliced with varying precision on top of music. In a video for the Vansire song Nice to See You (feat. Floor Cry), a YouTuber with the username “I’m cyborg but that’s ok” re-edited director Edward Yang’s 1985 masterpiece Taipei Story on top of the tune. On the channel “David Dean Burkhart,” one can watch the young protagonist of Phillipe Falardeau’s C'est pas moi, je le jure bike around and spread havoc to the tune of Current Joys’ Kids (the video sitting at 3 million views), or witness Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannsen share intimate moments in Lost in Translation to the gentle swells of Cigarettes after Sex’s Nothing’s

Gonna Hurt You Baby (sitting at 12 million views). On the found footage side, 3 million have viewed Burkhart splicing together 80s VHS prom footage to Foxes in Fiction’s Ontario Gothic. 5 million have viewed Craft Spells’ Nausea play on top of a video with a group of kids running around, miming fighting, and driving through their small town. In the top comment, a user writes “I don’t understand why I feel so much nostalgia I wasn’t even alive during that time period.”

The editorial playlists of major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music also dominated musical discovery in the scene. Both companies employ curators who add songs to various mixes organized by activity and mood like “Morning Coffee,” “Study Break,” “Sad and Lonely,” and “Chill Vibes.” Like the YouTube channels, this curatorial practice weaves a new cultural text—one characterized by aesthetic and aural consistency—from the musical work of many. The “Chill Vibes” playlist is a blank canvas for a listener’s lived experience and potential to experience situations which evoke chill vibes. A new narrative is realized through a curated sequencing of disparate music. This adds an authorless quality to the music’s consumption, and moves away from traditional modes like the album in which the primacy of the artist is established in the construction and sequencing of the work itself.

The impact of these playlists is so significant that it’s changed the compositional practice of bedroom pop artists. Having to filter through thousands of submissions, curators are far likelier to promote songs that are immediately captivating. As such, more artists are releasing singles in lieu of albums. A stream of instantly catchy singles proves more successful in catching the attention of curators who oversee placement on official playlists. This is certainly the case for Sam and I. Our last two Vansire singles, That I Miss You and Metamodernity, are more or less confirmations of this hypothesis. After feeling dismayed with the way most tracks on our last full-length album fell by the wayside, both singles were a test in creating the most compressed and catchy form of a song. This becomes a self-perpetuating phenomenon. More artists create work that will achieve placement, leading to a content mill with an unending slew of similar songs (e.g. ones which directly match criteria for the Chill Vibes playlist or high potential for a TikTok format). This ensures a constant selection of new music to replenish the playlists.

As a collage of music by far-flung practitioners, bedroom pop’s nascent rise can also be read as the inevitable creative legacy of a generation raised with internet access to infinite audio materials and culturally disparate locales. It is the distillation of what literary theorist Roland Barthes once described as “a tissue of citations” resulting from “thousands of sources of culture.” Bedroom pop’s origin itself is tenuous and indicative of the neoliberal propensity towards commodification under which it grew. The term didn’t take on its current definition until an editorial Spotify playlist of the same name emerged in January 2018. From the outset, this music has been inexplicably linked to its economic context and marketable potential to late-Millenial and Gen Z listeners. Furthermore, legitimate accusations of nepotism and industry insider-status have frequently been leveled at the genre’s pre-eminent figures. Polemics unfold across the internet, with individuals pointing out artists’ familial ties to music industry figures and attempts to conceal wealthy upbringings in what should theoretically be the most egalitarian kind of music making out there (music made in one’s bedroom).

This is a tension at the heart of bedroom pop. Its folkloric construction hinges on an idealized vision of an individual making music in small spaces with inexpensive equipment, when in reality, just a few years of growing popularity have led to massive label deals with some of its main originators. While some of us still work in our bedrooms, an artist like Rex Orange County works with a team of engineers and songwriters bankrolled by Sony. Yet, we’re still placed sideto-side on the same playlists.

This dissonance, fallout from a society “dominated by modern conditions of production” embodies what Guy Debord might describe as “the specialization of images of the world [evolving] into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived.” Here, I think

we arrive at the central dichotomy of a metamodern existence: a subconscious reconciliation of postmodern cynicism towards late capitalism, balanced with an embrace of romanticism.

Affect and Romanticism

Romanticism hit its stride in the late 19th century, manifesting across all artistic mediums in reaction to what artists viewed as the most negative aspects of modernity and the Industrial Revolution. Their work celebrated nature, the past, and individual subjectivity in a world increasingly characterized by rationalization. Detractors of their work believed romantics were partaking in unproductive escapism, but their work can ultimately be read as an alternative. Rather than blind nostalgia, their movement was a space for art and self-expression, a struggle to construct a relationship between artist, subject, and society in which modes of living and cultural traditions were at risk of subsumption.

A quick survey of popular bedroom pop songs makes me think that the Romanticist ethos still echoes. Mellow Fellow and Clairo’s How Was Your Day, Rex Orange County’s Loving is Easy, Girl in Red’s I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend, and Boy Pablo’s Feeling Lonely don’t possess lyrical revelations beyond the surface level sincerity alluded to in their titles. They all foreground the narrator’s personal experience, indulging in the emotion brought about by the song’s subjects. In an era of rapid modernization which—like those 19th century Romantics—threatens the existence of various modes of life and human cultures (climate change, far-right authoritarianism, pandemics, etc.), cultural texts which unabashedly indulge in romantic themes come to stand as a sort of political gesture by virtue of their mere existence. This gesture has clearly resonated with large swaths of young people who listen to this music around the world. Its romantic dialectic is what I consider to be the starting point of what can be identified as a post-postmodern affect, or a “metamodern” affect, in its ability to mediate romantic narratives of modernism within the poststructural and postmodern realities which led to bedroom pop’s actual development.

In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, literary critic Frederic Jameson traces what he describes as a “waning of affect” in an exploration of art and architecture. Of particular salience, I think, is his comparison of two visual works depicting shoes (Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes and Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes) and the different way viewers interact with these works. He writes:

If this copiously reproduced image, [A Pair of Shoes], is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation--which has vanished into the past--is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial situation to which the work is somehow a response is by stressing the raw materials, the initial content, which it confronts and reworks, transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh that content, those initial raw materials, are to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal, menaced, and marginalized state... Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind... Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object... we have a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas... [there is] no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context... All of which brings me to... what I will call the waning of affect in postmodern culture. (Jameson)

Jameson positions the “waning of affect,” the purported affectless quality of Diamond Dust Shoes, as the characterizing affect of postmodernism itself. Van Gogh’s work is to a certain degree locational. We can locate the “raw materials'' associated with this painting, which Jameson describes as our cultural and historical associations with a peasant engaging in agricultural labor. These “raw materials'' locate us emo-

tionally and culturally. Warhol’s work, however, exists in its own vacuum. The abstracted nature of the image leaves us with no lived experience from which we can draw meaning. This constitutes a post-modern waning of affect in which we lose the “endowment of history and the social,” as Jameson writes.

Bedroom pop mitigates this postmodern reality by employing romantic lyrical themes (manifesting what Jameson would call “raw materials”) that afford listeners an opportunity “to restore... a larger lived context.”. While bedroom pop alludes to grand romantic narratives, the technological circumstances under which songs are made place them somewhere closer to the visual abstraction of the Warhol piece hanging in a museum gallery, which Jameson describes as being “confronted... with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object.” The music utilizes decades-old synthesizers and analogue machinery in an era characterized by digital 14 means of creation and dispersion. Any audio recording can easily be sampled and exported, a grotesque palimpsest of nostalgia for 20th century analogue visual and auditory materials placed inside a commodifiable and digital 21st-century neoliberal framework. Songs sample the crackle and hiss of vinyl, or emulate the warble of a tape deck, and are then streamed from a digital bank of music. This paradox transpires under the eyes of massive corporations collecting listeners’ metadata. The ability of these contradictions to coexist constitutes what I believe to be the post-postmodern, or “metamodern” affect. For our generation, born into a post-modern era, there’s a collective propensity towards content deemed authentic, a yearning for escape from the pervasive cynicism and irony of the postmodern paradigm. Metamodernity is an inadvertent attempt to reconcile the central contradictions of today’s life as consumers of media.

This desire for genuineness rings true when I read articles and reviews about Vansire (an uncanny postmodern exercise in and of itself). To cite a few disparate lines from pieces discussing the project’s perceived appeal: There’s something pure about Vansire that makes them beautifully familiar... / The band has a kind of friendly feeling... that can [possibly] be attributed to the Midwestern stereotype... / Maybe it was the fact that they were a couple of nice boys from Minnesota... / Vansire works best... when it’s just the two of them and their genuine feelings their songwriting engenders...

These quotes highlight a direct yearning for authenticity. The image of Sam and I recording music in a Minnesota basement carries a relatively simple and romantic sentiment, one that I employed as a rhetorical strategy in the introduction of this essay. In the same way that Jameson could identify the raw materials which conveyed the emotional affect of Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes (agrarian economic structures, agricultural labor, the “working man”, etc.), listeners can easily delineate the raw materials of Vansire and complete Jameson’s purported “hermeneutic gesture” to restore a larger lived context. This might include cultural tropes like “Minnesota Nice,” Middle-American pastoralism, a scrappy origin story, buddy-comedy tropes, or any other number of caricatured readings which we implicitly identify in the zeitgeist.

It’s hard to know how to operate creatively in this sort of self-aware situation, but a wariness of the metamodern paradigm and the story of bedroom pop itself provide useful templates for moving forward. It’s my belief that a metamodern outlook can provide a positive antidote to the cynicism of postmodernism. Today’s youth are well-aware of Debord’s “spectacle” in one form or another; it is metamodernism that finds them carving out spaces of comfort inside of it.

Josh Augustin writes and records music as part of the dream pop duo, Vansire with Samuel Winemiller.

Originally from Rochester, Minnesota, he studied in Technology in Music and Related Arts & Film at Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music.

Sam Winemiller (pictured left) and Josh Augustin (right)

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

This book is set in Gill Sans Nova, a typeface named after Eric Gill (1882-1940) who was a British sculptor, printmaker, and typeface designer. This edition of the typeface was designed by George Ryan from Monotype, released in 2015. I included this font because of the humanistic style of the lettering, best to convey the emotion hidden in Vansire's music, and that I eluded to in my perosnal essay.

Designed by Nicholas Ismael Martinez

Printed and bounded at Broad Art Center, UCLA, Los Angeles, California

Photos provided by Vansire, Audiotree, Nicholas Ismael Martinez

Vansire's reflection no. 6 sound makes me feel like I am back home in the bay area, living my life before college. During the pandemic, life felt strange being away from the social scene and continuing school all online. although this time will be remembered by most as depressing, I still find solace in the music I listened to whenever I would go for a walk, do homework, or vibed in the car. along with my interest in design, using typography and image to express one of my favorite songs by Vansire was fun but also a reminisce on the interesting parts of my latter teens.