What makes a wave a wave? Julian Lynch and Zola Jesus examine asinine genre terms
Is this the face of "crimsonwave"?
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When a review of Madison musician Julian Lynch’s latest album, Orange You Glad, appeared on Pitchfork's front page this September, a teaser line touted Lynch as a “chillwave fixture.” The A.V. Club immediately had to wonder: What in the hell is “chillwave,” and how could such a vague term offer any insight? And what is it about Lynch's serene-yet-not-passive tunes that allows him to be gobbled up by the great blog behemoth and shat into a genre folder labeled with such a puzzling word?
Meanwhile, plenty of blog posts about fellow Madison project Zola Jesus (and, briefly, even her own Wikipedia entry) have contributed to the spread of an even more bizarre genre tag: "crimsonwave." Yep, the rise of two splendid local artists has paralleled the rise of two absurd additions to the world's (or at least the critics' and bloggers') musical vocabulary. Zola Jesus got an extra bump from a Pitchfork-hosted video premiere last week, and Lynch plays Sunday at the Project Lodge, so The A.V. Club figured it was as good a time as any to investigate.
“Uh, as you may imagine, I have no idea,” answers Lynch when asked for the meaning of "chillwave." "It refers to a group of artists who seemingly have very little in common stylistically. Artists are being conspicuously linked based on something as obviously subjective as, well, ‘This is what I listen to when I chill out.’" For example, the blog Hipster Runoff—an amusing monument to the post-ironic wasteland—applied the term to Neon Indian, whose sample-heavy pop doesn't have much in common with Lynch's layered, droning compositions.
While “chillwave” (interchangeable with the also-hysterical term "glo-fi") seems to be the mutant spawn of music bloggers, sometimes artists themselves inadvertently unleash made-up genre categories. Such is the case for 20-year-old Madisonian goth-pop songwriter Nika Danilova, who records under the Zola Jesus moniker. In dozens of blog-posts (including one from The Fader) and ZJ’s Last.fm profile, she's been associated with something called “the ‘crimsonwave’ movement.” (Pause here to remove your palm from your face and let the stinging sensation wear off.) We tried running a Google search to uncover some background on crimsonwave, but unless we put “Zola Jesus” in there with it, the search only turned up an Urban Dictionary entry on menstrual blood. Only Danilova was able to clue us in, because she made it up.
“I worked with Pink Reason and Cro Magnon on putting out a compilation of weirdo women from the Midwest," Danilova says. "The compilation is called Xxperiments, and while we were bouncing around ideas for names, I suggested 'crimsonwave,' for its, you know, association with menstrual blood. It was a joke, but somehow it stuck. The only thing the artists had in common was that we are all totally D.I.Y. and record in our bedrooms. We all come from different places musically.”
Do Lynch and Danilova support these fledgling attempts to brand their music? “Most certainly not,” Lynch says. “But you know musicians—it's hard to get them to self-identify as anything. We’re stubborn types.” Danilova, however, thinks it has to do with “someone wanting to sculpt a movement.” She elaborates: “I was asked in an interview if I was 'new-rave' or something like that. What does that even mean? People want something to hold onto. It’s a new age, and there’s a lot of eagerness to be the first to claim something. The Internet is now host to millions of people aspiring to become reputable journalists, just as there are millions of kids in their bedrooms making low-quality music, trying to be the next big star. Genrefication helps give a label to something and people ascribe to doctrines and patterns. I like to break that apart.”
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