EVERY GENRE PROJECT - January 19 - Hypnagogic Pop

Genre of the Day - Hypnagogic Pop

Album of the Day - Slide by George Clanton

Sometimes it seems like most music today is awash in nostalgia. While it’s certainly not invariably true per se, it can sometimes feel while encountering today’s charts that most English language pop music is in some way longing for the early aughts, the late ‘70s disco, recession pop, or 80s synthpop. It’s no wonder nostalgia is such a facet of music today: the wide access of the entire catalog of music ever put out due to streaming has elicited an unprecedented level of interest into every touchstone and microgenre ever put out, which I personally think is very cool and one of the benefits of streaming.

When artists can focus in on that nostalgia, though, they can counterintuitively lock into forms of musical innovation: i.e. using nostalgia as a building block for new and uncharted forms of music. That is evident on today’s genre, hypnagogic pop: a somewhat esoteric name is applied here to a genre that actually could technically describe a lot of pop, but is specific and distinctive enough ehre to be its own thing. On that note, though, this genre’s definition exposes the brutality of the music journalism world: when it was beginning to be identified in the late 2000s, critics attacked it, saying it was a horrible genre definition and arguing for its lack of existence. Yes, there are people that lifeless who care that much, which is terrifying in its own right.

You may be asking, what is it that these lifeless people are taking issue with? What even is this genre? In the late 2000s, almost like yesterday, a certain group of online producers bought a ticket on the nostalgia train of 1980s pop music and pop culture, drawing vaguely on its sound while combining it with very literal markers of oldness such as lo-fi production and a generally hazy sound. This has seemed to take an over decade-long hold, as RYM shows that releases have never really slowed down since the genre’s inception in the late aughts.

RYM’s top hypnagogic pop albums all seemed to be attached to some other genre, demonstrating its lack of cohesion as a genre, which is interesting to me because it’s a ‘genre’ whose definition allows it to draw on a wide range of influences and thus allow it to be adjacent to many different genres. Slide by George Clanton in particular though, today’s album is more close to ‘chillwave.’ This album was genuinely beautiful, though, and very moving: sonically homogenic with a strong emphasis on hazy, wavering synth driven sounds, Claton mixes emotional lyrics with occasional, beautiful, languishing interludes that provide a nice break with the yearning of the lyrics. Yearning is perhaps the core component of nostalgia, after all: a desire for something that will never occur, but that has occurred, a paradox that is insurmountable yet all the more enticing because it did happen once upon a time. Tapping in to that sense of nostalgia is healthy every now and again, but no art form illustrates it as beautifully as today’s genre.