As a new decade dawns, the synth has slowly but surely crawled back into popular musicians’ repertoires. In recent years, artists such as MIA, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, and Julian Casablancas (of the Strokes) have forcefully incorporated their love of synths into the world of pop music. Though perhaps more interestingly, new synth-centered subgenres have been popping up all over the place. Let’s investigate before they become irrelevant.
Glo-Fi/Chillwave
Wait, the indie hipsters are taking something as cheesy as the synth and as lame as new age music and making it cool? Surprise, surprise! Expect nothing less from the same Brooklynites and Austinians that are trying to bring back the fanny pack as a fashion statement. Glo-fi (lo-fi music fused with club beats) and chillwave (new wave music that’s a little more chilled out) has become all the rage over the past few months, with new bands forming (or old bands adding acid-head synth players to their line-up) faster than you can type “pitchfork.com”.
Granted, the synth has been relatively present in the wide-open frontier of post-‘80s indie and college rock, more so than most genres. The hazy, drugged-out synths of proto-chillwavers like the Magnetic Fields and Orange Cake Mix were going strong throughout the ‘90s, a time when the synth was considered all but dead or at the very least a novelty in the hands of bands like the Rentals and the Moog Cookbook.
However, since the release of MGMT’s brilliant synth-laced debut in 2008, the synthesizer has enjoyed an ample amount of spotlight in indie music over the past couple years. Hence, the glo-fi and chillwave movement, which is best characterized by walls of dirty-sounding synths (ala MGMT), dance beats, and collages of experimental tape sampling and loops. Along with indecipherable and heavily filtered vocals, the signature sound is a cross between shoegaze’s melodic dissonance, psychedelia’s freaky sound experiments, lo-fi’s warm, homemade 4-track sound quality and of course new wave’s heavy reliance on synths. The best proponents of the subgenre are Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Memory Cassette.
Sad Stoner Rap
While Dr. Dre’s G-Funk of the early-to-mid ‘90s matched soulful synth lines with funky bass grooves, the synthesizer, for the most part, has been absent from the rap world until this past decade. Popular beatmakers such as Timbaland and the Neptunes (both stemming from Virginia) were able to fuse leftfield hip hop beats with simple synth melodies to make mainstream rap hits for the likes of Missy Elliott, Snoop Dogg, and Clipse, as well as even more mainstream pop acts like Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and Nelly Furtado.
However, this fusion between hip hop and pop would be no fluke, but rather a glimpse at rap’s newest and most popular subgenre of the moment: sad stoner rap. While hip hop has been considered popular, airplay-worthy music for a little over two decades, it didn’t actually start to sound like pop music until recently. Most notably, Kanye West’s 808’s and Heartbreak led the revolution with its overuse of synths and auto-tune. Equally steeped in electronica and emo (gross!), this new subgenre of rap is less about “thug life” and more about “feelings”.
Finally, rappers are showing their sensitive sides! They still like to talk about smoking weed, except now it’s a coping mechanism for their anxiety. Likewise, they still talk about bitches and ho’s, except now said bitches and ho’s are breaking up with them because they never listen! With pseudo-sung lyrics, spacey synth hooks and of course, auto-tune (because rappers can’t and shouldn’t sing) sad stoner rap is on the rise. The leader of the movement is undoubtedly Kid Cudi, the young MC who helped Kanye craft songs for 808’s. With his new album Man on the Moon: The End of Day (sounds emo, doesn’t it?) Cudi gets personal with his lyrics and works with electro-rockers Ratatat and MGMT. It’s a far cry from Biggie, but at least no one’s getting shot this time.
Keymo
With the sugary mall-punk emo of the mid-‘00s in decline, the genre is desperately trying to stay relevant. Hence, keymo, or emo with keys. Unfortunately, keymo still sounds very much like emo, what with all the “whoas”, skatepunk whining, and chanted choruses. In fact, nothing much has changed except the keyboard player gets a bigger role, as squiggly synth lines are brought to the forefront of the mix. Of course now that emo keyboardists aren’t relegated to playing chords in the background it’s of utmost importance that their hair is impeccably straightened and their sleeves of tattoos are brightly colored and shaded.
However, there are two different styles in the keymo canon- there is the poppier, Van’s Warped Tour-ready emo, characterized by over-the-top cathartic energy, handclaps, and the self-importance of arena rock. This style is best exemplified by Teen Hearts, a band whose frontman recalls the kid in class who had to go to the nurse’s office everyday to take Ritalin because he threw a chair at the teacher.
The flipside is the softer, crybaby ruminations of bedroom emo-synth, best characterized by glitchy electronics, wistful metaphors, and bleeping and blooping synth parts. Unquestionably, Owl City is the leader of this movement, as he essentially carbon-copies the Postal Service’s Give Up (released 7 years ago), and in the process finds it necessary to dumb down that formula so his music can be enjoyed by 10 year olds everywhere. But for everyone else, listening to keymo is about as fun chemo therapy.
Kyle Donley - Hi, I'm Kyle Donley. I write and do comedy (not always in that order). Oh, I also live in Brooklyn and write articles for Suite101. I ...
