I was coming up out of the subway on the way to work today, listening to the Baths record, and I ran into a girl named Natalie who I went to school with, and I took my headphones off and we spoke for a minute and I asked her about some people from college that we both know, but she knows them better and has kept in contact with them and I’ve fallen out of contact with them. Most of her answers involved the person I was asking about leaving New York at some point between when college ended in May and right now, and eventually she just said, “Yeah, I think almost everyone I know fled the city. Like, you can’t find a job here…” And then she looked down and I looked down and we changed the subject and we said goodbye and she got on her subway and I put my headphones back on and walked to work listening to Baths.

In this book about North Korea that I just finished, the writer ends the book by describing the starving people sitting on benches and on the ground along the highway and keeping their heads down or staring blankly and just waiting for something to change, people who are helpless and without agency, and in a way it’s strange to think about people reacting to a bad economy this way (North Korea was going through its second major famine in two decades when the reporter drove by the people she described) instead of protesting or trying to overthrow the government. But sometimes when there’s a problem that is overwhelming and terrifying and almost universal, it makes it harder to address than some marginal, conquerable problem, and the best way to address it and keep your sanity is to get away from it. At one point in the 1990s, even as they could barely feed themselves, North Koreans went to the movies on average 21.8 times/year and at the same time, South Koreans went 2.3 times/year. When you can’t get a job for two weeks you can get angry and try harder; when you can’t get a job for two years it’s hard to get out of bed.

I studied economics in college and when I’m not reading about music, I’m mostly reading about the economy, except sometimes i can’t bear to read about it anymore because there is this pervasive sense of hopelessness about it. We’re living through a rare occasion in economic history when mainstream economists and fringe economists are in agreement about America’s economic present and short-term future: it’s bleak. Kim Jong-Il’s speeches about North Korea’s wildly prosperous economy sound preposterous and the rest of the world laughs at him because his people are starving, but it’s harder to laugh when are own leaders are making the same speeches and people here are starving (“New York City’s 1.7 million recipients of food stamps”). So I guess it’s intuitive to think that American independent music, made and received in the context of a collapsing economy, is a product of a similar escapism.

There’s a general understanding among economists, and this might be true among scholars in other fields too (about their respective disciplines) but i didn’t study other fields so I don’t know, that history can be accurately understood through an economic lens and almost any mass idea or action can be tied to a parallel circumstance in the economy, and also that there are superficial circumstances that are put forth as explanations for these ideas or actions but if you dig deep enough, or sometimes you don’t even have to dig that deep, there’s an economic motivation to explain anything. Wars, art movements, political movements, trends in mass psychology, etc., can be explained via the economy. There are aesthetic changes that shroud economic changes — as they say, “Cash rules everything around me.”

And sometimes I read Pitchfork reviews for chillwave records or witch house records and think of how often they review a record and use words like “amniotic”, “womblike”, or “womb” to describe it — it’s pretty constant, right? Five or ten years ago, every other twentysomething band wasn’t making hazy, woozy, droney, “womblike” music. There was no band called Baths and no crop of hundreds of projects that sound like Washed Out, but suddenly, since 2009, there are multiple micro-movements that sound like nosedives back into the uterus, “amniotic”, maybe because the world has gotten too hopeless and terrifying to handle. Two years ago, bands like Toro Y Moi (age 23) and Baths (age 21) and the hundreds of other projects that sound like that might have been (or were) on “the beach” musically, because two years ago it seemed like the economy might recover soon and the beach was a fun place to wait it out or escape it temporarily. Now they’re crawling back into bed or getting into the bath.

Missing the idea that chillwave and its siblings are the product of a collapsing economy and the instinct to escape it, and the effect the economy is having on the first generation of kids to have it worse than their parents, including kids who graduate prestigious schools and wind up working at the supermarket and kids who have no hope of making a decent living as a musician for very long if at all, is like thinking that Citizen Kane is a movie about a sled. Every music writer that has written about chillwave and neglected to understand this has failed the kids who make it. Chillwave is an economic phenomenon, and it’s the sound of kids who are long past anger and frustration and defiance.

After the Japanese economy collapsed in 1991, the country went through what is referred to as “The Lost Decade” (1991-2000) and the kids who graduated college during that time are known as “The Lost Generation” because they lived with their parents for an unusually long time before becoming independent, and they went through a bunch of other social turmoil associated with chronic unemployment. American economists have been talking about avoiding “the lost decade” since 2008. One of the symptoms of that is “hikikomori,” which is a term that refers to “the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation… from various personal and social factors in their lives.” How many chillwave artists are one-man bedroom projects? Almost all of them, right? Think of Dayve Hawke, Ernest Greene, Chaz Bundick, Will Weisenfeld, Alan Palomo, Tom Krell, etc.

It’s frustrating that the music press considers the sonic choices of bands like Toro Y Moi and Baths in isolation, because that cheapens their ideas and turns chillwave into an aesthetic fad or a trend or a bandwagon instead of a more psychosocially-rooted movement or a communal reaction, a bunch of kids going through the same thing and reacting the same way. Chillwave, and whatever microgenre How To Dress Well is, is resonant because its listeners want to get into baths too, you know?