E-Reactionaries Sure Like Their Synthwave

Like synthwave itself, I’m years late on addressing this topic. After all, by 2021, the novelty of a fifteen-year-old genre would seem to have worn off. What could be taken from it for use in other avenues has already been taken. Its legitimization and popularization by LA music industry types has already occurred, their takes on the genre already almost a decade old by now. Nonetheless, synthwave musicians remain alive and well, continuing to create the same sort of music they were doing back 2012—and with relatively larger audiences and more diverse sounds at their fingertips. Obviously, the genre has changed from its original course, but all things considered, it hasn’t changed all that much—the various other -wave musical styles along for the ride all share this much in common.

Aesthetics in Experimentation

At first appearances, there’s nothing distinctly right wing about it, except perhaps that, unlike what passes for too much popular music today, there still remains a shred of melody, albeit melted down and cast into repeating riffs. In this way, it’s something of a follow-up to the metal craze of the late-00s—fitting, considering the time that synthwave really kicked off. Several synthwave artists, such as Perturbator, even had background in extreme metal—in his case, as a guitarist, which helps explain certain tonal, chromatic, and structural similarities between the genres.

Unfortunately, the closeness in musicality also bled into a closeness in aesthetics, at least in the case of Perturbator. His understandable cyberpunk aesthetic is blended with his own interest in sexual preoccupations and the occult; demonic imagery features prominently in the artwork used for his music. Modern sensibilities often attempt to divorce a musician or artist from his work; while there’s something to be said for this, it can’t apply to a musician’s style in the context of his visual aesthetic. There’s a reason an artist like Perturbator puts all of this together as a package deal: even if all you listened to was his music, unaware of his cover art, the music is stylized specifically to evoke similar sonic aesthetics as found in black metal. One could make the argument that this is all merely an appeal to the schlocky 80s horror movie aesthetic that the musician clearly find appealing, but that fails to account for having spent almost a decade and a half building Perturbator’s whole sound, image and approach around it.

But it is not my intention here to dwell on Perturbator; his horror-tinged approach to synthwave exists as only one example of many in a genre that is not tied specifically to horror or open imagery of the demonic. But notice, even in his case, the way the subject is approached: it is not merely any form of popular horror that he broaches, but specifically the aesthetic exemplified by the 80s. The nostalgic interest in that decade, it goes without saying, is exactly the point.

Synthwave looks to capitalize on the nostalgia of an 80s that didn’t really exist. It presents a sonic retrospection of the 1980s, bathed in all of its digital ascendancy; layers upon layers of synthesizers, electronic machines, and automated beats construct a sonic landscape that, at a passing glance, bears a striking resemblance to the popular dance music of the late Cold War. This resemblance, however, is formed not by the song structures or the melodies employed, but by the equipment itself: alter the electronic timbres in question and the retro stylings of synthwave evaporates. Despite first impressions, the genre’s nostalgia is grounded in KORG more than it is in New Order.

This isn’t itself a good or a bad thing. After all, common defenses employed in favor of modern music involve the seemingly endless novelty to be found in the sort of sounds generated by electronic equipment. Even the use of old sounds in new ways, as in the case of synthwave, presents its own novelty. It’s an appropriate selling point for the modern age, but in terms of getting anything more out of the genre, there’s something missing.

A musician who tried was Compilerbau; about seven or eight years ago, he put together a track entitled “Fragments of Bach,” whose content is exactly as the title indicates. Taking elements of Bach’s etudes, Compilerbau played them on synthesizers rather than harpsichords, and he layered them against the driving beats of electronic dance pulses rather than the resonant halls of an open chamber. Such a description makes the song seem a lot more experimental than it comes across in practice, however, as the result leaves a lot to be desired. Trying to synthesize baroque music, and Bach’s at that, into digital signals does damage to the piece, and arguments that it’s no different from playing his keyboard works on a piano miss the point entirely. The differences between traditional western instrumentation and those that generate their tones using digital electronics are not merely superficial. Anyone with an oscilloscope can tell you as much.

Although Compilerbau’s experiment remains somewhat unique in this genre, its failure indicates something broadly categorical about synthwave as well: despite equipped—musically as well as logistically—to produce the complicated harmonies typical of high-brow music, the technology involved flattens the attempt. Likewise, despite its inability to appeal to high brow sentiments, as a genre, its adherence to nostalgia prevents it from breaking a mold. Although synthesizing Bach into the bars of a driving, pulsating synthesizer beat sounds experimental enough, the novelty demanded by modernity renders such an attempt as a curious byproduct of using keyboards in expensive equipment. The schizophrenic experimentation of say, Aphex Twin, this is not.

A Postmodern Condition

Not all music has to be high-brow. Not all music has to be spiritual, either. These sentiments should go without saying, but too-frequently do polemics against popular forms of music go misunderstood. Synthwave, despite seemingly equipped to take on the trappings of high-brow classical composition, finds itself encumbered by both technology and the lack of a modern context for the classical tradition. Thus it very obviously fails to make the leap; like the progressive rock of the Boomers and the extreme metal of both Gen X and Millennials (although bereft, mostly, of the technical virtuosity that usually accompanied those genres), synthwave remains thoroughly entrenched in the low-brow vein. It’s music for radio, if the radio still actually played music.

We must remember, however, what low-brow music used to be. It was music of and for the people: folk songs, a living tradition of living music, played by and for people that may otherwise have had no so-called proper background in musical composition. The advent of radio and the popularization of certain local tunes at the expense of others began the decline in this sort of living tradition, but Tin Pan Alley wasn’t ultimately what killed it; the record industry in LA, the cultural revolution of the sixties, and the general modernist impulse to package the world into so many consumable products were each, in their own way, the executors of that particular tradition. Music of today, no matter what its background, almost without exception owes itself to this period post-demise, after the destruction of the American musical tradition.

This is not unique to synthwave itself, of course, but synthwave’s nostalgia for the 1980s, both sonically and aesthetically, is; this is a nostalgia for a period already overrun with the consumerist trappings that had skewered American traditions. The country lost its footing not just in music, but in entertainment as a whole—movies especially. The films of the decade sprang from the imaginations of oligarchical Hollywood producers and directors whose moral definitions were directly at odds with the broad American consensus, and they pushed the same sort of culture-war revolutionary propaganda that we’ve seen in films of the current decade—the only change has been the advance of sexual liberation between then and now. The fundamental morality, however, was rooted in the same position; since the sixties, Hollywood has become increasingly antagonistic toward the depiction and advocacy of moral values, hiding its disgust under a thin veneer of creative freedom and ‘mature storytelling’. The same was obviously true in the 80s.

Although nostalgia always tends to include an element of contorted memories, it tends not to invent the past out of whole cloth. Synthwave’s popularity, however, does. Musically, it resembles the songs of the period only in passing because of the sounds the electronics make. Aesthetically, it embraces the cultural violence waged by Hollywood elites of the period. But of itself, it’s built from a collection of tones and rhythms that, without these dressings, would mostly be fit just for video games. The nostalgia isn’t just an integral component to synthwave’s existence, it is the very foundation. It stops making any sense without it.

Synthwave, and many of the other -wave genres that exist alongside it, sit as a flattened reconstruction of the already modernized music of the 80s. The nostalgia for a time that didn’t really exist, poured into a vessel of glorified background music, interrupted occasionally by moments musically drawn from other genres—this is the toolbox synthwave has to work with. There’s a reason that films use it in soundtracks, and it isn’t just because so much of its genre is drawn from soundtracks already: it’s because that’s basically all it’s good for. It’s intentionally engineered to be background music.

Conclusions

All this said, of course, there is something to be said for music that still actually uses music to be music—just as there’s something to be said for wistful nostalgia of a time when kids still played outside, news had no 24-hour cycle, people knew their neighbors, and the propaganda on our televisions was a little more intelligent. Like much of modernity, it can be hard to criticize things that still bear some passing resemblance to what is supposed to be good and beautiful and true, especially in times such as these when contemporary music is largely atonal noise overdubbed with primitive grunting noises and hypersexualized imagery. Attempting a critique of the less-bad comes across as the yelling of an old man at clouds, or worse, firing on targets that don’t deserve it.

This isn’t my intention, of course. Rather, it’s periodically necessary to recognize what modernity entails. It is not just some infection that has bled dry the traditions of our past. It’s not a poison that strains a society. It’s the very state of living in a world completely and utterly severed from those traditions. Infections can be healed, poisons removed; but the traditions of the West were, almost without exception, cleared completely away. Once gone, you don’t get them back. A felled tree can’t be glued back onto its stump.

And this applies, for our purposes here, not just to things like political structures or social mores, but even to what we find entertaining and how we should be spending our free time. Music today occupies a bizarre spot in popular consciousness as little more than background noise to an otherwise busy life. Its use in social gatherings—at least when we used to have them prior to COVID-tide—mark this pretty well: not just at clubs or parties, where the music serves to dull the senses in order for other activities to commence, but at concerts too. Although ostensibly festivals for and about music, the music tends to be a vehicle for some other activity—socialization, indulging in nostalgia, drug use. The proliferation of portable music players brought the sounds of the festival into every day life, but where background noise of gatherings bolstered sociability, flawed as it may have been, the iPod turned music into a self-imposed sonic fortress. Listening to music became about feeling things alone by yourself, produced by people you’ve never met, and packaged into consumable products—big pharma for the soul. It was turned from a living, participatory tradition into a means of social control.

What we should recognize is that music today is background noise, that it’s designed to be background noise, but that music isn’t supposed to be background noise at all. We shouldn’t be using it to pollute the air in order to fill some imaginary void. When we put on music, or play it, or experience it, it should be done with a specificity of purpose—not thoughtlessly consumed in the interests of easing an auditory boredom. This applies especially to those of us on the right seeking a way forward both culturally and politically, who recognize the value and necessity of aesthetics in common life. Developing one’s aesthetic taste isn’t all that different from training one’s mind to exercise reason, or conditioning one’s will to cling to God.

To wrap us back around, we have to remember, when listening to our choice in music, not to take it for granted. Can synthwave be enjoyed as something other than background music? Can vaporwave? Can New Order or Depeche Mode? Can Pink Floyd or Frank Zappa? Can Charlie Parker, Coltrane, or Miles? Can Bach? These are questions that only you can answer. But you have to answer it first beginning from a state of quietness.

Music, in itself, exists for a reason. It should not be taken for granted.