The leaves rust and the sky turns white like clay. With heavy resignation, we consign our Chip & Pepper wetwear and cut-offs to the furthest reaches of our closets. Yes, autumn is settling in, as it does every year, but this time our dreams of sun, sand and stupor seem to be dying especially hard deaths. Maybe it’s some kind of melancholy. Or maybe it’s just the music.
It seems like every time I put on headphones, all I hear about is summer’s most perfect sun-kissed promise: the beach. The ubiquitous indie pop movement has been christened with a yacht-load of genreriffic names — “glo-fi,” “lo-tide,” “chillwave” — and is, broadly speaking, a hazy articulation of sun-stroked experience via synth-patchs and vaguely electro beats. Only scant examples, like Best Coast’s California-made “Sun Was High (So Was I),” actually represent the beach-bound reality of their makers, however. Most wash up unexpectedly from far-flung locales. For instance, Washed Out’s “Feel it all Around” manages to evoke St. Tropez via a laptop band in Columbia, South Carolina. Air France’s seminal “GBG Belongs to Us,” a song that opens to the sounds of crashing waves and powerboats, comes to our ears all the way from Sweden. I don’t know about you, but the only Swedish beach I know is of The Seventh Seal variety — a barren windswept locale where you do things like hang with death.
Beach pop shrugs off any disingenuity by simply inviting us to chill, however. Indeed, on the surface, it is ease incarnate, best experienced in conjunction with “a good sit.” But listen closer. It is also cool and disconnected in its airy affect, drifting by like days lost in leisure. Yes, beach pop is not unlike an actual day at the beach — an experience partially defined by unsettling undercurrents of wasted time, and things left behind. Author J.G. Ballard once opined that sandy locales had exhausted their future, and therefore stood outside of time, becoming destinations for restless souls. His implication was that, if you looked beneath the sunny facade, you would often find deep existential unease at the beach.
It is an idea that finds considerable currency across popular artforms, where “the beach” has long been a reliable metaphor for underlying disconcert. Even contemporary beach pop’s own conceptual ancestor, Neil Young’s 1974 album On The Beach, is an example. His beach was a sombre artistic refuge where he rode out a dark period marked by drug dependency and a friend’s death. Young actually copped the title from an even more uneasy work — Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, which found the last remnants of the human race gathering on Melbourne’s beaches to face down their impending extinction with yawning ennui.
The auteurs of the French New Wave were similarly enamored with the symbolic potential of beaches, and they figure in pivotal scenes of Godard’s Pierre le Fou (1965), Vadim’s Et Dieu . . . Crea la Femme (1956), and Lelouch’s Un Homme et une Femme (1966), amongst others. Perhaps most memorable is Truffaut’s final scene in Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), where our adolescent protagonist emerges into a landscape of terrifying existential freedom — an isolated beach. The big happy/not happy beach motif only got more intense as it easily extended across oceans and decades. Indeed, the cocaine-and-grandeur-fueled ‘80s gave us Bette Midler’s women-with-terminal-diseases opus Beaches (1988) and Michael Mann’s bros-with-guns series Miami Vice, two works based entirely around the single image.
In all these examples, the beach is a clear metaphor for “living life on the edge,” whether that means the edge of extinction, breakdown, freedom or the unknown. As such, it makes sense that the beach pop movement of summer 2009 would arrive at the edge of a new decade. Indeed, when one considers our collective wont to compartmentalize artistic movements by decade (think of how monolithic the terms “’60s”, “’70s” or “’80s” music seem), then a little end-of-the-decade artistic anxiety is understandable. Perhaps even more, though, beach pop is a respite from the post-millennial tensions that have defined this decade. Somehow, we have made it through the last 10 years, through terrorism and technology, through war and George Bush, without completely destroying the shit out of everything and each other. How likely did that outcome seem in the immediate wake of 9-11?
So is beach pop actually just a breezy swoon of the human race exhaling deeply? Who knows. But, really, I can think of no better way to blow off the last bit of a difficult decade than by having a giant conceptual beach party, and basking in the warm glow of our continued existence.
