The Problem With “Chill”
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I have returned to this space after a small hiatus, at least when compared to other pauses in my history of blogging. Family, teaching, and other (paid) writing opportunities prevented me from maintaining my wonderful “Grading ChatGPT” series from the beginning of the year. You can find some of the work I’ve done since February in The New York Times and the Ann Arbor District Library’s Pulp online publication. I’ve also written for Early Music America’s magazine and Chamber Music magazine in this period, but I can’t share those pieces digitally.
One reason I’m back here is that I am back teaching — for the first time, I have a summer term section of the liberal arts music course I’ve taught at the University of Michigan since January 2021, and it is going really well. I am so amazed by and grateful to my wonderful students.
Last Tuesday, I presented one of my favorite lectures, which deals with the concept of ‘chill aesthetic’ from philosopher/musicologist Dr. Robin James’ fabulous 2019 book The Sonic Episteme. I a small portion of this text to introduce my students to the way we structure discussions of socio-political and cultural topics throughout our time working together. I found myself so inspired by my students and teaching this topic last week, that I could not help stop myself from writing about all the ideas James’ wonderful scholarship sparked.
My students and I discussed a short excerpt from the book’s fourth chapter, “Neoliberal sophrosyne: Acoustic Resonance as Subjectivity and Personhood”. As noted above, we focus specifically on James’ concept of ‘chill aesthetic’, a certain set of stylistic parameters she observes emerging in the upper echelons of American popular music circa 2016, following the turbulent political developments of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election.
James introduces ‘chill’ as a symbolic salve to the socio-political trauma audiences may have incurred at this point in history, and, from here, deftly builds connections to broader forces, like biopolitics and neoliberalism. Ultimately, James’ goal is to illuminate parallels between ‘chill’ and the concept of ‘sophrosyne’ in ancient Greek philosophy, but, given the nature of the course and my knowledge, we stick to the musical and social implications of her work.
Here is how James defines this meaning of ‘chill’ in The Sonic Episteme:
"Chill...is a desirable quality because it demonstrates reasonableness and self-control. For example, an Internet forum explaining English slang terms defines ‘chill’ as the ‘ability to act in a rational manner’ such that one refrains from excess...Chill is admirable because it signals masculinity, mastery, and self-mastery. ‘Being a chill woman is the opposite of being a hysterical one.’ Chill is the ability to rein in feminine and feminized excess."
Citing Washington Post music critic Chris Richards, James reinforces the appeal of ‘chill aesthetic’ in post-Donald Trump America as a sort of musical, “Xanax,” that provides comfort to listeners at a time when familiarity is more desirable than exploration. James using Richards’ commentary to explain the way ‘chill aesthetic’ manifests itself musically: ‘chill’ songs are ‘smooth’ and ‘soft’, their materials unfold in a consistent, predictable manner, and they tend to eschew dramatic, bombastic, or ebullient ideas.
James notes Richards’ observations that ‘chill’ songs’ regular, restrained expression makes them ideal for inclusion on contemporary streaming platforms that prioritize, “fluid, frictionless listening.” Here, we can see how the rise of ‘chill aesthetic’ is not only an ostensibly organic reaction to a particular historical moment, but also aligns with the goals of dominant corporations. Indeed, one of the songs James uses to demonstrate ‘chill’ is Ed Sheeran’s, “Shape Of You”, which remains the most-streamed song in the history of Spotify.
When I listen to “Shape Of You” with my students, we discuss its musical characteristics, and consider it within the context of this framework, which is applicable to other examples and topics covered in the course:
A real presentation slide from my lecture on this topic.
Neoliberal views may not determine the exact content of Ed Sheeran’s song, but the powerful influence of neoliberalism makes aspects of “Shape Of You” more valuable than they might be in a different system. Not only does the consistent materials and narrow range of musical expression in “Shape Of You” — qualities epitomized by the narrow range of the vocal performance (melodically and emotionally), as well as the song’s repetitive rhythmic content — align with ‘chill aesthetic’, the fact that Sheeran wrote the song in about 20 minutes makes it ideal from the perspective of anti-labor neoliberal values.
As you can see in the above image, the analytical framework I teach my students features a middle tier designated as ‘group dynamics’. This layer aims to represent broader discursive conflicts that effort to define and categorize individual musical works, activities, etc., within a given structural context. In the case of James’ work with ‘chill aesthetic’, these ‘group dynamics’ emerge in the purported aesthetic transgression of Harry Styles’ song “Sign Of The Times”, which serves as a foil to James’ ‘chill’ examples, “Shape Of You” and the The Chainsmokers/Halsey collaboration, “Closer”.
James references a profile of Styles in Rolling Stone wherein the author/interviewer, Cameron Crowe, criticizes Styles’ loyalty to his young, primarily female, listeners and apparent disinterest in, “proving credibility to an older crowd”. Styles responds angrily, defending his, “Teenage-girl fans,” for their honesty and lack of pretense. This episode illustrates multiple important elements in both James’ theory of ‘chill aesthetic’ and the way it connects to the process of structuring music within cultural contexts that I teach my students.
First, this exchange between Styles and Crowe indicates the significance of conformity to the ‘chill aesthetic’ and its culture. Styles’ subversiveness is relatively mild: “Sign Of The Times” is a more expressive and dynamic song than “Shape Of You”, but it is not aesthetically radical by any means. Nevertheless, by dismissing the characteristics of ‘chill aesthetic’, and, perhaps more importantly, resisting the notion that appealing to younger, female fans is less meaningful than an older, male audience, Styles becomes a sort of rebel (despite, of course, still participating in the highest commercial echelons of American popular music).
Second, this Rolling Stone episode meaningfully invokes gender norms. James clearly connects ‘chill’ music with the rejection of, “feminized excess”, and, as she further explains, there is a connection between ‘chill’, feminine identity, and conformity. “As Massey argues, ‘chill’ women don’t act in stereotypically feminine ways, in particular, ‘demanding accountability’ from heterosexual romantic partners (i.e. men),” James writes, continuing, “chill women are the ideal postfeminist subject: independent, self-possessed, sexually adventurous, but unbothered by and not a bother about pesky things like sexism.” By both embracing and validating his, “Teenage-girl fans”, Styles — who, in recent years, has drawn criticism from right-wing media on account of his ‘un-masculine’ fashion choices — rejects the general socio-political conformity attendant to the ‘chill aesthetic’, along with its gendered implications.
Third, and finally, Styles can be seen as transgressing the ‘chill aesthetic’ by advocating for community strength via his fans, which, as James explains, contradicts neoliberal values. She writes, “as part of its redrawing lines of social inclusion/exclusion around (supposedly) individual performance rather than group-based social identity, neoliberalism and biopolitics use sophrosyne as a gendered racializing practice to keep feminine people from sonic, political, and sexual insubordination.” Accordingly, we see the media servicing neoliberal institutions through its attempts to characterize Styles’ fan base as immature and unsophisticated. I always point out to my students that this phenomenon is an excellent example of how activity at the level of ‘group dynamics’ mediates the values of more abstract institutional structures and imposes them onto individual behavior.
The neoliberal desire to separate the individual from community is evident in James’ work beyond the discussion of Styles’ “Sign Of The Times”. James references The Chainsmokers’ “Closer (ft. Halsey)” as another demonstration of the ‘chill aesthetic’ alongside Sheeran’s “Shape Of You”. Here, James focuses on the song’s, “false beat drop”, as evidence of the kind of the subdued expression common to ‘chill’ music. I love this point because it is very easy for my students to hear the apparent influence of the ‘chill aesthetic’ on this song, and we do comparative listening exercises with ‘real’ beat drops from other EDM songs to underscore the compromised style presented by “Closer”.
But, the ‘false beat drop’ in “Closer” represents more than a simple musical concession to the demands of the ‘chill aesthetic’. Excising the beat drop from “Closer” eliminates a powerful instance of togetherness provided by that moment of rhythmic, melodic, and structural arrival typical to EDM. One example I usually show my students is this live performance of the song “Doomsday” by the artist Nero. We initially talk about its sample (the first movement of composer John Adams’ orchestral work Harmonielehre) but, when we cover James’ conception of ‘the chill aesthetic’, that performance of “Doomsday” helps demonstrate the sense of group identity audiences lose when songs like “Closer” avoid beat drops.
Not only is a beat drop antithetical to the ‘chill aesthetic’ because it ushers in an explosive release in the music and among those listening, the collective activity with which it is associated symbolically threatens the individualism neoliberalism desires to make imperative. In this respect, I find James’ work in The Sonic Episteme startlingly prescient. Published in 2019, the book’s discussion of conformity and the dissolution of social connectivity, via the ‘chill aesthetic’ and its relationship to neoliberal biopolitics, is, to me, extraordinarily relevant in the world after COVID-19’s arrival, which, at least in the US, has all but disavowed the idea that individuals and institutions should provide care for others.
