Hey everyone! 
I don't usually watch advertisements on television; hell, I don't usually watch television. But when I do, when the sport-ball game is on, I like to watch... beer commercials. Something about them is always so entertaining.
memegenerator.net, caption my own
Recently, there has been a television advertisement for a certain brand of light beer. In it, a king holds court with his subjects, who stand in a line before him offering gifts... mostly the light beer in question, until...
A man stands before the king and places a plain-looking bottle of something on the head table.
"What, um... what... is that?" inquires the king, taken aback by the sudden inconformity.
"This," the subject begins, before continuing in the most hipsteresque fashion imaginable, "is a spiced honey mead wine that I have really been into lately."
The subject is then ceremoniously banished to a place we know only as the "Pit of Misery." Harsh. Dilly dilly.
I'm not the biggest alcohol snob, but everyone has a weird taste in something, and I am no exception. There are probably dozens of things I could say I am unconventional about, but I think one of the most relatable categories is music. I like a little bit of everything, but if I had a "spiced honey mead wine" that I've really been into lately, it just has to be this stuff:
Soundcloud embed: Lost Years - ConverterOh my god, you guys. This genre is called "synthwave", "retrowave", "futuresynth", or "isn't this that song from that one 80's movie?" I'll just call it retrowave, because that's my favourite name. I feel like "futuresynth" completely misses the concept-- this is music made today in the style of the past. But not really, because you just can't make that kind of music anymore. It was a different world then. We didn't have cellular phones... or digital audio workstations. There were probably a lot more drugs involved, and certainly much bigger hair.
No-- retrowave is a robotic, mechanised reproduction of everything we remember about synth-heavy music in the 80s. And I don't mean we literally, because everyone who actually remembers how they made music in the 80s is a retired old fuck now (no offence intended to old fucks).
No. Retrowave is how millennials remember the music from a time period they never lived. And it's glorious.
Soundcloud embed: Mitch Murder - Ravaged SkiesI love everything about it. The methodical, undulating basslines. The syncopated synth punctuation announcing a chord change. The breaks in the action for half-minutes of far-off, dreamy synths.... they take us young folk back to a time not only before we were born, but that probably never even existed.
As the dreamscape portions draw to their close, you can almost hear the drum-machine fill say: "We now return to your regularly-scheduled eargasm."
Soundcloud embed: Rémi Gallego - Malware InjectionAww, yessss. This is my get shit done music lately, and most likely for the foreseeable future. I'm hooked. 🍋
How to get an upvote from me today: Do you like retrowave? Hate it? Have something (retrowave or not) that you think I should listen to? All comments are welcome!
