The Required Fall Playlist

Back-to-school, leaves crunching, feelings dislodging, now available on streaming

Last week, a self-described “former gifted kid” made a therapy-speak like tweet that induced further tweet exchanges, some affirming and some nasty. The crux of the original tweet was something along the lines of “I feel especially aimless right now, because as a former gifted kid, I lived for the return of the school year, so now that life just goes on without that kind of return, I, and other former gifted kids, feel pointed existential dread at this time of year.” Ludicrous, sure. “Gifted kid” designation is controversial for a reason, and really, it should be controversial enough that “former gifted kids” probably shouldn’t go around flaunting that designation. 

Being designated “gifted and talented” is arbitrary. School districts that have an accelerated track often test kids young, separate low- and high-scoring students, and keep it that way, often, through middle school to prepare kids to follow an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate program in high school. It’s well-established that these high-scorers are whiter and wealthier than the average schoolkid. Effectively, their Advanced Placement coursework subsidizes their postsecondary education. An AP exam costs a lot less than a college course. Yet another wealth transfer. 

Emily Yacina, PhilaMOCA, 2022

Now that I’m back in school (grad school specifically), I do find myself “regressing” every fall, in a way, like those “former gifted kids.” It’s different, though: every fall, I find myself regressing to high school and college music favorites. Whether it’s the ambient pop of Foxes in Fiction, the catchy utterances of Happy Trendy, or some pre-Domino Alex G, I’m drawn back into the feelings of crisp possibilities I felt when I first listened to these musicians. There is something especially intoxicating about listening to Brown Horse with leaves underfoot on a brick footpath. When the weather cools a bit more, I’ll dive even deeper.

The Orchid Tapes beat was huge for me in high school, easily one of my first forays into non-corporate music.It hit me at a time in my life when I was at my weariest: 6:30 am at Relay for Life. I’d spent the whole night awake, most of it pacing the track with whichever high school organization I represented. Foxes in Fiction’s “Jimi Bleachball” came up on my Pandora (I haven’t logged onto Pandora since high school, come to think of it) and it was catnip for me. The whole album, Swung from The Branches, wasn’t my first brush with ambient electronic music (arguably, that was Freescha’s Kids Fill The Floor), but it was pivotal. It’s human-scale, emotionally potent music, and it was perfect for 16-year-old me. Now, at 27, I feel many of those same feelings, but they’ve evolved. 

This introspective style of music, bedroom pop, has a lot of sounds: electropop, songwriter folk, fuzzy slacker rock. Some of the then-biggest names in the wave made experimental pop or occupied the midpoint between ambient and dance. The sound’s textures, deriving often from directly recording to tape, earned it the designation of “lo-fi.” After a quick couple years of overuse, “lo-fi bedroom pop” was a term critics were ready to discard by 2016. At another level, I think shoegaze and slowcore will get that way, too, even if the sounds never go away. The sounds of bedroom pop never went away – just look at the popularity of early Alex G the long-defunct Cyberbully Mom Club. 

I don’t think I’ll ever not be fixated on the evolution of “bedroom pop” from something that denoted a certain introspective, homespun, sometimes overtextured indie practice that often emanated from Silent Barn into the massive downtempo movement it became. Its most immediate bridge, Clairo, cut her teeth making miniature electropop in Boston DIY, is less a pioneer and more of a popularizer; someone whose witty musings and minimalist style inspired more players in the industry to find others like her. This blissed-out, low-energy sound feels like it’s been rebuked recently on all fronts. On the DIY side, controversy brewed when critics didn’t take to Emily Yacina’s Remember the Silver, and on the rising pop side, critics almost gleefully dunked on boy pablo’s Wachito Rico. But perhaps the biggest album that relied on gentle, blissed-out sound was Lorde’s Solar Power, which polarized critics. To me, it’s a miss. I didn’t hate it, but it lacked the texture or intimacy that makes closely held music so appealing. 

These bedroom tinkerers are the musicians whose songs will populate my fall playlists. They did when I was in college, and they will for a long time coming. I can’t deny that fall is a time when I do feel a certain type of way. But it’s still fuck “former gifted kids.”