Conference Agenda

Popular music from the 1980s and ‘90s is sonically defined by its heavy use of the synthesized electric piano and electric guitar, respectively (Lavengood 2019, 2020; Stafford 2018). The saturation of these timbres has produced sonic signatures easily identifiable to listeners across generations. While over time these sounds have faded, decades later, with a rekindling of electric piano and distorted guitar timbres, today’s avid listeners of popular music might sense a return to the musical past. I propose that the re-emergence of anachronistic sonorities is rooted in feelings of nostalgia, and that contemporary listeners and artists find refuge in nostalgic sonorities as an escape from modern interregnum to an idealized, less turbulent past.

The current study examines how and why today’s pop music recalls pre-millennial timbres while retaining its identity in the 2020s pop sphere. First, I engage two promising theories for reconciling these old and new timbres: musical hybridity (Alcalde 2022; Zbikowski 2002) and the (cascading) reminiscence bump (Krumhansl and Zupnick 2013; Rathbone, O’Connor, and Moulin 2017). The former situates disparate stylistic markers within a musical structure, and the latter is defined by heightened emotion around events (e.g., music) in young adulthood. As examples of this phenomenon, I present songs by current pop artists such as Miley Cyrus, Carly Rae Jepson, and Charlie Puth. Finally, I suggest that contemporary music’s reach to the past is a form of reconstructed nostalgia, specifically, where listeners intend to reference a collective, imagined, and self-soothing history (Ballam-Cross 2021).

As a result of this stylistic change, popular music of the current generation has been described as “sporadic and murky” (Morris 2013), its genre-defying sound immune to any singular characterization. This has much to do with the rapid technological advancement of the 21st-century: amidst streaming platforms that enable listeners to hear almost any song and artists to make almost any sound, current generations of post-millennial listener-artists can find comfort in the ability to escape (a sometimes-disheartening) reality at nearly any time, using musical nostalgia as “a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (Boym 2001, xiv).

From Taylor Swift’s lavender hazes to Billie Eilish’s blurry worlds, pop artists have turned in recent years to the atmospheric. Along with this shift has come a renewed preoccupation with breath and air. Artists enlist vocal technique and studio production to magnify and disperse each inhale and exhale, cultivating a whispery intimacy theorized extensively in recent scholarship on so-called “whisperpop” (Robinson 2017; Holmes 2023). Less studied, though, is how these artists make breathing seem entirely unobstructed. Where gasping, panting, or wheezing register toxic environments and physical limits, whisperpop evokes pure air while making breathing infinitely sustainable.

In this paper, I pursue this atmospheric, breathy aesthetic as it transforms respiration from an effortful activity—haunted by the figures of scarcity and exhaustion—into one that is effortless—calm, renewable, and signaling an abundance of air. I argue that this transformation captures important dynamics of our present environmental impasse, one that increasingly appears as a crisis of growth and sustainability. As stagnating economies across the Global North compensate for slowed growth by intensifying extractive inputs, our natural environments devolve into irreversible breakdown. In response to this economic deadlock, advocates of “green growth” turn to so many “technological fixes”—electric cars, renewable energy systems, carbon capture and storage—as ways to decouple human economic activity from environmental impact (Kohei 2022). Through a close reading of music by Billie Eilish, I find an analogous technological fix at the heart of whisperpop, whose atmospheric production style neutralizes impediments to breathing, making it inexhaustible along the way. Drawing on recent theories of breath (Crawley 2019; Tremblay 2022) and vocal staging in studio production (Duguay 2022; Barna and McLaughlin 2024), I show how Eilish and her brother/producer FINNEAS leverage studio effects like reverb, EQ, and stereo panning to solve a growth and sustainability problem. Overall, I show that pop music has the capacity to articulate the limits and possibilities of technological innovation as a solution to slowed growth and the exhaustion of nature, its resources, and human life.

Following the early-2010s collaboration of Justin Vernon and Kanye West (now Ye), Vernon’s indie-folk collective, Bon Iver, released two consecutive albums—22, A Million (2016) and i,i (2019)—in which hip-hop production techniques fracture and distort trappings of the band’s earlier sound. A striking ideological split between the two collaborators occurred in the interstice between the releases of 22, A Million and i,i: Ye embraced authoritarian politics while Vernon opposed them, speaking out in interviews about the importance of collective resistance amidst the present interregnum. Yet the techniques that Vernon learned from his work with Ye helped to push Bon Iver’s sound into greater alignment with an increasingly explicit pro-democracy politics. Using methods for analyzing sampling (Boone 2013) and sonic “signatures” of digital mediation (Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2016) and building on Ajitpaul Mangat’s historicizing of collaborations between indie and rap artists (Mangat 2024), this paper traces an efflorescence of hip-hop-derived textural strategies in Bon Iver’s late-2010s albums and contextualizes it in relation to Vernon’s political turn.

Bon Iver’s Ye-inspired textural strategies—which include collage, sampling, multitracking, and vocal distortion—reflect the expertise and expressivity of many participants. They disrupt the insular first-person perspective that characterizes Bon Iver’s earlier music, evoking both fracture and intersubjectivity. In two key examples from 22, A Million, “22 (OVER S∞∞N)” and “33 ‘GOD,’” an array of digital manipulations complicate the musical surface around Vernon’s folksy falsetto. Meanwhile, an eclectic collage of samples adds textural and narrative layers while gesturing toward a web of interrelated texts and voices. These techniques find their apotheosis in “iMi,” the ostensible thesis statement of i,i. “iMi” dramatizes a shift from solitude to solidarity, moving from unadorned passages of solo voice and guitar with lyrics about loneliness to segments of densely interwoven samples over a drum program by hip-hop producer Wheezy. The song culminates in a richly heterogeneous texture that resonates with Mangat’s adaptation of Josh Kun’s concept of audiotopia to describe indie-rap collaboration as a genre-defying, multiracial site of political possibility (Mangat 2024, Kun 2005).