ChriSTOPHER BENTON--Article 2

New Artists Hits It Big Through Social Media

From the Bedroom to the Stadium

Christopher Joshua Benton

Fuzz-skuzz buzz band Wavves is just some regular-guy dude from San Diego who smokes weed, wakes up late, rides his skateboard, trying to catch old-ass Garfield cartoons in the wee hours, or at least that’s the impression he gives off; he’s best-coast chill and sings about it. Watching Nathan Williams in his music video for “No Hope Kids,” filmed during his world tour, it is easy to imagine him a picaresque hero, getting wasted and playing shows, unwittingly implicated in the machinations of blog hype and Internet coolhunting. In less than two years, he’s released two albums, a bevy of cassettes, and has endured the hype and backlash waves of fickle music listeners. Already, he’s in the redemption phase. Wavves is the paradigm for a new kind of alternative band made on the Internet and in bedrooms, and promoted via social media tools.

Wavves was the bedroom pop project of one Nathan Williams (age 23); now, the epitome of “Gorilla v. Bear” blog hype, don’t-take-too-much-X-before-playing-stadiums advice from your mom, and the poster boy for the no-fi genre. Wavves also now includes the hardest working drummer in showbiz, Zach Hill.

His music probably hinges on an impossibility: if you ever tried playing a scratched Smiley Smile bootleg LP on blown-out speakers, so you used the line-out; instead, connecting the vinyl to that amp that’s been stuck in overdrive since you found it at some garage sale, the output would sound something like shit, but it’d also, maybe, reach that equilibrium of vaguely tuneful/ groggy pixilation/ distortion noise that Wavves has adopted as his own.

He’s not the only one: Why is everyone and their mom in a lo/no-fi band these days?

(Laughs) “I don’t know. Maybe because it’s easy to do, it’s easy to record, and it doesn’t really cost money. But I’m not sure. I wouldn’t say I’m any scene in particular, I’m just labeled that,” Williams said.

At 21, after quitting his day job, Nathan Williams spent a month making ramshackle home recordings in GarageBand that would become his first two albums. Through the course of those two D.I.Y. albums, titled Wavves and Wavvves, Williams has explored kinda-sad themes like ennui, stupid sub-cultures, and drug freakouts, titling his songs plainly “So Bored,” “California Goth” and “Weed Demon.” Simple and wide-eyed, it’s his pseudo-adolescent, bratty Brian Wilsonisms and up-Beat-Happening-floor-tom pop that transforms such drab subject matter into optimistic stoner anthems.

It wouldn’t be reductive to say Wavves has tapped into the cool zeitgeist where everyone has a fuzzy bedroom pet project, where everyone has a little too much consonance in their name (see UUVVWWZ, Lovvers, Nodzzz), and where no one can really play their instruments.

It is arguable that without the power of the blogging community and other social media like Hypemachine, a forum mostly consisting of free-to-create weblog platforms, Wavves and bands like him would still be very obscure. "I think the first place that gave me press was that blog Gorilla v. Bear."

Perhaps most significant of this new rockist narrative is that “overnight success” is a literalism—relative popularity is instantaneous and measured by a new temporality called “blog years,” an ADD blank (screen) generation eye-blink test, akin to a “light year.” The short incubation period from obscurity, to hypeblogged, to Pitchfork Best New Music wunderkind, to backlash, only magnifies that most of these bands can’t perform live. When Williams first started playing live shows last spring, he sucked. His inexperience reached a tipping point during his so-called “meltdown” at the Primavera Sound Festival in May where he took a cocktail of ecstasy, Valium, and Xanax, harassed the audience and was booed off stage.

“When I first started playing, the first couple of shows were with 500 people, so I just got thrown into it and I didn’t have any time to work the set out with somebody and practice and play smaller shows for a while. It just kinda blew up so quickly and I was playing for tons of people right away so it wasn’t necessarily very good in the very beginning. There was stuff to work out and its just like with anything, you do it enough and you get better at it,” he said.

Since then, Wavves has played to glowing live reviews and plenty of redemption feature stories. And with a new album already recorded, it seems he’s about go through it all over again. Whether he’ll be relevant a few years from now is anyone’s guess, but if he can write fifteen stuck-in-your head melodies in month, I’d go with longevity. Either way, he’s down for the ride, one that hopefully includes munchies. I’ll leave you with William’s last words:

“I’m sorry, I have to go, we’re pulling up to the Burger King right now!”