Audio By Carbonatix
If you become the soundtrack to FX’s Portlandia, you’ve reached a new kind of hipsterdom. Or is it meta-hipsterdom? The semantics boggle the mind. The show satirizes the many eccentric personalities you’ll find in the “keep it weird” Oregon city, all of which could be considered hipsters on the sliding spectrum of intentional irony. And, then, in waltzes a small-town Georgia librarian and his laptop. Ernest Green, otherwise known by his stage name, Washed Out, mastered the genres of chillwave, dream pop, and lo-fi, genre names with way more “ideas” than defining characteristics. The music of Washed Out doesn’t work on paper, because it’s something you just feel. The ambient-meets-dance vibe of Portlandia theme “Feel It All Around” gets heads bobbing and feet moving, all while inducing an artificial, dreamy high. It’s a sexy seductress of a song, but it exhibits restraint. You could say that about pretty much all of Green’s music. It’s audible foreplay, as written by a buttoned-up Southern gentleman who intended to live his life helping you pluck the latest Glenn Beck masterpiece off library shelves with undetectable contempt.
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