Beyond vibes

Update: I published an expanded version of this essay in Real Life magazine in September 2021.

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What is a vibe? It’s a mood, something that you can’t really explain, but that’s captured by a loose association of ideas, concepts, things that you can identify by feeling, rather than by logic. Frank Ocean’s music easily exemplifies the concept, and indeed his debut album Channel Orange even begins with a sample of the start-up music that plays when you boot up the original PlayStation gaming system, surely intending to suggest a nostalgic vibe of lazy days spent gaming. Frank Ocean’s songs have such a strong character of vibe that their remixes have become a sub-genre unto themselves, particularly “slowed and reverbed” remixes that amplify the feelings of ennui in his songs, and that perhaps evoke the effects of drugs and alcohol on perception. The most hyper-specific edits of this sort are those where the reverb is meant to mimic the quality of music playing outside while you’re in the bathroom at a party. A vibe upon a vibe: muted, muffled sounds, perfectly reflecting the repressed longing of Frank’s lyrics.

Vibes are everywhere. Vaporwave and citypop, the vibe of optimistic futurisms of the 80s and 90s. Lo-fi hiphop beats, the vibe of enjoying the warmth of quiet jazzy vintage records in a cozy room with a cat in your lap. Co-Star’s “brutal” push notifications may register on the level of vibes: they concisely capture minute details of users’ realities which make them feel validated or called out — in any case, they feel seen, vibed with. Tinder now has a feature that quizzes you on your vibes. The opening track “DVD Menu” on Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher employs the same basic trick as the opening of Channel Orange. A man with the username 420doggface went mega-viral for his seemingly narrativeless TikTok of himself drinking cranberry juice while skateboarding and listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”.

A recent New Yorker piece on vibes argues that “TikTok provides a rebuke to the truism that people want narratives.” But I don’t agree. The lyrics of “Dreams” speak of a lover who wants their freedom. “Well, who am I to keep you down?”, asks Stevie Nicks. In other words: If you don’t want me, then I don’t want you either, and I’ll enjoy my freedom, too. 420doggface’s TikTok is not just a video of the vibes of a care-free cool guy; it can be interpreted instead as an illustration of a guy who’s decided to not give a fuck about a lover who has scorned him, who’s now enjoying his newfound freedom in his own unique way. There’s a story here, not just a feeling.

How far can we really go with just vibes? I would argue that vibes are a useful aesthetic concept for art, but that they should only be viewed as a basic component of artistic craft. More beautiful, and more true to reality, are layered concepts that are compared and contrasted, if not strictly logically connected then at least narratively connected. To simply do away with such structure would be a terrible loss.

Mozart’s final piece, his Requiem Mass, contains a section titled “Confutatis” which illustrates my point. The lyrics in the original Latin:

Confutatis maledictis
Flammis acribus addictis
Voca me cum benedictis
Oro supplex et acclinis
Cor contritum quasi cinis
Gere curam mei finis

Translated to English:

When the accursed have been confounded
And given over to the bitter flames
Call me with the blessed
I pray in supplication on my knees
My heart contrite as the dust
Safeguard my fate

These lyrics present a vivid contrast between the suffering of the accursed in the bitter flames of hell with the holiness and salvation found in the blessed. These two moods are similarly reflected in the music itself, the former sung menacingly by the deep male voices, the latter sung by the high, angelic female voices. The song does not find its power in a single vibe, but in the structure of two vibes juxtaposed. The pure relief of heaven cannot be fully realized without the stark recognition of the threat of the suffering of hell.

Similarly, the chorus of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars” provides a contrast between personal suffering and, in the final line, the comfort provided by a lover, or as the case may be, a bottle of booze.

People you've been before that you
Don't want around anymore
That push and shove and won't bend to your will
I'll keep them still

This contrast again is reflected in the music: both the “people” in the first line and the same “them” in the last line come with an F major chord, and the final word “still” is accompanied by an F minor chord that’s out of key with the rest of the song. This gives a further emphasis to how the last line changes the entire meaning of the phrase and provides a narrative structure.

Peli Grietzer has posited that neural networks can capture the vibe of a work of art. I would agree with this thesis insofar as neural networks can capture statistical patterns and correlations akin to how the PlayStation’s start-up sound matches well with Frank Ocean’s opening lines in “Thinking About You” about his room being a mess, while there is no necessary or logical connection between the two things. Similarly, it is easy to use AI models like GPT-3 to produce artificial writing with great verisimilitude to human writing, at least if you squint.

But when you look closer you often find that there is no real sense that underlies any of it. Although neural networks can in theory capture logical structures underlying concepts, in practice they do not. (Why this happens is a topic for another time.) When provided with the following prompt,

You poured yourself a glass of cranberry juice, but then you absentmindedly poured about a teaspoon of grape juice into it. It looks okay. You try sniffing it, but you have a bad cold, so you can’t smell anything. You are very thirsty. So

GPT-3 completes the paragraph with “you drink it. You are now dead.” The writing style of the passage does suggest a suspicious, suspenseful vibe, like that of a mystery murder novel or a noir film, and perhaps that can explain why the model completes the paragraph in such a grim manner. But the completion is in a logical sense a non-sequitur; there is no natural reason why cranberry juice mixed with grape juice should kill you, nor does the model provide an explanation.

So TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, surely implemented at least in part with a neural network, can probably be accurately described as operating on vibes, a convenient synchronicity with the content itself operating as such. But during those long TikTok browsing sessions, you never feel satisfied. It is a sampling of a vast array of flavors, but without nourishment. You feel the way you used to feel when you would flip channels on cable television late at night. Sometimes the vibe is right, sometimes it isn’t, in the end you always fall asleep exhausted and with nothing to show for it.

“No thoughts, just vibes”, as the memes go. In both culture and statistical learning, the trends ultimately ring hallow to me: resignation to the world as it appears to be, without greater aspiration to its underlying narratives and structures.