Bedroom pop. Who’da thunk that such a thing even exists?
Bedroom pop is a sub-genre of Lo-fi (“low fidelity”), defined in 2019 as a DIY musical genre or aesthetic in which artists record at home on their own equipment, rather than in traditional recording spaces, the music characterized by contemplative lyrics, bedroom pop a contemporary indie re-invention of the once popular emo or dream pop musical genres.
There are a great many bedroom pop artists, but the most celebrated is Claire Cottrill (born August 18, 1998), known professionally as Clairo, an American recording artist from Carlisle, Massachusetts who wrote Pretty Girl, a lo-fi-produced song that attracted over 30 million views on YouTube.
At 16 years of age, Clairo wrote and produced Pretty Girl employing studio equipment in her bedroom (the equipment sometimes referred to as a digital audio workstation), as well as Pro Tools production software, while also recording and editing the video before uploading it to YouTube.
Home studios have been popular for decades, but have become ever more refined as computer technology has become increasingly sophisticated, enabling ever higher quality music production. One of VanRamblings favourite artists, Imogen Heap (who we interviewed and wrote about in 1997, at the outset of her career) records all of her music in her kitchen, where she’s set up a home studio that revolves around the use of Pro Tools.
As it happens, VanRamblings discovered bedroom pop during our recent bout of illness, when all we could manage to do most days was plunk ourselves down in front of Netflix — where we were very pleased to see that Crystal Moselle’s acclaimed Sundance and Tribeca award-winning film, Skate Kitchen, simply appeared out of the blue (and unheralded, but not by us) one very fine day, as one of the varied viewing options.
Vibrant, alive, poetic, superby shot and and richly informed, Ms. Moselle’s follow-up to her award-winning, one of a kind documentary, The Wolfpack, her fiction début emerges as the most accomplished film about skater culture since Catherine Hardwicke’s 2005 American biographical drama, The Lords of Dogtown (which is also available on Netflix).
The story goes that Moselle spotted two of the girls on the subway, introduced herself as a filmmaker, and asked if there were more girls like them. Indeed there were, all forming a feminist, sex-positive, shred-happy collective called the Skate Kitchen. Some time later, Moselle’s film arrived in Park City, with all the kids playing a version of themselves.
And who do you think the featured music artist on the soundtrack might be? Yep, you got it — none other than Clairo, who wrote and produced Heaven for the Skate Kitchen soundtrack.
So, while VanRamblings reveled in our discovery of Skate Kitchen on Netflix, we were also introduced to Clairo, and the contemporary musical genre known as “bedroom pop.” And now, you are familiar with Skate Kitchen (a must, must watch!), the work of Crystal Moselle, the musical genre of bedroom pop, and its most acclaimed progenitor, Clairo.
You know what’s exciting about life? That you get to discover something new, something that just yesterday you knew nothing about, every day.
