User:Rrocket/Babywave

Baby Wave

Baby Wave is a genre of music that fuses elements of hardcore punk, apartment rock, baby humor, and art punk.

Characteristics
Baby Wave shares characteristics with apartment rock — music made in an apartment by musicians who don’t have access to a garage or rehersal space. Baby Wave uses instruments that need little or no amplification, and can be recorded straight into a laptop or other small, portable recording device such as a 4-track recorder. The resulting aesthetic is a thin guitar sound accompanied by programmed drums, recorded on a drum machine, ostensibly so that you "won’t wake up the neighbor’s baby."

Baby Wave humor isn’t about making fun of babies or weakness. Instead, it is an embodiment of these characteristics for the purpose of resisting a bro-dominated music culture that values male musical virtuosity and female heterosexual attractiveness. The baby, as a pre-sexual, a-mature being, represents someone outside of this binary gender system.

Origins
Nicole Brunel is a Canadian artist and scholar who has written extensively about the Baby Wave genre. Although Baby Wave was first culturally recognized as a musical genre, many of its characteristics originated in comedy. Baby Wave bands find humor in taking lyrics, riffs, and song structures from hardcore punk and make them sound babyish. Some strategies are making them sound weak, dumb, or annoying in a satirical or humorous way. She traces the origins of Baby Wave music to Calgary, Alberta, the home base of various musical acts such as Womb Baby (2004-2006), Hugh Man (2016-present) and Crims & Flow (2015-2018).

Some elements that denote a baby wave songs are the inclusion of cooing, gurgling, and crying, using baby diapers or bottles for band merchandise, or

Examples
Crims & Flow is a band from Calgary, Alberta and Brooklyn, New York. Their song Eating Food For A Baby from the album "Nightmare Food in the Vacuum Room" contains sounds of a crying baby, is sung in a baby voice, and has lyrics which exemplify Baby Wave characteristics:

"Eating food for a baby Applesauce and airplanes my mom is going crazy

Eating food for a baby Sorry Dad, I'm just a baby"

- Crims & Flow, Eating Food for a Baby, 2016

Hugh Man is a band based in Calgary, Alberta and Toronto, Ontario. Their song Baby Crazy is another example of Baby Wave music:

"I'm baby crazy Baby, I'm crazy

I wanna little boy to feed

And dress up to look just like me

I'm baby crazy, baby crazy, baby crazy, baby crazy

Fly your little kite and teach you all about this life

You got those little brownie booties

Mom’s got tickets to the movies

I made you and I bathed you

and I just can't wait to raise you

I got babies on my brainy and I'm feeling kinda crazy"

- Hugh Man, Baby Crazy