The instrument’s sound today immediately evokes a whole range of associations: Tropicália music, the mid-twentieth century’s obsession with Hawaii, shallow cosmopolitanism, and nostalgia hovering between sincere and ironic. At the time of its invention, in the nineteen-twenties, musicians weren’t sure whether its nickname should be singular or plural, vibe or vibes-the latter eventually stuck.
In the early twentieth century, the term became associated with the vibraphone, a cousin of the marimba, which uses motorized fans beneath its bars to achieve a vibier sound.
The word “vibe” is short for vibration-something that resonates and echoes, suffusing a space. Through our screens, vibes are being constantly emitted and received. That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text. Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience. It can even become a quality in itself: if something is vibey, it gives off an intense vibe or is particularly amenable to vibes. (#Aesthetic is sometimes used to mark vibes, but that term is predominantly visual.) A vibe can be positive, negative, beautiful, ugly, or just unique. What a haiku is to language, a vibe is to sensory perception: a concise assemblage of image, sound, and movement. In the social-media era, though, “vibe” has come to mean something more like a moment of audiovisual eloquence, a “sympathetic resonance” between a person and her environment, as Robin James, a professor of philosophy at U.N.C. ( Hygge, the Danish quality of contented coziness, is a vibe that has been wholly commercialized in the United States.) So, too, could the Japanese iki, an attitude of casually disinterested elegance, or the German fernweh, the longing to be somewhere far away, evoked by distant vistas or unknown forests. Saudade, the Portuguese word for a bittersweet longing, could count as a vibe. Many vibes don’t have specific names, but some do. It’s an intuition with no obvious explanation (“just a vibe I get”). It’s the reason that you like or dislike something or someone (good vibes vs. It’s a placeholder for an abstract quality that you can’t pin down-an ambience (“a laid-back vibe”). We know the meaning of the word “vibe,” of course. So is slaloming down the road on a skateboard to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” while swigging cranberry juice, as Nathan Apodaca did in a now famous TikTok. Casually cooking a meal in a swaying sailboat on the open Atlantic Ocean is a vibe. Where others might get meme dances or practical jokes, I only see chill vibes. These brief flashes of seemingly normal life, compressed into short videos, are among TikTok’s bread-and-butter genres, and they have taken over my algorithmically curated feed on the app. “I love the vibes at night here,” the caption of yet another TikTok montage read: a dim apartment lit by a pink neon sign that says “Where Love Lives,” a wandering Shiba Inu, an orb lamp on top of a Picasso art book, a wall-mounted flat-screen playing the popular ambient-music YouTube channel “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to.” If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say that the video’s vibe was chill Gen-Z good taste, the world of a teen-ager whose parents have given up on curfews and screen-time restrictions: midnight-basement-desktop-computer vibes. Altogether, they evoked a mood of calm, enlightened, prettified productivity.
In another clip, a woman demonstrated her morning routine, with shots of rumpled linen bedsheets, navy-blue satin pajamas, and a steaming mug of matcha, along with brief glimpses of other objects: a monstera plant, a burning chunk of palo santo, a busy street outside.
#Explain vibe check meme windows#
On an upper floor, beside huge windows shrouded in fog, a man was floating on his back in a gleaming pool, to the soundtrack of the plaintive Frank Ocean song “White Ferrari.” The ten-second video was hashtagged #vibin. Deep into the thoughtless hypnotism of TikTok one afternoon, I came upon an anonymous urban scene from inside a residential tower in Manchester, England.
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