SNP’s word of the day: Psychedelicate
Word: Psychedelicate
Meaning: “Something that is simultaneously psychedelic and tender,” says Urban Dictionary, because every time you think you’ve made something up, Urban Dictionary is there to prove you wrong.
Usage: “Have you heard that Paisley Palm Trees mixtape? I might be hallucinating, but if that name isn’t psychedelicate, I don’t know what is.” —Me.
You should know it because: It’s the moood, guys. If you’ve been spending any time at all on Hype Machine, you know the music this summer is all hot, hazy and ’60s-y. Think of Cults (a band from the desert island of…Manhattan that sounds like the Beach Boys minus most of the boys) or Washed Out (Atlanta’s Ernest Greene) or Teen Daze or Memory Tapes or Crystal Stilts. All these bands sound like no more, no less than their names. The new psychedelia is all wave sounds and sunny nostalgia on loop, but it’s distorted, like karaoke in a wood-panelled basement. It’s not so much groovy, though, as a groove worn so thin you can hold it up to the light and still need sunglasses. Where the ’60s were acid-bright, this summer’s ’60s-via-’90s redux is cloudier, pastel, prismatic. Chillwave (the official Pitchfork term for all this stuff) doesn’t look or sound like an LSD trip, either. It’s more like one too many prescription painkillers mixed with Pimm’s Cups, plus heatstroke. Tender is the day; that’s psychedelicate.
Psychedelicate, style-wise, is bleached denim and a spritz of At the Beach 1966. It’s Birkenstocks (Oh, did you hear they’re back now?) with frilly socks. It’s rough crystals dangling on a real gold chain. It’s Proenza Schouler’s highlighter-dipped lace slips, or Lauren Conrad’s tie-dyed hair. In a print, it’s paisley, and so it’s no surprise paisley is back in a big, soft way. (Check Chloé, check Kenzo, check J.W. Anderson, my favourite.)
For a fleeting, quarter-baked moment I thought I’d made up this portmanteau, but of course “pyschedelicate” turns out to be a Pink Floyd cover band, a pretty rad 2002 album by girl-rock group Slumber Party, and the name of a recent party thrown at a Facebook friend’s vintage store. And, because how could there not be, there’s a tumblr: psychedelicately.tumblr.com run by a 24-year-old girl “living in a 100-year-old redwood forest on a mountain in California.” Which, I guess, says it all.
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