Best Coast premiered their debut video last night on MTVU last night. The song they chose just happens to be one of my favorite tracks of last year, “When I’m With You”. While I don’t want to take away from the accomplishment of the band having their video featured on the network, I do want to take a moment to comment on something else. In the network’s post debuting the video, they talk about “chillwave” and lump this band in with that genre.

First off, I think when the term is being used by network heads, it’s clear that it has become even more lame than it was when it was just being used by the larger indie sites like Pitchfork. Secondly, it’s pretty clear that the term is now being used to lump just about any band that does anything remotely close to lo-fi music and exists in the independent music world in any remote way.

The need to create new genres of music to pigeonhole bands in exists strictly for marketing purposes. I highly doubt any band is going to refer to themselves as “chillwave”, and if they do I’m probably not going to bother listening to their music. Anyways, Best Coast is the band to watch this year. Bethany Cosentino is a rare and beautiful talent and the LP they’re working on right now is going to elevate their status to new heights. This video getting posted is just one of many signs that they’re on their way to the top of the indie music stratosphere.

Watch the official video here as the embedding is broken.