At some point during the course of 2021, the word “vibe” became utterly ubiquitous. I tried to count but would lose track of how often it was deployed in conversations with friends. I couldn’t stop myself from using it, either, the way you can’t stop yourself from yawning after someone else does. It caught on like the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518, spreading long past the point of semantic satiation. What did it mean? What didn’t it mean? “Vibe” was a placeholder for an unplaceable feeling or impression, an atmosphere that you couldn’t or didn’t want to put into words. You didn’t like a bar because the vibe was off. The new Netflix show has kind of a “Sopranos” vibe. The two of them didn’t vibe as a couple. It’s a linguistic shortcut for the ineffable.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Maybe we used the word so much because 2021 itself has offered an unplaceable vibe. It is a year that feels as though it does and does not exist, a hangover from the depths of terror in 2020 that provides a significant improvement and yet remains vacuous and unstable. For a moment, with the arrival of vaccines in the spring, we all thought we were on the cusp of Roaring Twenties vibes, a Hieronymous Bosch-style summer of orgy and excess. Instead, with the serial announcement of new COVID-19 variants, we became strung up with tightrope vibes, as if we could fall backward in time at any moment. A year that never started can’t really end, either, and so the boundary of the New Year feels unreal as well. But the time did pass, and in looking back we have to recall grace where we can.
In April, I described vibes as, ultimately, moments of audiovisual eloquence, ephemeral, multisensory collisions so sharp that they amount to poetry. They can be recorded and shared as TikTok videos or just observed as fleeting impressions. Sometimes a particular image is a vibe. Or an action is a vibe, or an aesthetic, or a feeling. It’s anything that becomes representative of a mood in society at large, to which one can point and say, “That’s a vibe.” Here are some of the strongest vibes I’ve registered in 2021. Call it my attempt to capture the year’s ambiguous nonverbal phenomena, both positive and negative.
Office-building hallway. Dead-end street. Loading dock. Nighttime hotel atrium. @SpaceLiminalBot is a Twitter account with more than four hundred and eighty thousand followers that tweets photos of “liminal spaces”: disused, off-hours, haunted. The mood is spooky but also calm; in these spaces, nothing happens. By definition, “liminal” means “transitional,” a threshold. (What qualifies, exactly, is hotly debated on the r/LiminalSpace subreddit.) But it became a meme in 2021, the year of liminality, its meaning expanded to describe pretty much anything empty and weird. Examples of liminal vibes include the Twitter account @gameauras, which collects “video game images with elegiac auras” and tweets screenshots of virtual liminal spaces, and the TikTok account @pineacre, which films montages of mundane institutions (laundromats, grocery stores) in the Arkansas Ozarks.
The philosopher Jane Bennett noted that matter is vibrant—everyday detritus, even trash in the gutter, can emit its own vibe that capitalist consumerism encourages us to ignore. The year’s most poignant piece of trash was a wrinkled face mask, paper or cloth, left strewn on the ground, its strings tangled, its symbolic hygiene demolished. There’s an abjectness to the mask; it’s the kind of detail a future movie would pan past in order to evoke the time period’s general despair. Perhaps the mask was lost by accident and its owner is anxiously debating the awkwardness of going into a store without one or just giving up and returning home.
Owing to pandemic restrictions, the third season of the Netflix show “Master of None,” which débuted in May, was filmed mostly in the United Kingdom. This wouldn’t present a problem if the season’s intended location were not upstate New York, where Lena Waithe’s character purchases a sprawling historic house after the success of her novel. I felt a creeping sense of unease as I watched the season, with its detailed settings and elegant cinematography. I didn’t realize why, exactly, until I read a behind-the-scenes. The landscape of the house was too lush and pruned for actual upstate; it didn’t look like the outskirts of any run-down Hudson Valley town I had ever seen. More than the story line, this dislocation has stuck in my head, the eerie sense of being told something’s true but knowing deep down that it’s not.
“Young, famous novelist moves into a ramshackle mansion on the coast of Ireland” is the plot of Sally Rooney’s 2021 novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” but it also evokes the ideal of devotees of Dark Academia, a Tumblr aesthetic that became a TikTok vibe and then a life-style template. (People these days seem to study abroad in Edinburgh just to shoot moody videos.) Dark Academia is all about staying inside, gazing out a brick-lined window at the rain, leafing through a book without reading it, lighting candles—in other words, a cozy quarantine when it doesn’t make sense to go outside. Rooney’s dark Dublin streets, fraught magazine parties, and domestic dramas both describe and serve the mood.
At one point this year, there was an expectation that offices would fully reopen and that working from home would become slightly more optional. The situation hasn’t changed so drastically. Office workers are still hiding from family members and negotiating which leftovers to eat for lunch. There is no better reminder of the combination of convenience and ennui of working from home than a mug of coffee going cold. You get up to microwave it, then repeat the process thirty minutes later. Even the mug seems exhausted.
Life has haltingly resumed, but nothing seems quite as good as it used to be. Plenitude is thwarted by persistent supply-chain issues; glamour is a pale facsimile of its former glory. Activity wraps up early. In Nolita, the sidewalk cabins outside Balthazar amount to something like a forced smile, a tourist attraction trying its best to remain attractive. The white-aproned waiters whirl, but something seems hollow. Maybe it’s the reminder that a brief period of unmasked post-vaccine freedom ended too quickly. Or it’s the pall cast by the Balthazar proprietor Keith McNally’s overactive Instagram, which romanticizes—as the TikTok kids say—his own business a bit too strenuously. We’re still not yet sure what post-pandemic luxury might look like.
A press photo from the 2021 Met Gala documents Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, in elaborate formal attire including matching masks, kissing—or, rather, mashing their masked faces together, their features entirely obscured. There’s no better encapsulation of the strained belief that everything might be normal if we just try hard enough. Celebrations can still happen! Celebrities can still fall (back) in love! And yet, the signs keep indicating that normalcy remains far away. The photo offers an update to the ominous Magritte painting “The Lovers,” from 1928, in which two figures, their faces draped in cloth, make out, oblivious to the barrier.
One innocently impish face with a blond pixie cut seemed to float behind a large swath of culture this year. Diana, Princess of Wales, was an influence not just in fashion and beauty but in affect and sensibility. “The Crown” released its fourth season late in 2020, introducing Diana as a character (played by Emma Corrin), and Netflix resurfaced the documentary “Diana: In Her Own Words.” The clothing brand Rowing Blazers offered a version of her notorious black-sheep sweater, which proliferated through Instagram ads. But 2021 brought the true Diana mania. In March, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s Oprah interview presented another reminder of his absent mother. In November, the film “Spencer,” starring Kristin Stewart, brought Diana flamboyantly back to life. Anxious, flighty, embattled, sick, struggling with an order of power beyond her understanding or control, Diana is a sympathetic figure for the ongoing pandemic era.
My personal vibe of the year is encoded in this one quintessentially eighties track from the Japanese keyboardist Hiroshi Sato, in collaboration with the Canadian Australian torch singer Wendy Matthews, recorded in 1982. In the sensory-deprivation chamber of last winter, the song played incessantly in my mind, and I haven’t stopped listening to it since. In part, it’s the looping modular-synthesizer backbeat that’s so sticky, like passing through a neon-lit city in a taxi after midnight. (The track is an amped-up version of the original, which is from earlier on the album.) But it’s also the story sketched by the lyrics: sitting down to practice piano and reaching for a good memory for musical inspiration. Matthews’s voice soars: “As I play / Any trace of sorrow fades away / And the window goes from night to day.” The song offers the hope of making the best of downbeat times, which is about the best vibe we can hope for.
2021 in Review
- New Yorker writers on the best books we read this year.
- Richard Brody on the best movies.
- Doreen St. Félix on essential TV shows.
- Ian Crouch on the funniest jokes.
- Amanda Petrusich on the best music.
- Alex Ross on notable performances and recordings.
- Michael Schulman on the greatest onscreen and onstage performances.
- Kyle Chayka on the year in vibes.
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