The Controversial Music Genre of Barber Beats 

*NEW VIDEO!* My Top 10 Barber Beats Albums: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WbFc_bJl9gw.html

wow the graphic design for these covers are so good. i feel like maybe 50% of the reason for its popularity

I think of the people who compile these mixtapes as curators rather than full blown musicians. But I think their work is another form of art that lives side by side with music artistry.

Barber beats aka the music they play during evening dinners at Dorsia

Vaporwave started off criticizing capitalism through the recontextualization of corporate muzak and pop hits and now a decade later people are using the genre to make money by reselling other people's music. What a world.

Yo, thank you for the massive shoutout! HFM and Macroblank are the reason I'm here, so to peg me as someone who helped push the genre to where it is today is wild to me, I appreciate it a ton

Haircuts for men seriously helped me sleep when i only had a few hours at a time. Cant say enough good stuff about those early collections

Honestly the best part of Barber Beats are the "album covers." I love so many of their art styles. The music is ok. Its relaxing.

modest by default is my favorite to be born out of the genre, but HFM, the og, will never be topped.

everyone gangsta until pad weighs in on barber beats

A fun trivia piece is that HFM's bio used to just say "i take no credit. everything is plundered." , but he changed it to take some credit after he uploaded his original gabber work, northern labour camps. You can check it on the wayback machine.

i just hate that they flood the bandcamp vaporwave tag, its hard to find anything actually unique sounding these days

I didn't even know Slowerpace was Brazilian! I'm so proud!

I get the aesthetic appeal of the genre, and i do dig the sound, but as someone who writes music themselves , i can't help but get riled up when i see a single guy dropping a 15 track album every week just by slowing down 8bars from an old takanaka tune and adding some fx to it, while other talented producers and musicians spend tens of hours into a single tune and get basically no attention for their original piece of music. Now i'm far from being against sampling and sample editing of any sort, but i think this whole genre just takes it a bit too far. What i'd like to see though is actual musicians creating this type of music from scratch. Writing an 8/16 bars loop/chord progression really isn't that hard and with that little bit of effort i think it could push the genre in a really great direction.

As a barber beats enjoyer, I tend to see them as just chill mixtapes and the makers to be an indie dj of sorts, and because of how small scale and indie it is it's mostly harmless. (Though I myself am quite the pirate with artistic media even though I'm an artist myself so I can relate to this kinda paradoxical passion for a medium as well)

it's crazy how macroblank can slow down hundreds of tracks, and release them under different names. It would be 1000% better if they just release it as mixes.

I just had a SHORT listen on some of them, basically it's just Nu Jazz/Trip Hop named differently (Correct me if I'm wrong)? You got Thievery Corporation, Tosca, Kruder and Dorfmeister, Fila Brazilia, Kid Loco, early Bonobo, Air etc.

Around 5 years ago I got really into barber beats, however as with many genres like chillwave it started to come with lots of imitators who barely put effort into making the music unique. Basically it got oversaturated quickly and it's harder to find the true gems in the genre

This isn't really sampling. More like entire tracks slowed and maybe filtered, and EQed... I'm not against it, but let's be clear. Terms like sampling have meanings.

There are so many on the rise barber beat artists, it's crazy. Slowerpace, Dirty River, Oblique Occasions, there's so many great artists with huge discographies 🦑💜

I have been listening to slowerpace and macroblank a bit. I also like a Chilean guy called Mabisyo. However, I listen to his jazzy atmospheric stuff more. It's so good. "Sun colored eyes" and "In the dreams of a dragon" are amazing

Pad “MF” Chennington - the realest

It's desert sand feels warm at night is a interesting artist since he makes entirely original music but then slows it down to a snail's pace plus reverb

hey there, i saw some of my thumbnails! nice video. barber beats to me is like dadaism; it sort of spits in the face of decorum but allows artists to express and recontextualize as they see fit. it's sharing, it can be poetic, it is not held up by a central theme or hierarchy. there are ways to elevate and inject more 'artistic integrity' back into a project too. that's up to the artist.

I kinda treat barber beats like mixes more than albums Nobody would get angry at a dj set because it's just plundered songs, it's here to set up a mood, it's the same for barber beats and they absolutely deliver As per selling records, i don't really know what to think about that, because to be fair, if my favorite mixes started selling on records, i'd probably buy a few of them, but i would expect them to be honest about it I mean not just telling that they plundered everything, but putting the actual songs in the tracklist

Oh man this is awesome. I’ve seen these in my feed on RU-vid for years and had no idea what it was so I’m happy you uploaded this. Also love to see you doing a topic that is very clearly up your alley. Huge fan of all your videos but this topic screams “Pad Chennington”. Killer stuff

One of the reasons I love vaporwave is because once u hear a mix that u definitely love and cannot get enough of u look for the sample and by listening to the sample it’s as if u are rediscovering the song again and you get excited waiting for that samples part to come up,, I love how vaporwave lets you discover artists with amazing tracks that u might’ve not even be able to have a chance to come across

I just found your channel, and wow. I love it!!! These things like psychedelic or existential musical genres really interest me, but I thought everything was just an offspring of Vaporwave, but you made me realize there's way, way more to it than that. It's a whole world of music, and you do such an excellent job documenting and explaining it all. Godspeed on your future uploads!!!!

One Album that always really reminds of this vibe and kind of sample based production is Devon Hendryx's "Dreamcast Summer Songs" . The fascinating part is that this came out in 2009, before Vaporwave and similar genres where even a thing, which is why some people call it the first Vaporwave album. It's also heavily inspired by videogames and anime. I don't really think of it as a vaporwave record but Hendryx really was ahead of his time with this dreamy and nostalgia-based sound. Given it's recent rise in popularity, due to him becoming popular under the name Jpegmafia, I guess some people in the barber beats community may have been heavily inspired by it. It's a phenomenally produced album, definitely worth checking out :)

I don’t think it’s even remotely up for debate that posting someone else’s work as your own is just theft if you don’t even change it.

Rory Macdonald on a cover hits different

I had listened to a bunch of Haircuts for Men and Macroblank and thought there was some sampling involved and that was it... had no idea a lot of the songs are literally lifted from other artists, barely edited. I see in the comments that some people try to take the high road and call them/themselves "curators" but if that was the case then they would credit the original artists appropriately instead of being cheeky and translating everything to japanese to make it harder to find the original songs, selling their albums and even selling merch! Kinda like the NFT/AI bros of the music world...

Dude. As an avid Haircuts for Men-listener for many years by now, this was really fascinating. At first I had no idea what to make of it and just bought it at face-value as someone who actually constructed these chill beats - or perhaps added a saxophone on it, since so many of the tracks had a sax. But then I heard the one mixtape where they use Windowlicker by Aphex Twin and I knew something was up. I think the Coronamix they made is my favorite, because it's straight up a sort of DJ-set where they make all the tracks flow well into each other, so it's both more of a original product and also really good at the same time. Fascinating nonetheless. Can't resist the chill vibes at times though.

Shoutout to DΛRKNΣSS! My favorite artist dabbling with this genre 🖤

I think we can call them "musical curators" and if they edit samples - "producers" as well. With how much music there is, spotlighting good music becomes an important task. And that is what they do.

I found Macroblank and a dude called Middle MGMT last year and they hooked me. Driving barber beats, jogging barber beats, chilling out barber beats yeah i think you get the point.

Seeing it discussed like this makes me think of barber beats as more of a subgenre of plunderphonics that evolved its aesthetics heavily from vaporwave. Considering a lot of plunderphonics artists also don't know whether to call themselves DJ's/Producers/ or simply music curators the connection there is strong. Not to mention the headache that is sample clearing a heavily sampled release, a lot of the plunderphonics crew don't monetize their stuff at all, except for maybe the bigger names like The Avalanches who spent years trying to get projects released.

Babe… wake up! He’s back!

Been seeing you on the Slowerpace comment sections. You've been consuming this like Skittles.

Ah yes Barber Beats, the Classical Music of Vaporwave, glad you could finally cover it

I remember reading a comment in one of these playlists saying "Barber beats is how i always imagined vaporwave to feel and sound like" and i felt that.

I appreciate the Trip Hop revival the sound has, but it would be better if there were new artists who could recreate the “barber beats” sound with a clean slate instead of sampling other artists and slapping their own name on it. The vibe and aesthetic is nice. The potential is promising. But the plagiarism aspect needs to go in order for it to be the next incarnation of Trip Hop. When it comes to VapourWave bringing back Trip Hop, George Clanton gets it right.

I absolutely love barber beats! The remember a year or two ago seeing Macroblanks mix with the Nazgûl on the front and thinking I had to see what it was. I’ve been hooked ever since then.

Its great as far as being a curator of music goes. I really wish people didnt compare it to actual beat making though. This is just making a mixtape and making album art. I dont really know if its an art form explicitly, but its cool.

holy shit, haven't seen you pop up on my feed for years. glad to see you're still around man. time to catch up on what i've missed.

i'm an artist myself, not a musical artist, but my take is that it's pretty cool. the only thing i wish for was more attribution to the original artists, but it's otherwise a fascinating genre. i have many of macroblank's albums that i downloaded before bandcamp shut them down, and i continue to listen to them pretty regularly. and hey, it's nice to see people start to do sample-free takes on the genre, the one album you showed briefly is one that i'll definitely buy soon.

This is the classic Pad content I stay around for! Lol Love barber beats, I’ve been listening to soooo much slowerpace lately

Why not just give credit to the original artist? For example, have the cover art state the name of the original or something.

I am freaking out! I am not the only one in the world that knows about this stuff omg. I really, really like their music and didn’t realised the “history” around them. - Even though they can be still considered “lazy” i still really like them and i feel like i would’ve never even thought of hearing the originals without it. - the reason i feel like it can make productive is because of the whole nature of it, the music make you feel like your getting ready to work at your “million dollar company” or “getting dressed/groomed for a action movie.” Makes you in a very productive type of mood where you are ready to get things done. One of my favorites is haircut’s for mens : Nothing special, nothing wonderful (especially the track “sweatpants”) is one of my favourite songs or things ever. This video was really good and i really like it a lot ! I really like this type of content and i hope you continue it! Also hi from Brazil

What are your thoughts on Barber Beats? Do you dig em or nah?

The Patreon email of a NEW Pad video is always a good vibe 😌

I remember showing HFM to friends in 2019 and it genuinely blew some people away who were NOT your typical Vaporwave enjoyers. When MACROBALNK popped up for the first time I remember the words shared between them and HFM were pretty bitter. It's been nice seeing the genre grow more, especially in ways that stray away from what made HFM's sound so iconic.

Long Live Barber Beats. ✌

Vaporwave: a genre literally based on slowing down music and selling it on a cassette. R/vaporwave: this is wrong :((((

I discovered this subgenre a couple years ago through Macroblank and loved it, I've been listening to vaporwave since Eccojams Vol.1. But it didn't take long until I saw in the comments people posting names of the barely edited source songs, and alarmingly, other people complaining that their source lists were being deleted. I can get behind these "albums" being more considered as mixtapes and the artists being more like DJs or curators, but actively hiding the names and artists of the songs they use feels more unethical than straight up piracy to me. I'm honestly glad a few Barber Beat "artists" got all their stuff scrubbed from Bandcamp, if only to push the rest of the scene to be a bit more innovative and creative. While I don't think fair use legally applies to any of this, I use the idea of a "transformative work" as a guiding star when evaluating a genre like this. As I listened to Macroblank that first few days, for every beat that I loved grooving to, there was another that sounded like a lazy flip of slowed-down Balearic downtempo or jazz. While with classic vaporwave there were enough elements in a song or edits to a sample that, even though many famous samples are easily recognizable, the end result felt like an actual new song. Very few Barber Beat tracks meet this standard. And then I step back and think about people decrying any sampling being used in the 80s and 90s and how ridiculous I thought they looked, and all the gigabytes of mp3s I pirated before Spotify came to the Western Hemisphere, and several famous examples of theft-as-art in the Visual Arts; even though I find fault with the ethics of these artists, I'm ultimately very excited to follow this new evolution of Vaporwave wherever it leads us. Watching a new genre or subgenre grow and spread in real-time is one of my favorite pastimes as a music nerd, even when it is seemingly growing itself into an ouroboros.

"i like to think of Barber Beats as audio coffee" sums it up pretty darn well

This popped in my recommended today, haven't seen your vids in a while and you've really improved your writing over the years, good job man

the type of sounds in barber beats is really way more complex than you can make it out to be on surface level, it’s a perfectly balanced mixture of tons of different genres like jazz, world music, jungle, downtempo, shoegaze, trip hop, gnawa, like barber beats to a certain point can have almost every other genre inside of it and it can work. the best albums will organize and blend completely different genres together track to track, to almost weave a narrative out of different genres and samples. haircuts for men’s original vision is really imbedded in this imo, and alot of new artist’s completely disregard a big part of the genre’s identity by just calling it lounge or just sampling the same lounge artists they have been over and over again. you can really sample anything in barber beats, as long as you know the limits of what you can do in the genre. honestly it can be one of the coolest vaporwave genres when you see how it can make hauntology out of any genre, culture, and history. but honestly, there are so many different views and perspectives on this genre that i can see anyones view as valid. i’ve seen the genre rise and grow since it was just haircuts for men, from tokyo to honolulu, & and | nothing | back in 2018-2020. i really love the genre, it’s molded and shaped my whole music tastes as it has led me to discover tons of new genres and artists i love, just from finding samples used in barber beats. it’s the most beautiful form of hauntology and sharing cultural memories and even just best way to find new music for me.

Elevator music.

Always love seeing a new video from you, especially on genres I haven't heard of before. I also find your videos on these genres inspiring to create my own music and art

Pad youre videos scratch such a niche itch for me and i love you for it!!!

“It’s time for the moment you’ve been waiting fooooor!”

Love the Snowpoint Lounge shoutout

i think it's really funny you specifically said "plundered" here, as in Macroblank's bio a lot of these songs feel kind of "stolen", but i love a lot of them, and specially the way they put the songs together

It’s basically buying a various artist compilation of the same genre of music, which is/was always fun

I have enjoyed many Barber Beats albums throughout the years that it's existed. For the most part, I wish Barber Beats "producers" were more up front about their source material. I always find myself wanting to find the original tracks and artists who made the songs in the first place. Sure, youtube does pretty well with copyright detection of these tracks (as stated in the video). But there are always certain tracks in these albums that I am unable to identify and I feel like it is a disservice to the original creators.

I was waiting for you to cover Barber Beats. I absolutely love the genre and the creators that are apart of it. The community is really great and I certainly enjoy hearing what each creator mixes up next!

The fact every cover has so much style is probably the main reason I like it. It's just so vibes

yo! thanks for showing BARBER BEATER PT 2 シ​ャ​ー​プ​な​カ​ッ​テ​ィ​ン​グ​コ​ー​ム's cover art in the beginning of the video! i wanted to point out that this album, and BARBER BEATER 床屋を打ち負かす音楽, is a reaction to the genre. part 1 reacts in heavily chopping sampled tracks making them non detectable. for part 2 everything is sampleless & slowed as a barberbeats/vaporwave artist in traditional sense would. the Barber beater albums tries not to be lazy. :) i also want to add that these reactions are very inspired by the genre and in no way a form of disrespect. barberbeats has become the new sound and is very catchy. the lazy edits actually inspired me to make these. it's way harder to keep stuff minimal and keep it lazy than you think! curious where it will take vaporwave ❤

for me personally barber beats is about the curation and not creation. i think the original artists should get the majority of the kickback, but at the same time lots of these tracks are things people would never generally hear. I know lots of tracks were coming from like licensed generic dj library albums, basically contract work for the original artists. So the only chance you might have had to hear some of these is if you were at a live event they were played at, or if you are digging for samples on obscure catalogs. I know everyone is different, but personally if i was one of the original artists and my track blew up because it was on a macroblank album I'd be really thankful that people were listening to it and enjoying it. That being said, I'd still want credit. I think most barber beats producers operate on the whole "beg for forgiveness instead of ask for permission" which maybe if that changed the genre wouldn't be so controversial.

Regardless of how much effort they put into the music, they sure do put a lot of effort into the artwork/aesthetic.

Pad you partially got me thorugh the pandemic and your content is strangely nostalgic to me now, I was in your streams 3 to 4 years ago. Thanks for puttingo out such in depth and interesting videos.

I love Barber Beats to be honest. It's been one of my top favorite vaporwave subgenres over the past couple of years; and I own more Barber Beats cassettes than vaporwave ones at this point. But gosh I really would love the genre even more if I could use their music in my videos- and if 95% of the genre wasn't wrecked by RU-vid's content ID system. Also ROMBREAKER MENTIONED LETS GOOO‼🔥🔥

To me the people that make barber beats are curators, their work is similar to the one of a dj in the sense that they capture an aesthetic with purposely picked and manipulated tracks or samples. While the music by it self is clearly not original, with the manipulation and in conjuntion with the other tracks or samples a new body of work is created with a ditinct meaning/feeling diferent to the original material, that in my opinion has its own merit. They are the new djs of the digital bootleg era.

Dude, I got so many of these albums recommended to me and the album covers looked metal af. So I gave one or two of them a listen at them expecting some sort of heavy music and what I find are mild beats to relax/study to, I got tonal whiplash.

how do you always seem to make videos on the obscure genres of music i like?? amazing!

Wake up.. Pad Chennington uploaded..

It's like vaporwave... but now 70% lazier! (no hate, I say this as a vaporwave fan)

Fantastic video! I got recommended macroblank about 2-3 years ago and have been down the rabbit hole ever since. I only recently discovered modest by default like 3 weeks ago and permaculture is a real treat. I love barber beats because they let me keep my focus clear and concise especially when I'm doing certain monotonous things at work. Barber beats are absolute motivation starters for me and I try and click any new ones the youtube algorithim recommends me. Another artist that I've been enjoying thats a bit closer to nujabes as opposed to barber beats is Vanilla. Summer is my absolute favourite track they've made. The soundscapes get even deeper when you get a newer piece of audio equipment. I remember I got my first pair of IEMs and relistened to some vanilla and macroblank and it just made my jaw drop. Fantastic video mate 👍

Great video, it's a genre we all stumbled on and I'm so grateful for the breakdown of where it's come from

uhm i dont think you get it bro

Once again, love your music writing

The sound track of my day is Modest by Default ❤

Superb content quality, please keep up the incredible work!! 👏🏼

Lets go! I was waiting for this one :)

I've listened exclusively to HfM since 2018 and didn't know there was more until last year. I think that Vapor wave is the decade defining music of this era. Because one thing is to have these re-revivals of Past decades creeping up like first with the 80s, then the 90s (which was a revival of the 70s) into being a sort of placebo effect of the thing many millenials and Gen Z look fondly on their early years. Now turned into more of commercializing nostalgia. I think that Vaporwave is a true attempt to use all of these ties that we have to the past and make the remix an actual choice. The fact that the barber beat offshoot to me looks like the midpoint of being a creative mixtspe from a fully realised album was a happy coincidence. Maybe too much thinking into this but the same way oeoo younger than 40 can't achieve the apparent hallmarks of adulthood like being a homeowner, stable income etc and then drift their expenses and interests elsewhere (the whole thing of milenials killing X industry is more because their interests are different from past generations)

The artwork is awesome too. Such a good style, across so many albums and artists. Been enjoying haircuts for years

SUCH an honor to see this genre getting some attention!!! I am such a big fan of this genre and I totally love Pad so BIG WIN! And for my birthday today too!!! yesssss

I discovered HFM during COVID when we had all of our classes online it really helped me get through most of my assignments and from there on I started listening to barber beats the rest of my school years I thank HFM, Macroblank and Oblique Occasions for helping me graduate couldn’t done it without them literally

haircut for men carried me during corona times i never knew the genre name until now, absolutely wonderful for more people to find more music with the same style like haircuts for men and macroblank thank you for covering the history and the nuance behind the genre.

Yo, thank you for the massive shoutout! HFM and Macroblank are the reason I'm here, so to peg me as someone who helped push the genre to where it is today is wild to me, I appreciate it a ton (0.75x)

I've been waiting for someone to cover this.

Ayyy Big Daddy Paddy! Macroblank goes crazy

thank you for introducing me to a new genre. looking into this and boombap now.

I got into this "genre" of music a long time ago starting with basic video game chip music, evolved to synth wave and I slowly found myself exposed to these types of music more frequently. Each of these releases are something the artists want to showcase, even if the idea is as simple as "What if this song was slower with a few sound effects here and there?" and instead of throwing these experiments away as attempts of plunder, we should encourage impressive and more experimental, thoughtful pieces of tracks, so this way like how we came from vaporware to here, we can evolve even further.

French philosopher Roland Barthes in 1967 wrote in Death of the Author, discussing the importance of detaching words from the author (or art from the artist), "The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end... the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us... We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single meaning, but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none' of them original, blend and clash. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them... To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing... we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the Reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."

elevator music for zoomers

I think it's funny the coined term "Barber Beats" summoned from the fact Haircuts for Men was cancelled from Aloe after posting a Joker meme during the riots in 2020, then Macroblank, among others, took over.

I literally just started making barber beats and I agree with the conundrum of whether or not I should consider the music "barbers" and I also entirely agree with the problem of people not giving credit to the original artists. The genre owes an immense amount to often unknown, underdog or even forgotten Downtempo artists. Barber beats is great imo as a recontextualization of tunes already out there and it's pretty much what I see it as. I've already made the mistake of calling my first piece of work an "album". You're right, it's a mixtape. Thank you for weighing in on this and humbling the genre a bit.

I love the sound of barber beats, but more often than not these are just self-made compilations/mixes of other people’s work - oftentimes work that is provided royalty free. For a barber beats compiler to place their name on those tracks instead and then have the gall to sell them online is a bit of a slap in the face to the artist(s) who originally made those tracks. And hey, I get it. Copyright is flawed. It’s not easy to clear samples. And if there’s a fairly strong transformative element to the track other than slowing it down x0.5 then maybe there’s firmer ground to stand on. I’m cool with spreading the joy this music brings and having compilers display it in a fun and organized fashion for free (if the original samples/tracks included are free originally), but these barber beats compilers should do the bare minimum and at least credit the samples or the entire track. If they’re going to sell a track that didn’t involve any further mixing, reach out to the original artists and arrange for proper compensation. Otherwise, just don’t include the track. Just saying “Most of this was plundered” or something to that effect is like when somebody reposts art online with the description “Credit: Google” or “Credit: idk.” These guys know the names these songs originally had. They know the names of the original artists. And if they don’t provide it, they shouldn’t be surprised when the RU-vid algorithm finds out for them.