“It scared me,” he said. “The word ‘vibrations’.” Wilson originally wanted to call the song Good Vibes, but his lyricist, Tony Asher, said it was a “lightweight use of the language”. Nevertheless, by 1970,
John Lennon was saying it (“You give off bad vibes”), then Bruce Springsteen (“Hey vibes man!”), and, by 1983, Kate Bush (“Vibes in the sky invite you to dine”, in Blow Away).
Since then, the word “vibe” – and various promises to change it, check it, luxuriate in it – has become inescapable. A “vibe” can be an idea, a message, a connection between two people, an atmosphere, “off”, unquantifiable, a sensation as clear as the weather. Dressing nicely is “a whole vibe”; a “vibe shift”, as popularised by a 2022
New York Magazine article, is a coming cataclysm. (“Will any of us survive it?” the piece asked.) A day of bliss spent with the people you love is simply “a vibe”.
But, without anyone intending it, the popularity of “vibes” threatens to make it mean nothing. Jessi Grieser, an associate professor in linguistics at the University of Michigan, said that “vibe” had undergone a process known as linguistic generalisation, where its meaning had slowly expanded.
The
New York Times asked last year: “Is crime that bad, or are the vibes just off?” Bloomberg described an economic downturn as a potential “
vibecession”. Google
announced that its maps will soon be able to perform “vibe checks” on entire neighbourhoods – with AI. The example provided was a trip to Paris. Imagine having your
arrondissement “vibe-checked” into oblivion by a robot.
The whole vibeThere is undoubtedly value in having a word for the unquantifiable. The German word “Zeitgeist” was loaned into English, in 1848, perhaps precisely because it encapsulated what we were missing before “vibes”. A classically German compound noun, it literally means “time-spirit”, and the broader German concept of “Geist” itself is maybe even more modern-day vibes-ey – combining to make “Volksgeist” (“national spirit”) and “Weltgeist” (“world-spirit”).
Part of what is driving vibes could be that everyone is actually feeling it. On 11 February, the New York Times crossword ran a clue: “Emotional assessment of one’s surroundings, in lingo”, nine letters. The answer was “vibe check”. Like it or not, part of the contagiousness of “vibes” is that everyone seems to understand, on some level, what it means. (...)
“One of the most important events in the history of vibes was James Clerk Maxwell’s theoretical discovery that light is an electromagnetic wave vibrating in a narrow spectral band, implying that there are other EM waves invisible to humans vibrating at frequencies higher and lower than RGB,” he said. “I would guess that the notion that we live in a vast ocean of invisible radio waves was one of the main inspirations for vibes, for ‘getting on the same wavelength’, for ‘being in tune’.”
Could there, then, be a scientific basis to vibes?
“To really touch the truth of what good vibes between souls might mean, we would have to answer the question: what is it that is doing the vibrating? What is the medium, in other words, in which vibes vibrate?
“No one has the slightest notion how to answer this question. It probably, in my opinion, has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. Which is now, like radio once was, the hottest science fad for some people to dress up their deep ignorance – (our deep ignorance – in phoney knowledge-sounding words.”
Yankelevich said “vibes” was “a universal word, in a sense … People apply it differently based on their given situation. And I think that’s a fantastic thing.”
Grieser sketches a slightly gloomier picture. “It’s hard to get much broader than the space that is currently occupied. We just kind of mean ‘the state of affairs’.” She added: “I mean, New York Times headline, that’s kiss of death for a piece of slang.”
