Vaporwave is a music genre, meme language
that aesthetic and cultural strategy
that emerged in the late 2000s and
broke into wider cultural circles between
2010 and 11. It both is and was, the
frenetic avant-garde of its heyday
seemingly obsolete as its exchange and
influence expands. It is a movement of
the past recycled muzak, discarded genre
of adult contemporary and a slew of
former corporate imagery made obsolete
by the passage of time and capital.
This past obsession masks its vibrant
contemporaneity, it's thoroughly
digital frameworks of meaning and the
nuances of it's a fluctuating mass of consumer/producers.
Still, it's here and
now has always been spent focusing on the past.
So vaporwave has never been new
and as long as it repeats, it will never
gain the luxury of having a past. Instead
its focus and reworking of the obsolete
appears almost as an envious longing
into that continuing slew of digital circulation.
We begin here looking around
and looking back.
In this vantage of nostalgia fever and obsolescence fetish, it seems fitting to begin this
meditation on vaporwave with its
favorable cry "vaporwave is dead".
This declaration echoes from the titles
of vaporwave artworks the text of Vaporwave memes,
to the sanctimonious
preaching of the hardline genre acolytes
and culture priests. It is the favored
sentiment saturated with irony that
declares an end,
despite its existence in that declaration.
This catch cry, exclamation,
joke and meme is where we will begin.
At a cursory glance, vaporwave appears to be a
contemporary, but simplistic micro-genre
but as critic Simon Reynolds
demonstrates genre and particularly
micro genre are often tools the critic
uses to condense a range of artistic
activity
into a culturally digestible and
commercially viable set of boundaries.
Genre is a narrative is told from the
outside and often from the perspective
of times past. This narrative charts
creative developments, commercial
imperatives and the lineage and
transformations of its form, as it shifts
and develops. Vaporwave is a collective
motion that formulated its own statuses
genre from the shared interactions of
its producers and consumers and their
shared dissemination of the cultural lexicon.
Genre is also a temporal-capital
designation, designed to build lineages
of musicians, to modify styles and
attitudes in order to crown reigning kings,
manufacture loyalty and dispute
amongst followers and market new
inheritors and challenging players.
Vaporwave circumvents the impact of
these familiar patterns by embedding
subtle layers beneath the accepted appearance of genre.
There is an unusual adherence to its established methods and a rejection of development.
Following other contemporary movements in genres
it focuses on contemporary inflections
of nostalgia but separates itself
through vast and uncompromising use of
sampling, rendering it largely
commercially unviable and ambiguous
artistically
Like its vaporous namesake it surrounds, swirlingly evasive, suddenly converging and condensing.
A declared field in which intentions float
swirl and obscure into cultural mist,
masses of content that test the nuanced
flexibility and altering textures of
culture and liquid capital in the
digital age.
It is this vaporous liquidity that obscures vaporwave's
intentions, its perspectives even its
arrival and departure. From this swirling
ambiguity comes the cry that "vaporwave is dead",
a cry that could just as well be a
"vaporwave never arrived".
So what is this movement that gleefully
denies it's here and now and defers its beginnings
and end?
Vaporwave sits in a
continuum of nostalgia genres, as an
audiovisual assemblage of the
appropriated material of recent history.
These audio visual aspects make vaporwave unique, even amongst other recent
nostalgia-genres. Beyond a music genre
with an accompanying visual style or a
visual trend with links to a musical
aesthetic,
vaporwave incorporates all
these elements into a sprawling yet
cohesive cultural assemblage.
In this track, vaporwave artist Macintosh Plus mainly utilizes portions of Diana Ross
performing "It's Your Move".
This altered, oozing feel of the track
provides a core principle of vaporwave:
material is reused, recycled, combined and
generally altered to form something new
and express it,
that nonetheless flaunts
the cuts and formation of it's assembled form.
As the focal point of the album
'Floral Shoppe', the track is titled in a
deliberately indecipherable or overly
complex form to its western audience.
It is noteworthy that the title is made up of
two distinct parts: a reference to 420
the marijuana reference that predates
the Internet but is nonetheless a
recognizable contemporary cultural
reference and staple language of drug culture.
The second point is the kanji
script which, to it's largely
english-speaking audience, and indeed
anyone who can't read Japanese,
are initially unreadable.
In the face of such
language, the unreadable text is
digitally copied for accurate searches
or referencing, while or colloquially shortened
to the recognizable "420" in conversation.
Other vaporwave track titles also
feature any combination of
unconventional and non-phonetic symbols
as either alternatives to letters or as
textual ornament.
Greco-Roman statues, busts and columns
seen in this album art are a common
motif in vaporwave and operate as
declarative symbolic language aligning
the content with the vaporwave genre.
Along with other vaporwave stylizations
like the pink and purple coloring that
pervades this image,
the aggressive cultural signaling of this collective approach is typifies by its complex style,
known as " A E S T H E T I C "
 
This stylization is replicated as a signaling mechanism to
other members of the genre assemblage,
who in turn replicate and disseminate
imagery and style as a form of
communication, in which memes reinforce
cultural language.
The imagery itself, is intentionally lurid increasing its
recognizability and suggesting a
reflexive tone of irony or contemplative ambiguity.
These appropriated styles and
formats thrive in the shared nature of
their wholly digital environment the
role of the digital and the networked
exchange is not simply the context for
vaporwave but serves as its stylistic content.
Early computer-generated imagery,
reference to outdated Apple and Windows
iconography are intermingled with
advertising and corporate imagery of
this hyper capitalist moment such as
this shot in the background which
freezes footage from an advertising reel.
By focusing on the hyper-capitalism that
produces the fabric of the internet movement,
vaporwave generates a
tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for its own
recent history and its status as a
wholly digital medium.
It is this attention to capitalist liquidity, that situates
vaporwave as a movement that is of
hyper capital circulation
dissemination disposal and wastage.
It is from the cringe and tack of outdated
advertising, the rapid outdating of fashion,
and the obsolescence of early
digital technologies, that vaporwave
investigates the flow of capital in the
information society.
What is solid becomes air.
The liquidity of the market
creates a continuous lightness and in
this condition we must learn to
navigate the vapor.
There is something of a style,
something of an aesthetic,
a purposeful language of forms and conventions
from which an attitude of
flaunted ambiguity emerges as a genre
As a genre today, vaporwave exerts a refusal to develop and change and while other
genres and aesthetic movements may claim
historical influence,
and tout their cultural lineage,
vaporwave's most resounding echo, is in the heavily reverbed cry,
"vaporwave is dead".
A sense of glee follows this catchphrase
that outweighs any detached irony.
This death, the leaving of vaporwave recalls the origins of its name,
"vaporware" and
the earlier cries that it would never truly arrive.
The term "vaporwave"
originally came from Texas based
producer Will Burnet, who was describing
the work of artists Vektroid, by making a
pun on the existing term "vaporware", which
refers to a product that was in
development but ultimately fails to
emerge on the market.
By using this term
to align themselves with the casualties
of information capital and the failure
of future promise, vaporwave positions
itself not only as a movement focussed on
past content, but as a movement that
never fully arrives in the way that
movements and genres do.
It never extends
itself beyond self reference because
this self reference is its defining
feature.
It's never validated in
commercial artistic canon because of its
incompatibility with contemporary modes
of music based capitalism.
This play on 'arrival' reveals a complex critical
dialogue that allows vaporwave to
maintain its ambiguity even as it is
continuously disseminated.
Whether references are recognized or not
vaporwave summons its matter through the
medium of the digital.
Medium becomes
both the language of technology and its
function as a summoning medium force,
recalling the content formats and
technologies of the past.
This medium
follows vaporwave's own death, twisting
the ghostly iconography of the past
through the swirling forms
it's expressive vapor.
In this sense
vaporwave recalls the logic of the
proceeding nostalgia-mediums of the
2000s which used methods of internet
exchange to practice digital adaptation
of non-digital technologies and existing
materials.
Vaporwave follows the trail of
three major genres Hauntology, Hypnagogic
pop and Chillwave, linked by this
framework of nostalgia.
Hauntology was a
music genre that met sampling
practices with sound art and musical
outcomes.
It was characterized by a technological
focus on quarter-inch tape and modular
synthesizers that created a murky sense
of temporal dislocation.
By sampling and
imitating the sounds of 60s and 70s
British radio hauntology references the
failed utopianism of the post-war era
and the crushing blows of Thatcherism.
More generally it summons these echoes,
whispers, dreams and false memories of a
failed utopian promise that haunts the
present it was denied.
This complex
nostalgia reveals a longing not simply
for times past but for the promise of
futures that never arrived and the ghosts these summon in the present day.
That ghost is neither
of the past, nor of the present,
but is the lingering dislocation of intangible
alternate presents and the failures of
future.
Hypnagogic pop follows a trend of hauntology but from the perspective of a more
American context, particularly the
threads of nostalgia from the west coast.
It also extends a different range of
tone, by emerging from a context of semi
dreamlike consciousness.
Where hauntology referred to the shared past and lost futures,
hypnagogic pop conjures the
sensation of memories that never
occurred in a position somewhere between
sleep and wakefulness as its name
suggests.
This hybrid state features
allusions and appropriations of the
media formats that surrounded and
influenced those children of the 80s and
90s it holds a particular interest in
the phenomenology of the cassette and
it's warm descent into noise and memory
and textural palimpsest.
It also featured a growing interest in
audio-visual assemblage and the
appropriation of 80s retro material.
We can see traces of vaporwave to come
in audio-visual tracks such as Oneohtrixpointnever's "Nobody Here".
This track samples video game footage
with an old-school VHS wipe transition
over an audio loop that samples a tiny
fraction of Chris de Burgh's track,
"The Lady in Red"
Hypnotic and repetitive while
obviously and unashamedly appropriated
it brings us to the nostalgia movements
bifurcation into vaporwave and chillwave.
Vaporwave developed from the
textures and exploration of hypno-pop
particularly, Oneohtrixpointnever's other influential work as 'Chuck Person'.
The 'Eccojams' album made under
this name featured tracks that were
slowed down and cut up with very little
other addition as a kind of warped
mixtape.
With obvious copyright issues it
was released non-commercially with the
legal distance of the Chuck Person
pseudonym.
This non-commercial approach,
purposeful appropriation and the strange
retro looking cover art imprint a mode
of production that would influence a
wave of producers and artists that
formed into vaporwave.
Chillwave was a
commercial genre that began to emerge in
similar timing to vaporwave.
It took its
cues from the sounds, production styles
and moods of hauntology and hypno-pop
and compressed them into a more conventional
and palatable song structure and music
style.
For this reason chill wave was
more readily suited to the framework of
commercial genre whose claim to value
lay in the artistry of its premier
players and relatable creativity of
their individual approaches.
Samples were
always credited and used sparingly in
favor of more general sonic adoption of
instruments styles and production
techniques.
While it shares many origins
and influences with vaporwave, chillwave
presents a more conventional engagement
with the music industry and its
associated labels.
The imperatives of
commercial interests are then balanced
with the interest in retaining the
artistic cachet of the
earlier movements and a closer
engagement to their audience and the
craft of their work.
Vaporwave, in contrast,
quickly moved away from an
interest in artistry and craft, toward a
more distinct and recognizable formula
that would find a range of expression
through the impact of its continued
repetition.
It was resolutely extra legal
with recognizable samples appropriated
and altered in uncredited but
recognizable ways.
Moreover, there was a
sense of parody that existed in
vaporwave that seems at odds with the
more serious and earnest interests of
Chillwave artists.
Though ambiguous,
vaporwave's appropriation engaged a sense of
parodic reversal of roles, changing
sources and misdirecting content.
Where Chillwave took strategies from its
earlier genres and directed them towards
commercial distribution,
vaporwave took
the non-commercial forms and functions
as points to appropriate.
The community
establishment and internet genre scene
then become part of the whole assemblage
by which vaporwave is formed.
In this sense, chillwave remains a genre that had
more commercial interests than its
previous genres and therefore the
greatest conventional stability.
Vaporwave stabilizes by moving away
from the notion of genre and towards an
aesthetic assemblage and community of
exchange, appropriating the forms of
earlier net based movements
From its nuances, achievements and problems,
vaporwave was not a genre in the
conventional sense and so did not fall
into the simple logic of the music
industry but rather the complex logic of
the information age and its hyper
capitalist exchange.
In this state of
hyper-circulation, intentions become
obscured and meaning is increasingly
replaced with ambiguity.
Rules such as
"Poe's Law", state that using the internet
to parody an extreme view will most
likely be mistaken for an article of
genuine sentiment or support
Without the context all signals of intention the
parody is unclear and one's views take
on the appearance of the position one in
and into satirize.
The adage of Poe's Law
emerged from a serious point about
mocking extreme and fundamental views
but becomes increasingly relevant for a
range of digital communication and
exchange.
A state of confusion emerges
from the indecipherable borders between
jokes, sincerity and intention.
This ambiguity heightens the plasticity of
meaning and the disposable nature of
intention in the face of hyper
dissemination and dispersal.
In this sense,
vaporwave has often been accused of
being blatantly poor artistic work by
some or being alternately praised as a
potent satire of contemporary digital
craft.
It even has the honor of being
frequently described as both
simultaneously, jokingly affirming and
ridiculing those analyzing it.
"...Wait, what?"
It is
this ambiguity that allows vaporwave to
traverse the various cultural realms.
Declaring or being declared with
different intentions, ultimately allowing
its safe passage to continue its
multivalent amorphous dissemination.
Vaporwave then fills the various roles
cast to it, taking ambiguity as a
creative approach to the occupation of
varying cultural positions.
Like its
vaporous namesake, the content of
vaporwave fills the container in which
it finds itself.
This is not to say that
it has no quality of its own but that
its quality is culturally fluid.
The free-forming vapor then condenses into
more solid structures as its free
floating particles are cast in the
boundaries of more rigid frameworks.
Vaporwave even finds its way through
corners of net-based critical thinkers
who laud its accelerationist wrangling
of capitalism, even as it serves the
repetition of dead brain shitposters
and creative cul-de-sacs of lonesome
soundcloud wanderers.
Accelerationism
suggests that in this day and age of
digital modernity, the best means to
counter oppressive capitalism is to
hurry its demise, accelerating its own
functions to breaking point.
This follows an argument that there are cracks
inherent in capitalism and it's
functions must reach an ultimate crisis
point.
With its loudly ambitious take on
the continued obsolescence produced
via stylistic cycles, vaporwave appears
to cast a critical eye on capitalist
function.
This is further emphasized by
the role of digital technology in sharing
and disseminating content through extra-legal practices.
It is this extra-legal
approach that appears to position
vaporwave as an accelerationist
exercised, undermining capitalism's
rampant consumerist frenzy with its
creative piratical parody.
However, such
pronouncements must be treated with
suspicion recalling that vaporously
ambiguous form that conveniently fills
any number of cultural frameworks.
Vaporwave definitely relishes the pirating
of material and it's accessible
alteration and redistribution.
The cuts
of its sampling are often obvious and
techniques easily replicable. For this
reason there is a kind of enforced or
assumed amateurism to the medium which
encompasses much of the material that is
made.
The formal input of its trailblazing
artists provided examples of genuine
craft and inventive form.
This contrasts
with the mass of content in which
lesser-known players create material
uploaded onto their soundcloud, bandcamp
and YouTube accounts as their own
interpretations of material or vaporwave
remix, applying ready-made methods
towards songs of their choosing.
Quality drastically, with amateurism being
incidental rather than purposeful but
still resolutely vaporwave.
Other content
is generated by taking more popular
vaporwave material and creating a video
clip for it, meaning multiple clips
surface to popular tunes like "420".
Here
we see the formal threads of vaporwave
stylistic qualities and recognizable
iconography operating in contrast to the
movements of contemporary capital.
Instead of the development of genre and
the phasing out of styles vaporwave
continues with this resolute set of
imagery and musical approaches.
Contrary to the accelerationist viewpoint,
this slavish adherence to these
stylistic conventions actually
undermines the concept of acceleration
and speed.
Rather than accelerating
stylistic trends of hyper-capitalist
exchange, vaporwave enacts a denial of
cultural speed by halting stylistic
movement and development.
The innovations
of individual actors are then
contributions to the great swelling
tides and directions of vaporwave mass,
the liquidity of their content forming
great collective trending channels in
place of stylistic successions.
Though its sensibilities remain unmoved,
particular niche focuses and
iconographic trends emerge from the
swells of tidal trends.
Though its form
continuously repeats whirlpools and
eddies form into particular iterations
of vaporwave.
Futurefunk,
Vaportrap,
Ocean grunge,
Mallsoft.
Rather than demonstrating the disintegration of
vaporwave and its formal approaches,
these nuanced inflections demonstrate
the explorative depths to be found in
the repeated format of vaporwave's
ambiguous reconfiguration of culture.
In visual approach, use of the cartoon show
The Simpsons demonstrates the value of
extended use of a high value cultural
source.
Though common enough as part of a
larger vaporwave assemblage, the
approach of Simpsonwave used footage
from the show, slightly altered and
filtered, as a kind of curatorial
mechanism for framing existing vaporwave
tracks and mixes.
First emerging in meme-imagery,
Simpsonwave demonstrates the
hybridizing of production and
reception in the vaporwave community,
as cartoon footage becomes part of the
continued reassembling that
characterizes vaporwave in its
insistence on the plasticity of cultural
objects.
This continual assemblage of
cultural material demonstrates its
distinction from capitalist genre-formats,
cultural succession and
completion are rendered unnecessary in
the expansive internet exchange and
contemporary curatorship.
Inhabiting forms of sub-genre and trending division
then become a performance of capitalist
paradigms, mocking its rigidity with an
alternatively ambiguous fluidity.
This quality to inhabit to reshape and reform
is one of what Zigmunt Bauman would
call, "liquid modernity".
Bauman contends
the liquid modernity is the quality
first alluded to by Marx's announcement
that,
"All that is solid turns to air".
One in which Marx saw liquidity as a
clearing force to replace outdated forms
and structures with newer more relevant
ones.
This is the same pronouncement that
jokingly supplies half of vaporwave's
name and that Bauman embraces with less ambiguity.
He argues that the liquidity
of capitalism has eroded any sense of
returning solid structure and it is now
this liquid paradigm the remains to be
navigated.
The liquidity of society
produces the hybrid capitalist forms of
the Internet which in turn provide extra-legal and non-capitalist exchange in a
paradoxical mood of ecstatic hyper
consumerism.
Form in such a setting
becomes relational, relative and fluid in
contrast of former structures of meaning
which drove earlier capitalism.
Value is
simultaneously expanded and contested
though its incipience never waned,
its flow and forces reshaping in a more ambiguous cultural context.
In this condition,
 vaporwave finds itself
navigating the various nuances and
textures of liquid modernity through its
own fluid properties.
Vaporwave utilizes this cultural
fluidity to create an expansive
collective form from which shared
sensibilities and languages emerge.
In this sense, its
" A E S T H E T I C "
demonstrates its reflective approach to
liquidity by embracing the incipience of
its form as a means of recognition and
shared discourse in the immense cultural
fluidity of the Information Age.
The sensibilities of vaporwave
" A E S T H E T I C"
reflect the fluid ambiguities of its
surrounding modern fabric alternating
between irony and joke, critique and
superficial affection.
While it is an
encompassing term for vaporwave
stylistic languages, it also refers to
its ambiguous attitudes multivalent
outcomes and dimension of expression.
But what does vaporwave's expression 
convey?
Beyond its play with culture and exchange,
nuanced modes of emotion arise.
It's over-the-top stylizations create a
dreamlike sense of alienation and
isolation, resonating with the emotional
frequencies of contemporary modernity.
One such issue is the isolation that
emerges from the hyper-connectivity of
the Information Age.
Vaporwave sound and
imagery explores the increasing
connectivity of the Internet and its
corresponding loss of intimacy and sense
of isolation.
This find expression in the
sense of being "lost in translation".
A mass of signs and collective languages
both literal and cultural.
Internet art, vaporwave in particular, gravitates
towards the use of Japanese texts,
iconography and imagery as a dislocating
setting for it's generally
english-speaking audience.
This metaphor
of techno-cultural loneliness uses a
sense of otherness that is problematic to
say the least.
Vaporwave's use of this language and
imagery is evidence that it exists
within a certain inflection of Western
cultural thought,
reinforced by analysis
of its linguistic approaches and the
domain locations of its formative web
presences.
The performed inequalities of
its content are mirrored by its own
cultural inequalities, giving extra
potency to the moods of its scenes of
'Blade Runner'-esque
alienation.
This anxiety reveals the eclipse
of earlier optimism towards the future and
haunting echoes of futurist losses and
the loss of futurism itself.
Culture piles up in ever-expanding digital
archives, creating a sense of ongoing
present that collects the growing waste
of the past and constricts the sense of
movement towards a future destination or
goal.
Vaporwave fetishizes these visions
of the future, and past imaginings of
cyberpunk and the failure of utopia or
dystopia to conjure sufficient
imagination in the wake of the yawning
contemporary.
This aesthetic becomes a
kind of historical futurism that
examines these past impulses and
languages with a sense of longing and
lost for the potential of future
imagining.
Vaporwave's aesthetic is
therefore situated in a complex dialogue
with the occurrence and reenactment of
the past within the present.
This is why
we find vaporwave in the continuum of
nostalgia media, with similarities to
many forms of appropriation and
reconsiderations of past media.
Its accompanying interest in considerations
of the lo-fi, uses past media and content
as an alternative to the techno capital
impulses towards newer technologies as
higher-quality.
As a thoroughly
audio-visual assemblage, vaporwave
focuses on early computer-generated
imagery, seen in the art of early video
games including blocky vector art and
"Tron"-like vector grids.
But while it shares nostalgic tendencies with other
genres and styles, vaporwave merges the
unintentional low-fidelity of older
technology with this acceleration of
amateurism,
a weaponized de-skilling of
dissemination.
This all serves to
increase the particular forms of
arrangement while empowering a strategy
of repetition.
Much like the inclusion of
Greek statues and Roman columns, the
accepted yet somewhat arbitrary choices
of style build a "what the fuck" shrug into
its shared language and expression.
That language then in turn inflicts the shrug
into varying corners of its output, a
detachment and a numbness that weaves
its way through vaporwave's aesthetic.
Tones emerge throughout the stylistic
strategies of vaporwave that explore the
nauseating textures of synthetic
numbness
that emerge from former corporate
blandness.
The monotony of advertising
the synthetic detachment of the
pharmaceutical industry and the numbing
stupor of the mall all provide a range
of textures where we only once
recognized emptiness
No soft psilocybin tints,
or organic living patterns of the
acidic experience.
Vaporwave is the 2C-B
of aesthetics psychotropes, lurid,
colorful in a synthetic and garish way.
A Photoshop drug on a framerate trip.
This spectrum of the garish and nauseating
announces itself in vaporwave's
trademark color scheme of lurid pinks
and purples, pushed into zones of
contrast and saturation that would make
a colorist's eyes bleed.
This is an
intentional strategy to inhabit some
artificial zone that makes no pretense
to be holding on to it's realistic
depictions of worldly origins.
It inhabits the monitors and electronic
spaces of hypnotically sickening
exchange.
So vaporwave emerges from
digital circulation and so to digital
circulation it recedes.
Obsolescence is
always an opportunity for the nostalgic
but how that nostalgia then directs
itself becomes the marker for its
contemporary relevance.
Vaporwave is not
just an artistic reworking of past
materials or the careful application of
audio-visual craft, rather it is these
elements put into the service of
collective ambiguity and mass exchange.
The solids crumble into vapor and even
the liquid of modern capitalism becomes
caught in the cultural cycles of hyper
circulation and calculated strategies of
repetition.
Vaporwave almost begins by
declaring itself dead and over and yet
it's zombie virality charges on.
It spreads, mutates and reforms but all to a
central conceit of expression,
its endemic aesthetic.
In this sense it is
not just an appropriation of the trash-past,
but a cancerous twisting of the
notion of trash itself.
As it piles up in
our digital spaces,
can media ever be considered obsolete again?
Material is simply engaged or
unengaged, ready to take its place in a
constellation of contemporary
redescription.
Commercial tools are
ambivalently applied to the aggressively
non-commercial, to a plane of hyper
capitalist liquidity, hyper-consumerist
speed and a contingency of contemporary
cultural meaning.
That vaporwave exchange
gives obsolescence of voice,
a slowed down, amorphous voice that cuts, chops and
shifts through the ambiguous whims of
its shrugging participants.
Trash to trash,
bust to bust.
 
