We'll be doing a listening party on the Deep Cuts Discord for 2814 - Birth of a New Day (some might say a vaporwave 'classic') Tuesday 15th, 22:00BST. Follow this link! discord.gg/UrEPuw9
deep cuts This album blew my mind. A stellar ambient record. I hope you and the rest of the listening party enjoy it. Would love to join in but I'll be busy sadly.
Kyashi San It may literally just be because of Floral Shoppe, which is what many people know as “the” vaporwave album, having that Roman bust on its cover
Vaporwave is one of the BEST THINGS to happen to the music industry. It's so completely incompatible with the industry, it's incredible that it got so popular. It shows that the general populous has the capability to look past technical ability and experience music and art for what it is. It shows that people appreciate well executed ideas no matter how the idea came to be. Music listeners are finally catching up with contemporary art enthusiasts. Also, the popularity of Vaporwave is proof that the world is ready to abolish copyright law, or at least heavily reform it. Most Vaporwave is blatantly infringing, but wholly transformative nonetheless. Art movements like this will get people on the side of getting rid of the concept of intellectual property.
Wow we're entering a whole new debate here with regards to intellectual property. If artists aren't able to protect their work in the future, how can they make a living off of it? If everyone is able to take a concept or work, add effects and package it as something new, surely that has more negative implications for the industry than positive ones?
There are a lot of different ways to make money besides just putting walls around your music, not just limited to your fans' generosity. I'm writing a video essay about this where I'll go in to more detail, I'll send it to you when I'm done.
>>> "Most Vaporwave is blatantly infringing, but wholly transformative nonetheless. " You really know what you are talking about man. Right on the spot.
The phrase "We are haunted by a future that never came to pass" reminded me of William Gibson's short story Gernsback Continuum (coincidentally, released in the 80's), where a photographer sees phantasmagoric images of the future as envisioned in the early 20th century (giving origin to the name Raygun Gothic). It's worth checking out.
Ah I love Gibson, some of his concepts definitely fit into these ideas of nostalgia and temporal dislocation. I've never read that short story, thanks for the recc!
I think it has to be addressed that though some vaporwave artist do criticize consumerism, I think overtime it became and earnest longing for a world were there was not war, there was not economic crisis, there was hope. And I think this goes hand on hand with the rise of gen Z, a generation that doesn't know a world without terrorism or the risk of total destruction or information overload thanks to the internet (a big contrast with the milennials that did know a world like that and it was taken from them) I think the album News at 11 captures this (ofter not discussed) side of vaporwave
It's really like graffiti but for the internet. That's at least what I gather. The ease of production and the similar aesthetics of the group are a lot like how stencil graffiti works.
As a person who's 36, you young cats have no idea how amazing vaporware actually is. You may know 20 years from now when somebody turns the music you like into something else.
I am 36too! and you're comment is odd have you not heard a mash up or experienced hiphop's deep love of sampling? but, vaporwave essentially culturejams on a future we were P R O M I S E D malls that never closed and smooth jazz bringing near bliss.
I'm 34, and for me vaporwave is that sun creeping at the corners of my eyes as am I enjoying a soft drink outside the local mall. Listening to the wind, the indistinct sounds of shoppers, and commercial jingles played in the mall mixing together to create a moment seemingly disconnected from time. A short exhale before life must continue.
I also think that hauntological listening breaches the gap between morphology, how a thing is structured, and interface, how we internalize a thing. It's not how genres are taxonomically different, it's how we internalize things like trap music and shoegaze. They are both haunting.
I started making vaporwave as a form of mental escapism. My vaporwave albums were some of the first releases I'd ever put out that I feel like people really resonated with. Back in 2014-15 i was really into the vibe the genre gave me, and i really got "lost in the sauce" for a while there haha. I'd listen to Computer Death/Decay/Afterlife by Infinity Frequencies almost every night as i was falling asleep and i loved how it reminded me of vague, ephemeral portions of my childhood, like half-memories of things that may or may not have actually happened. The online community back then was awesome too! Luxury Elite would host vaporwave livestreams, VW twitter was off the hook, and everyone generally just really loved the music and community. Unfortunately, drama and burned bridges kind of ruined the magic of the social experience in the genre, and the magic of the music itself has somewhat burned out for me as well. I still absolutely still love this genre to death though and i'm really glad i got to experience it while it was still somewhat in it's prime.
Hey man, I know I'm 2 years late, but I just checked out your channel and music. Really liked the first one, loved how you completely captured the essence of vaporwave while, at the same time, adding your personal touch (I personally felt it on the beat you made). Just wanted to say that you earned yourself a subscriber. I really love people adding more content to this almost dead (not really) community. Keep doing what you do, and in case you don't enjoy doing it anymore, that's okay too. The pieces you already created are awesome (specially the videos for your songs, they're fantastic). Sorry for the long text. Good luck and carry on!
glad to see mp3neptune in this comment section! Love your music, found some strong hauntological vibes in it especially in empty faces in digital faces, keep it up!
Discovering Vaporwave was one of the best things to happen in my life. I'm in my own world when listening to it. Not many people are able to understand this.
I find the commentary Vaporwave brings interesting, even if the music isn't really enjoyable IMO. It reminds me a lot of what Warhol did with his commodified and kitschy style, wherein he bridged gaps between lowbrow and highbrow art along with blurring art with pop culture and materialism. The homogenous and vapid focuses on "A E S T H E T I C" when creating it remind me as well of Warhol's own methods of creating, using cheap printing and an almost assembly-line approach to commodify art. IDK, I might be pretentious though
@@dive_in_me226 and the philosophy of it in of itself is inescapable, even if one were to just appreciate the vaporwave aesthetic for just the sake of aesthetic, you're essentially perusing and indulging in a dream of something better
I'm with you on vaporwave being "both" a meme and a genre worth intellectualizing. It works on many layers, both ironically and unironically fetishizing the past, and that's kind of the whole point.
The existence of vaporwave makes me curious to what kind of genres will the internet give birth to. To me, vaporwave communicates our relationship with music and how we consume it, given its atmospheric nature and the fact that most people these days listen to music while doing something else.
I think one branch can be younger and younger people making great & unique stuff. I mean, check out all those type beats, vapors and youtubepoops made by really young people, sometimes 16 or even 15 and more. With technology and movements like vw making it easier and easier for more people to partake in, I think it will just be a matter of time before young kids 12, 11 and more will be doing crazy stuff that many will appreciate.
Individual vaporwave albums can be either pro capitalism or anti capitalist. However, the way I see it, is that vaporwave is a reflection of late stage capitalism. The reason so much of the aesthetic of vaporwave revolves around consumerist aesthetics of the past is an extension of capitalism. It recalls a time when the system actually appeared to be working for most people, namely the 80s and 90s US and Japan. Both countries were experiencing economic booms at the time. Those days have long since passed, and so many of us feel nostalgia for a time when the system was still believed to be working. Consumerism really became a big aspect of the human experience during those decades, and so now it's only inevitable that a lot of nostalgia for those times will be linked to the media and pop culture of that time. So with that in mind, vaporwave can only exist as it does because of the social conditions that were prominent when it became a movement. And the current social conditions are late stage capitalism. Had vaporwave been made in a different context, it might have adopted different aesthetics. The aesthetics it employs are the result of the current cultural context. This ultimately means that how one views vaporwave as a whole is ultimately dependent on their relationship to capitalism. Someone that has a mostly positive experience with capitalism might see most vaporwave as a way to relive certain memories, and think it's just chill music, while someone who is anti capitalist will view it more as a commentary on capitalist alienation and a critique of consumerist culture. But of course, there is some overlap. I'm anti capitalist, but the vaporwave I make is mostly about making sensual or relaxing atmospheres. It's impossible to label the whole genre as one or the other, because an individual artists intent in making vaporwave can still be important.
Thank God you actually broke this all down for people. It's all happening so fast, things get meta so fast, layers of meaning start gettings tacked up so quickly that we can't even keep up with all the inside jokes and self referential meanings...It's also very mesmerizing because the nostalgia just opens up a whole world of lost cultural artifacts that are now coming back because someone finds an old 80s VHS tape , uploads it and then BOOM we have a hot youtiube video al of the sudden!
Your patience and depth of research with this genre is pretty admirable. i generally dismiss it as a meme, although I can't say I haven't enjoyed a few tracked that labels themselves vaporwave.
My view is art can't push forward so we take 1 step back and take 2 forward by looking back we've made something new. Plus modern main stream is at the end of its tether
Awesome video as always man :) I liked the idea of hauntology, it seems to sum up what I've been thinking about in terms of the way nostalgia has been marketed and sold to people who weren't around to experience the thing they're nostalgic for, and the idea of vaporwave as existing in an atemporal space almost rejecting that marketing by perverting it. I also think in addition to this hauntological viewpoint, vaporware might be thriving as a cultural critique because the internet has allowed for a sort of simultaneous nostalgia; there's easy access to past media and cultural capital to be gained from having experienced and being well-versed in it (i.e. the entire point of Ready Player One). The critique might come from the fact that a lot of people are claiming past culture as authentically theirs, even though they are divorced from that culture by time, and vaporwave is sending up this idea of internet nostalgia as authentic nostalgia by removing it from a sense of time and perverting the 'warm fuzzies' by way of lamentation and disposability. That is to say it reveals this simultaneous internet nostalgia as disposable and its existence as lamentable because it isn't authentic and deigning it as so is a sad joke. At least that's what I see maybe feeding into some of the comical juxtapositions within the vaporwave aesthetic. Maybe vaporwave's sadness is in that the past itself is a meme?
I like this a lot - of course vaporwave and this idea of hauntology has to be considered alongside the channel which birthed it: the internet. This is what I love so much about the concept of hauntology, the fact that an entire generation of people can find nostalgia and melancholia by fetishising a period the majority of them will have had no experience of. It makes you wonder what else the internet and easy access to information might give us in the future in terms of art/music movements.
I love vaporwave its like the music i hear in my dreams i have a lot of dreams about my early childhood I grew up during the transtion from the 20th century into the 21th and even as a child i hated the derection music was heading to by the time i was a teenager i did not like music at all listeing to vaporwave is relaxing it makes me feel like im safe at home with unlimited time but then i realise im a adult in the year 2019 and the world is changing for better or worse and nothing will last forever sorry for any grammar mistakes my phone is acting strange.
I guess both statements hold some truth, as you suggested. Honestly though it feels hard to oversee in this time, with the rapid frequency of releases on the web and the anonymity involved in the vaporwave scene. I think especially the tendency to anonymity in the "genre" or scene, however people want to call it, can be a very liberating factor in terms of trying out new ideas or seperating different "aesthetics", "atmospheres", .. the image of the music .. into different sideprojects. On the other hand it disguises the artist, his workflow and you never really know who may be behind certain projects, nor how much effort he put into his music. I can imagine some people making quite some profit of this anonymity by selling a lot of easy to make vaporwave under different names, and this is where the anti-capitalism attitude can bite it's own tail. I believe there lies a great joy in just toying around with your favourite songs and/or samples in software like ableton, stretching and warping the last inch of humanity out of it and make it sound like it comes from your personal mind. Your very own favourite nostalgia-drenched sounds reimagined and contextualized for your own joy and sense of experimentation. It's too easy though, to just take an old 80s song slow it down, put a lot of processing on it - just enough it makes the original barely recognizable anymore - and call it a vaporwave song. Anyways, every genre that got hyped inspired a lot of uninspired copycats - Vaporwave is just way easier to create and it hit a tech-savy generation, so the extent of this may be greater than usual. Vaporwave (depending on how deep and experimental you go for..) also breaks a lot with music theory, which is an ongoing trend in every new genre arising, until many successful artist coming from new genres will eventually learn it and/or these new techniques kind of become a theory and get blueprints, like you see it now a days with all the "(Deep) House Chords", "808s" and whatever mainstream music assimilated from the fresh weeds of the 90s and 00s the "underground"/new music.. It's hard to tell exactly what is so mesmerizing about Vaporwave. It may be just because it originated in the Internet, it may be much more. I appreciate that it favours a more adventurous way of working with audio and pre-existing material, experimentation and especially that it favours an electronic sound, which isn't produced for clubs. New seeds of musicians, who break with traditional ideas. Thinking of the very lo-fi aesthetique Vaporwave carries along with it, maybe it can be compared to early 90s Grunge and their build up of antipathy toward big 80s sounds, reverbs, keyboards etc. Vaporwave may not break with the idea of a big arrangement and many tracks, but most of it clearly has a lo-fi sound and a sense of anarchy towards guidelines production and music theory... There were more thoughts I wanted to convey, it's difficult topic to finde the right words for, but I enjoyed you bringing Vaporwave up, even if I haven't heard any the last months. :)
Zero Books published a book called Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts by Grafton Tanner. I haven't been able to pick it up jet, but I thought it would be worth mentioning, since Oliver mentioned Mark Fisher, whose works were also published by Zero Books.
Yeah I think Tanner actually bases a lot of his writing there on Fisher's orginial ideas. I haven't read it but it looks like something worth checking out! Zero Books put out some great stuff
“Babbling Corpse” is one of my favorite books. It is very enlightening on the concept of ”vaporwave” and also extremely fascinating to read. I definitely recommend it.
as a vaporwave artist, I don't really see vaporwave as a repetitive piece of art. I try to include different (obscure) genres into my music that aren't usually used in vaporwave. I see it more as a spectral and expressive form of plunderphonics.
For me getting into vaporwave got me into vinyls, which got me into analog formats, which got me into reel to reel. For vaporwave started out as great sesh music, but over time shifted to a straight up love. Futurefunk is actually what first got me into it, futurefunk is like a 80's disco that never happened plus it features city pop, a genre I already adore. From there I got into the vapor essentials and quickly become obsessed with breaking my wallet on vapor vinyls.
I think the argument of vaporwave being a meme depends on who's making the music, a lot of people are just doing it because its "cool" and some of them don't really know how to actually have their own ideas, they're just copying others. despite the copying tho i feel that looking back at it ten years from now the sheer amount of content and the sameness of it all will gel well with some of the themes of the genre.
That is the thing, back in the 80s everyone in the new wave scene was copying each other too. Punk scene? same thing. Hiphop? Rock? etc etc etc. Same thing.
This is an amazing video mate, absolutely loved it. Definitely going to check out Fisher's stuff! Never considered Vaporwave in the way you discussed it here
I've noticed how vapourwave is similar to the 2010s dubstep movement. Obviously they don't sound alike but both genres have repetitions in the songs (dubstep having bass drops and vapourwave having the slowed down 70s music) and both ending up being memes instead of actual genres.
Yeah dubstep is similar in that the same sonic tropes (heavy bass, build ups to big 'drops') just get endlessly repeated ad nauseam , to the point where it's difficult to find merit in any of it
Brace yourself ... this may be a long one ... I came into the vaporwave (or just vapour as Wolf suggested should be used as it is more encompassing) relatively late consciously speaking. I was aware of things like Saint Pepsi's "Enjoy Yourself" and the use of Roman busts and the like. But it wasn't until late 2017 when I did a somewhat crash course (and still unearthing things here and there) including the classic Macintosh Plus's _Floral Shoppe_ and newer classics from 2814. My Bandcamp collection has grown quite a bit because of this. And yet, it was something that was not completely unfamiliar. For starters, I was born in the early 1980s and had a certain familiarity with that "80s/90s world": the colour schemes, the artificial sounds, technology as the future, etc. I am also intrigued by experimental music in general (I'm one of the few people who can say my favourite Beatles track is "Revolution 9") as well as electronic music at large (The Darkest Future's _Untitled_ [originally _Floral Shoppe 2_] is not out of line with Autechre). While I haven't yet heard _EccoJams Vol. 1_, one of my favourite 2013 music encounters was Oneohtrix Point Never's _R Plus Seven_. And finally, I know melancholia and temporal disassociation in music too well. One of my favourite recent artists is Leyland Kirby (and by extension, The Caretaker, The Stranger, V/Vm), who also is strongly associated with "hauntological music" (hell, Mark Fisher praised him in his writings and, at the end of last year, Kirby paid musical tribute to him whilst in Barcelona). On this last one, I think the appeal is that the music does often paint a world that seems very familiar, comforting and, perhaps, still promising. It is basically world building through music. While I will give credit where credit is due and say that vapour does help to propagate more widely these notions, there is really nothing new under the sun and vapour is not the first (nor will it be the last) to explore these ideas. For instance, even those who love vapour can acknowledge _Blade Runner_ as a primary influence and that film came out in 1982 (it was released less than three months before my entry on earth). Temporal disassociation did not need a post-modern philosopher to talk about "spectre hauntings" ... look at T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Hell, you can even make a case that we are still continuing the a e s t h e t i c s of late 17th/early 18th-century rococco, where it was about indulging in fantasy and pleasure ... to the point where it is hard for individuals to distinguish between the two. So basically, I hear this as no different than any other music I have heard that generates these effects or conveys these ideas. But all the same, good music is still good music, no matter what label you choose to apply to it.
P.S. I absolutely love 2814's Rain Temple. While I really enjoyed what Zimmer and Wallfisch did, 2814 could have provided a powerful score to Blade Runner 2049. It also reminded me a lot of Future Sound of London and _Dead Cities_ in particular (and that was twenty years before this album).
The aesthetics of vaporwave is both a parody of 90s nostalgia and consumerism, yet it's presented entirely tongue in cheek to the point where it is definitely a meme. So to answer your question, I think it's both valid criticism and a meme. Although I do think the argumentation of the meme vs. criticism is overstated and unfortunately overshadows the music itself, which I think is based more on capturing an atmosphere than it does in creating a discussion on capitalism and consumerism.
what about certain artists in the scene that create 'vaporwave' music that isn't tongue in cheek? Artists like 2814, I don't think they're making music specifically in mind to make an ironic comment, rather they like the aesthetics and sonic styles of the movement
deep cuts I was trying to clarify that in the last sentence that the consumerism angle does overshadow artists within the genre that are simply trying to capture an atmosphere, which I think 2814 does very very well.
I think an element that shoud be taken in consideration is that maybe some of those artists don't know how to make money out of it and then comes the feeling of depression and nostalgy from childhood when all the things were great and easy
Is it fair to compare the current Lo-Fi Hip-Hop movement to vapourware considering its considerable rise in popularity over the last few years and that for some people its again a movement reflecting on the past with its movie references but also again with its "aesthetic"? But then in a similar way its also seen as a meme because of its internet status? Just want to hear opinions on this because I'm personally curious to see where this scene will go in the future and if it will branch off into more scenes or something else?
I like that vaporwave is so unique to every other genre. When I hear certain artists and talk in the discord about what genre they are, you can have a legit discussion/argument over what genre something is. Vaporwave is so unique and polarizing that the second you hear it you know, "oh, yeah that's vaporwave."
Vaporwave is a mimetic form of art, but not as in a sound is being mimed, but a feeling: the longing for nothing. I'll explain myself: In an age where information (let's remember that information != knowledge, it'll be important later) is rapidly changing places and it's difficult to process due to the sheer amount of it, making it basically white noise, and most information in media outlets being either extremely superficial and substance-less (I.e. vapid) or just traumatic and mind-numbing, vaporwave just asks and craves for nothing. No war, no mind, no drama, no hate, no love, no NOW. It is definitely along Lo-Fi Hip Hop in that.
I think that it's hard to distinguish between the side of vaporwave associated with memes and the side that could be viewed as just musical genre/subgenre/etc. I think that the main reason for this is that vaporwave seemed to develop (or at least get some real traction in terms of popularity): 1. mostly online and 2. in a time where memes are really prevalent in online communities. A contrast to this might be Radiohead. There are plenty of memes about Radiohead and Thom Yorke floating around, but Radiohead was around before memes (in the online community sense), yet has a fan base outside of online communities. So although there are memes about Radiohead, it doesn't have this intrinsic association with memes like vaporwave does. I haven't really put a lot of thought into this outside of what I've written here, and I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert on either vaporwave or Radiohead. Let me know what you think.
Academic storm in a teacup with carefully situated jargons: discussing humanities like new musicologists once did without proper analysis just to scratch the surface of a musical topic which is based around the social or certain political ('capitalist') aspects of a piece of art -or other sorts of- music by bringing in social and gender studies, racial and historical disciplines in combination with scientific and other, technically absolutely non-relevant knowledge. It surely opens new academic doors to discussions of the semantics and meanings and other pointless aspects of the discussed area by giving music scholars and other wish-to-be-creators endless opportunities to pretentiously write books and dissertations and articles on things which are absolutely pointless even to discuss just to be able to talk about something -by referring to and quoting other people doing exactly the same- whose discussion will not even be influential or useful in any way other than it being "interesting".
How can Burial be considered as hauntological? I get how BoC would, and Basinski, partially. Not sure about Burial. I'd just like to hear an opinion as I'm a big fan of him. P.S. As always, great video Oliver
here's a direct passage from one of Fisher's articles - *The problem is that the electronic sounds produced between the 1950s and the 1990s remain sonic signifiers of the future-and, as such, they are signs that the anticipated future never actually arrived. The music of Burial and of Ghost Box is haunted by a paradoxical nostalgia: a nostalgia for all the futures that were lost when culture’s modernist impetus succumbed to the terminal temporality of postmodernity.* Fisher suggests that many of the production techniques used by Burial have an appreciation for the physical, yet his whole sound is very contemporary, and melancholic at that. Therefore there's a disconnect between different time periods, musical techniques etc. Plus his music kinda sounds really haunted too!
Zero Books... great publisher, I've seen a lot of interesting works that blur non-fiction and fiction on there. Some other theorists that might be useful when looking at vaporwave: Fredric Jameson (His book on postmodernism and late capitalism in particular) and Jean Francois Lyotard.
Definitely - Lyotard and Jameson would be great theorists to look at if anyone wants to delve further into these ideas. Also Michel Foucault's Technologies of the Self would be good too!
Hmmmm....You could argue that all electronic music is a nostalgia of the future, certainly if you look at a Kraftwerk photo's recall the 30 and 40s, so vapourwave is nothing new. Personally the glitch movement is a far more interesting idelogically, as it originally took those all too human failings, represented by the pops , crackles and the sound og say cd skipping, and creating something engaging. Check out artists like Pole, Oval, Alva Noto or SND for examples of this type of music.
I don't see where it is stated that the idea of nostalgia and lost futures is new. Hell, BOC was doing that with 70s stuff. But it does not matter if it is new or not. What matters is if it is great! And vw is great.
Ive never understood why Blank Banshee exploded in fame when it is counter to the purpose of vaporwave. You could argue it is vaportrap but part of the cool thing about vaporwave is that the artists are anonymous and anti-consumerism. So I see some of the vaporwave audience really ignorant to the purpose of the music they are listening to. Good video, Oliver!
That's a good point, there are definitely styles within the vaporwave umbrella that don't completely conform to the ideas and concepts we've been talking about - Blank Banshee being a good example.
Every sub genre is "the same perpetual loop" of re using similar sounds. think "alt rap" like lil uzi ad designer are putting out its all the same shit in the grand scheme of the idea, they use the same words they rap about the same stuff the production has a similar style to it. It doesn't make it a meme. 80's hair band music, pop music, pop country, its all basically re uses of the same thing that doesn't make it a meme... I understand they are putting there own twists on one thing but thats what genres are in general...
For what I understand, vaporwave is less than a decade old, and it's too early to judge how much self-sufficiency and cultural value it has - we just have to watch how it will progress musically (or will it?) for like another decade. I mean, back in early 60's who would consider rock music anything more than just...you know, youngsters with no musical education trying to parody blues and R'n'B which that generation was sort of growing on? A meme? Yes. 'cause everything new, funny and unusual in all spheres of life including art becomes a meme nowadays. Will it grow of just being a meme? As I said, we just have to wait and see. Hauntological Movement? It's hard for me to judge because I don't really get what exactly you are referring to as hauntology. I mean I do enjoy BoC or some Caretaker, but I don't really see this kind of implication behind the music, maybe it's too much a British thing and I'm not from Britain. As for me (and your point kind of touches it) vaporwave is more like a new tiny artistic decadent movement, not as global and shocking as that in late 19th century of course, but more like it's the punk of our days. A weird kid of DIY-culture or something.
this comment describes the heart of Vaporwave whereas the video mostly discusses its head. there was a technological shift when this music first happened, that enabled any individual with a laptop and the interest to make any damn noise they wanted to and share it with the world. you take something old and archaic and unused and forgotten about, then mix it with new technological abilities and distribution platforms, and out pops something original and familiar simultaneously. Vaporwave. similar to fifites RocknRoll and seventies Punk in this fashion.
Totally get your point, it probably is a little too early for us to properly define vaporwave's importance culturally, but that doesn't mean it's not worth discussing. I like what you said about it being like a DIY movement - it is a kind of liberated punk style, globalised because of the internet.
It already has a lot of value, just look at all the videos about it, and all the music produced. All that attention by all that people. That is value. It has had so much value already that there was the infamous redesigning of MTV's image to reflect on vw. Or how Tumblr created Tumblr.TV just to also reflect on vw's influence.
I feel like using "hypnagogic" as a descriptor of vaporwave is sort of disrespectful towards hypnagogic pop which is what spawned vaporwave (along with chopped & screwed), and is the more legitimate genre that in many ways pioneered the idea of hauntological music and simulacra-esque rerenderings of past cultural periods in music.
I would argue that it's not really disrespectful to call it hypnogogic as the term refers to a psychological state, rather than anything specifically tethered to music. I get where you're coming from w/r/t/ hypnogogic pop as perhaps a more 'fomed' genre - I wouldn't say more or less legitimate though
yeah ur right disrespectful is probably the wrong word, maybe it's more that bringing up the word hypnagogic evokes the inclination to bring up the genre as a predecessor to VW.
I'd suggest either Far Side Virtual by James Ferraro which is considered a precursor to Vaporwave or the album everybody knows about, Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus
Can Vaporwave it be a critique of capitalism if the artist behind it is making it for the purpose of humor or at least unaware that the movement behind the art they make entails that? It's pretty amazing to think vaporwave is one of the first musical movements to have no place of origin in the physical world and to not die in a pool of its own Irony Lmao
Aren't people in every age convinced that they are presiding over the funeral of the future? Every past age thought that you can't get more future than they were. But guess what? We're their future. And someone else will occupy our future. If pressed, I think most hauntology theorists would acknowledge that the futurelessness they talk about is more of a mood than an actual state of affairs. It's essentially the same as what people used to call the "fin de siecle," or the decadent mood.
We really need a fruit or vegetable to refer to deep cuts as. It's irritating writing deep cuts over and over. Something like melon is much more succinct and satisfying. Any ideas?
Maybe I'm cynical but I think to wax postmodernism about Vaporwave is to play into the the collective joke that is like a self fulfilling prophecy. It's people that didn't experience the era they are eluding to which to me is a simple response to millennials not feeling like their own identity isn't as appealing as the idealistic 80\90s motif they've imagined. I lived through part of the nineties as a teenager and let me tell you it was boring as shit. Anyway what do you think?
As a big vaporwave fan, I'm curious as to why you don't like it. Maybe there are some artists that you'll enjoy that you haven't found because you can't get past the surface stuff.
@@lofy1263 I just dont like how people can just make entire records in an afternoon and how effortless it seems. I just personally think it shows no artistic merit.
I feel as if Vaporwave as a "Genre" was necessary for understanding the true power of the internet age. Vaporwaves many influences in 90's culture is mostly down to escapism, living in that age using the samples in music to reflect that to younger, "Born in the wrong generation" listeners. This creates a huge "Meme" community and while some view this with complete distaste and leave it be, I think that peeling away at the surface of vaporwave reveals a truly amazing, wonderful, creative and diverse genre. Being an entirely internet based genre allowed for a level playing field for everyone to express ideas through this strange style. Albums like "猫 シ Corp: News At 11" with haunting jazz music and samples from TV news stations just moments before 9/11 gives us a unique, personal perspective into a time long gone and a time not even remembered by younger listeners (Such as myself) "2814: Birth of a new day" presented an amazing ambient soundtrack to a world far from home, like you're experiencing an entire movie inside your own head (I actually own the CD to this album) Blank Banshees trio album series presented these 90's samples and aesthetics into trap music which strangely works well. Vaporwave is a weapon, used by all to blast out ideas and emotions, completely alien to modern day music conventions. That's why it's amazing.
I love what you wrote about as an internet-based genre it gave everyone a level playing field - this is why are is such a diversity of styles within vaporwave's umbrella term, but also the reason ideas have been spread and repeated by people to the point that the repetition obfuscates the creative stuff. As an aside you should join our listening party on the discord for 2814, sounds like you'd have a lot to talk about :)
i feel like it's also largely a platform through which to make socio-political commentary as much as it is a genre, so it's also a weapon in that sense
100% agree. Thank you for putting it into words so wonderfully. I'm sure you used some time writing that comment that you could have used elsewhere, so thanks for taking the time to write it.
Vaporwave is building new things out of the detritus of the past. it's sort of like pop art in that regard. personally, I love it. but I also grew up in the 80s and 90s so perhaps my love for the genre has more to do with nostalgia.
Love the video. Completely aboard especially the hauntology. One thing that you didn't explicitely covered is vaoprwave and its a e s t h e t i c s' relation to irony. It is "bad", almost objectively bad, but at the same time good for some sort of ironic reasons. Just like some retro fashion is ugly, almost universally agreed that it's ugly. So you like it "ironically", but then start to actually like it unironically. People (who don't understand it) have asked me if vaporwave is ironic and I have to answer that it's both ironic and unironic, or neither. It sort of transcends irony and good taste in a way that post modernist pop/trash art never was able to do. And if you look like vaporwave's obvious influences on other genres, like for example house music in lo-fi house, you see in that genre how the same ideas about some sort of irony and play with what in a pretty stuck up genre is, or was, considered too cheesy or uncool samples or references in a way is a resistance to the older "good taste" house music where everything used to be so SERIOUS. Just look at the ironic DJ/producer names like DJ Seinfeld, DJ Playstation or DJ Windows XP, the choice of samples of emotional 80s power balads or interviews with people like 90s movie star Winona Ryder, or the way the music used to be distributed as limited edition cassettes (instead of the serious vinyl), releasing on DIY bandcamp labels instead of the big serious online DJ stores etc etc. Sorry for the long and rambling sentences, but I hope you get my point.
I like vaporwave and all of it's sister genres because it represents a style that no other music really does. It embraces imperfections in recordings and conventionally unattractive visuals (that I've learned to adore) and sounds that just aren't found elsewhere.
I believe that the Vaporwave movement is against the Capitalist society of consumerism, not about post-modernism or Late Stage of Capitalism (what I don't think that's really correct and what created the conception of Vaporwave as a meme). But I consider that have a misunderstanding between the Vaporwave musicians that have make these two conceptions inside the movement possible to exist, considering the first one right and realistic and the second wrong and idealistic, also memetic (in the greek sense of the term). The core process of Vaporwave movement is the fight against copyrights using pop culture songs from middle 1970's, 80's and 90's and the demonstration that the development of capitalist societies and the ideology of consumerism have failed in a lot of aspects. The conclusion is that we have to do something about this. Something that needs to be superior to the capitalist society of consumerism and a development of a new kind of music with the instruments that what we have nowdays to do this. In other terms, the Vaporwave movement is about forming a new kind of society and the best genres of music that we can do after the Vaporwave.
so you see Vaporwave as a call for a kind of utopia Fabricio? I find the idea interesting, I would say though with regard to vaporwave not being about post-modernism I would agree, and writers like Fisher aren't really saying that. What they're saying is that the parameters that allowed the kind of movement like Vaporwave to be born is because we've existed in a post-modern age of art and culture
Interesting Oliver, in #serious-music-discussion at Discord the community had a big chat about this. Yes, I actually thinks that the Vaporwave movement started with Vektroid's Floral Shoppe not only as an "aesthetic-meme" movement of nostalgia and so on, but it also came with a political proposal against copyrights, consumerism, pop music... A form to evidence the capitalist system itself. Since that we have piracy, downloads and other ways to cheat the copyrights laws, now, with Vaporwave, we have a new way to cheat the capitalist consumerism system slowing down nostalgic pop music and this makes more deeps exposure of the fails of our system. Have some discussions about this at Reddit, articles and other sites that discusses precisely these questions.
I like that copyright political proposal idea. It could also mean that the fact that music had copyright and ownership for so long (during the 80`s) and it's presence is growing day to day, vaporwave Is a statement about the impossibility to own the past, as if the past has already been claimed by record companies and held its meaning. So now its up to repurposing to rebuild new identity out of one that's been held by the cultural market.
>>> "The core process of Vaporwave movement is the fight against copyrights using pop culture songs from middle 1970's, 80's and 90's and the demonstration that the development of capitalist societies and the ideology of consumerism have failed in a lot of aspects." Wow! Yes. You got it man.
>>> vaporwave Is a statement about the impossibility to own the past Yes, in fact, if we analyze, almost anything has entered the Public Domain for a looooong time. Yes the past has already been claimed by corporate interest and vw is repurposing all that. The VHS effect works great to defeat TH-cam's Content ID system (imposed to YT by the copyright industry).
Great video! The interesting thing about vaporwave is how many people how vast and expansive the genre is. There are so many different sub-genres of vaporwave to where you can lost in the world or narrative that the album creates. Take fuji grid tv,which is one of many pseudonyms for Vektroid. THat album is literally just old japanese commercials looped for about 20 minutes. It seems silly, but whenever I listen to it, I feel like I'm experiencing the life of a japanese businessman who is just coming from work and just fell asleep with the TV on. Another one is WosX Brazil World Cup 2034 and its narrative of a post apocalyptic World Games. It's great and I don't any other genre could convey such feelings. There are definitely meme-y parts of it, but I think the genre as a whole has way more to offer than just being a meme.
I really like the fact that it's very varied in what you want to do with it, you can just load tons of samples onto eachother like Saint Pepsi or make something with almost no samples and very trap influenced like Blank Banshee
Great point, there are a lot of facets to vaporwave that don't perhaps get as much attention as the more obvious choices, perhaps because they don't use those obvious vaporwave visuals/aesthetics as much as others do.
We'll be doing a listening party on the Deep Cuts Discord for 2814 - Birth of a New Day (some might say a vaporwave 'classic') Tuesday 15th, 22:00BST. Follow this link! discord.gg/UrEPuw9
deep cuts This album blew my mind. A stellar ambient record. I hope you and the rest of the listening party enjoy it. Would love to join in but I'll be busy sadly.
shame you can't join!
fantastic album! Perfect for studying
Kyashi San It may literally just be because of Floral Shoppe, which is what many people know as “the” vaporwave album, having that Roman bust on its cover
The piano piece from 2184’s mentioned album’s 1st track is identical to Commix’s - Painted Smile (amazing track)
RIP Mark Fisher
Vaporwave is one of the BEST THINGS to happen to the music industry. It's so completely incompatible with the industry, it's incredible that it got so popular. It shows that the general populous has the capability to look past technical ability and experience music and art for what it is. It shows that people appreciate well executed ideas no matter how the idea came to be. Music listeners are finally catching up with contemporary art enthusiasts.
Also, the popularity of Vaporwave is proof that the world is ready to abolish copyright law, or at least heavily reform it. Most Vaporwave is blatantly infringing, but wholly transformative nonetheless. Art movements like this will get people on the side of getting rid of the concept of intellectual property.
Wow we're entering a whole new debate here with regards to intellectual property. If artists aren't able to protect their work in the future, how can they make a living off of it? If everyone is able to take a concept or work, add effects and package it as something new, surely that has more negative implications for the industry than positive ones?
There are a lot of different ways to make money besides just putting walls around your music, not just limited to your fans' generosity.
I'm writing a video essay about this where I'll go in to more detail, I'll send it to you when I'm done.
Please do mate, interested to watch it!
"Also, the popularity of Vaporwave is proof that the world is ready to abolish copyright law"
This is it. +10
>>> "Most Vaporwave is blatantly infringing, but wholly transformative nonetheless. "
You really know what you are talking about man. Right on the spot.
The phrase "We are haunted by a future that never came to pass" reminded me of William Gibson's short story Gernsback Continuum (coincidentally, released in the 80's), where a photographer sees phantasmagoric images of the future as envisioned in the early 20th century (giving origin to the name Raygun Gothic). It's worth checking out.
Ah I love Gibson, some of his concepts definitely fit into these ideas of nostalgia and temporal dislocation. I've never read that short story, thanks for the recc!
The future isn't what it used to be.
Underrated comment
The Future is a reimagined Present and therefore unknowable. What we don't know can't be cancelled. The future does not exist.
I think it has to be addressed that though some vaporwave artist do criticize consumerism, I think overtime it became and earnest longing for a world were there was not war, there was not economic crisis, there was hope.
And I think this goes hand on hand with the rise of gen Z, a generation that doesn't know a world without terrorism or the risk of total destruction or information overload thanks to the internet (a big contrast with the milennials that did know a world like that and it was taken from them)
I think the album News at 11 captures this (ofter not discussed) side of vaporwave
It's really like graffiti but for the internet. That's at least what I gather. The ease of production and the similar aesthetics of the group are a lot like how stencil graffiti works.
Vaporwave is not a meme, it's fuckin awesome music!
As a person who's 36, you young cats have no idea how amazing vaporware actually is. You may know 20 years from now when somebody turns the music you like into something else.
I am 36too! and you're comment is odd have you not heard a mash up or experienced hiphop's deep love of sampling? but, vaporwave essentially culturejams on a future we were P R O M I S E D malls that never closed and smooth jazz bringing near bliss.
And the political, sociological and economic implications of ignoring copyright.
I've got another 10 years on you brother and I've become completely hypnotised by it
Vaporwave is incredible. It's evolved into something so much more.
I'm 34, and for me vaporwave is that sun creeping at the corners of my eyes as am I enjoying a soft drink outside the local mall. Listening to the wind, the indistinct sounds of shoppers, and commercial jingles played in the mall mixing together to create a moment seemingly disconnected from time. A short exhale before life must continue.
I also think that hauntological listening breaches the gap between morphology, how a thing is structured, and interface, how we internalize a thing. It's not how genres are taxonomically different, it's how we internalize things like trap music and shoegaze. They are both haunting.
I started making vaporwave as a form of mental escapism. My vaporwave albums were some of the first releases I'd ever put out that I feel like people really resonated with. Back in 2014-15 i was really into the vibe the genre gave me, and i really got "lost in the sauce" for a while there haha. I'd listen to Computer Death/Decay/Afterlife by Infinity Frequencies almost every night as i was falling asleep and i loved how it reminded me of vague, ephemeral portions of my childhood, like half-memories of things that may or may not have actually happened.
The online community back then was awesome too! Luxury Elite would host vaporwave livestreams, VW twitter was off the hook, and everyone generally just really loved the music and community. Unfortunately, drama and burned bridges kind of ruined the magic of the social experience in the genre, and the magic of the music itself has somewhat burned out for me as well. I still absolutely still love this genre to death though and i'm really glad i got to experience it while it was still somewhat in it's prime.
Hey man, I know I'm 2 years late, but I just checked out your channel and music. Really liked the first one, loved how you completely captured the essence of vaporwave while, at the same time, adding your personal touch (I personally felt it on the beat you made).
Just wanted to say that you earned yourself a subscriber. I really love people adding more content to this almost dead (not really) community. Keep doing what you do, and in case you don't enjoy doing it anymore, that's okay too. The pieces you already created are awesome (specially the videos for your songs, they're fantastic).
Sorry for the long text. Good luck and carry on!
glad to see mp3neptune in this comment section! Love your music, found some strong hauntological vibes in it especially in empty faces in digital faces, keep it up!
Discovering Vaporwave was one of the best things to happen in my life. I'm in my own world when listening to it. Not many people are able to understand this.
𝓪 𝓮 𝓼 𝓽 𝓱 𝓮 𝓽 𝓲 𝓬
Flug!! Fancy seeing you here
Small movement transformed to large meme
I find the commentary Vaporwave brings interesting, even if the music isn't really enjoyable IMO. It reminds me a lot of what Warhol did with his commodified and kitschy style, wherein he bridged gaps between lowbrow and highbrow art along with blurring art with pop culture and materialism. The homogenous and vapid focuses on "A E S T H E T I C" when creating it remind me as well of Warhol's own methods of creating, using cheap printing and an almost assembly-line approach to commodify art. IDK, I might be pretentious though
I think that's become the philosophy, kinda just to meme on consumerism by using the same tactics.
Warhol and Lichtenstein were the originators of Pop eating itself. You are BANG! ON!
@@dive_in_me226 and the philosophy of it in of itself is inescapable, even if one were to just appreciate the vaporwave aesthetic for just the sake of aesthetic, you're essentially perusing and indulging in a dream of something better
I'm with you on vaporwave being "both" a meme and a genre worth intellectualizing. It works on many layers, both ironically and unironically fetishizing the past, and that's kind of the whole point.
The existence of vaporwave makes me curious to what kind of genres will the internet give birth to. To me, vaporwave communicates our relationship with music and how we consume it, given its atmospheric nature and the fact that most people these days listen to music while doing something else.
I like that as a way of thinking about the movement, and it would be crazy to not take the internet into mind when discussing vaporwave for sure.
I think one branch can be younger and younger people making great & unique stuff. I mean, check out all those type beats, vapors and youtubepoops made by really young people, sometimes 16 or even 15 and more. With technology and movements like vw making it easier and easier for more people to partake in, I think it will just be a matter of time before young kids 12, 11 and more will be doing crazy stuff that many will appreciate.
Individual vaporwave albums can be either pro capitalism or anti capitalist. However, the way I see it, is that vaporwave is a reflection of late stage capitalism. The reason so much of the aesthetic of vaporwave revolves around consumerist aesthetics of the past is an extension of capitalism. It recalls a time when the system actually appeared to be working for most people, namely the 80s and 90s US and Japan. Both countries were experiencing economic booms at the time.
Those days have long since passed, and so many of us feel nostalgia for a time when the system was still believed to be working. Consumerism really became a big aspect of the human experience during those decades, and so now it's only inevitable that a lot of nostalgia for those times will be linked to the media and pop culture of that time.
So with that in mind, vaporwave can only exist as it does because of the social conditions that were prominent when it became a movement. And the current social conditions are late stage capitalism. Had vaporwave been made in a different context, it might have adopted different aesthetics. The aesthetics it employs are the result of the current cultural context.
This ultimately means that how one views vaporwave as a whole is ultimately dependent on their relationship to capitalism. Someone that has a mostly positive experience with capitalism might see most vaporwave as a way to relive certain memories, and think it's just chill music, while someone who is anti capitalist will view it more as a commentary on capitalist alienation and a critique of consumerist culture. But of course, there is some overlap. I'm anti capitalist, but the vaporwave I make is mostly about making sensual or relaxing atmospheres. It's impossible to label the whole genre as one or the other, because an individual artists intent in making vaporwave can still be important.
Thank God you actually broke this all down for people. It's all happening so fast, things get meta so fast, layers of meaning start gettings tacked up so quickly that we can't even keep up with all the inside jokes and self referential meanings...It's also very mesmerizing because the nostalgia just opens up a whole world of lost cultural artifacts that are now coming back because someone finds an old 80s VHS tape , uploads it and then BOOM we have a hot youtiube video al of the sudden!
Your patience and depth of research with this genre is pretty admirable. i generally dismiss it as a meme, although I can't say I haven't enjoyed a few tracked that labels themselves vaporwave.
We need another Deep Cuts essential!
My view is art can't push forward so we take 1 step back and take 2 forward by looking back we've made something new. Plus modern main stream is at the end of its tether
Awesome video as always man :) I liked the idea of hauntology, it seems to sum up what I've been thinking about in terms of the way nostalgia has been marketed and sold to people who weren't around to experience the thing they're nostalgic for, and the idea of vaporwave as existing in an atemporal space almost rejecting that marketing by perverting it. I also think in addition to this hauntological viewpoint, vaporware might be thriving as a cultural critique because the internet has allowed for a sort of simultaneous nostalgia; there's easy access to past media and cultural capital to be gained from having experienced and being well-versed in it (i.e. the entire point of Ready Player One). The critique might come from the fact that a lot of people are claiming past culture as authentically theirs, even though they are divorced from that culture by time, and vaporwave is sending up this idea of internet nostalgia as authentic nostalgia by removing it from a sense of time and perverting the 'warm fuzzies' by way of lamentation and disposability. That is to say it reveals this simultaneous internet nostalgia as disposable and its existence as lamentable because it isn't authentic and deigning it as so is a sad joke. At least that's what I see maybe feeding into some of the comical juxtapositions within the vaporwave aesthetic. Maybe vaporwave's sadness is in that the past itself is a meme?
I like this a lot - of course vaporwave and this idea of hauntology has to be considered alongside the channel which birthed it: the internet. This is what I love so much about the concept of hauntology, the fact that an entire generation of people can find nostalgia and melancholia by fetishising a period the majority of them will have had no experience of. It makes you wonder what else the internet and easy access to information might give us in the future in terms of art/music movements.
Thanks for the reply man! I'll need to read that book you mentioned for sure to get more of an understanding of this concept, appreciate what you do:)
Nice analysis. Would be good to see one on Retro Wave. been listening and liking some of that recently.
I love vaporwave its like the music i hear in my dreams i have a lot of dreams about my early childhood
I grew up during the transtion from the 20th century into the 21th and even as a child i hated the derection music was heading to by the time i was a teenager i did not like music at all
listeing to vaporwave is relaxing it makes me feel like im safe at home with unlimited time but then i realise im a adult in the year 2019 and the world is changing for better or worse and nothing will last forever sorry for any grammar mistakes my phone is acting strange.
I guess both statements hold some truth, as you suggested.
Honestly though it feels hard to oversee in this time, with the rapid frequency of releases on the web and the anonymity involved in the vaporwave scene.
I think especially the tendency to anonymity in the "genre" or scene, however people want to call it, can be a very liberating factor in terms of trying out new ideas or seperating different "aesthetics", "atmospheres", .. the image of the music .. into different sideprojects.
On the other hand it disguises the artist, his workflow and you never really know who may be behind certain projects, nor how much effort he put into his music. I can imagine some people making quite some profit of this anonymity by selling a lot of easy to make vaporwave under different names, and this is where the anti-capitalism attitude can bite it's own tail.
I believe there lies a great joy in just toying around with your favourite songs and/or samples in software like ableton, stretching and warping the last inch of humanity out of it and make it sound like it comes from your personal mind. Your very own favourite nostalgia-drenched sounds reimagined and contextualized for your own joy and sense of experimentation. It's too easy though, to just take an old 80s song slow it down, put a lot of processing on it - just enough it makes the original barely recognizable anymore - and call it a vaporwave song. Anyways, every genre that got hyped inspired a lot of uninspired copycats - Vaporwave is just way easier to create and it hit a tech-savy generation, so the extent of this may be greater than usual.
Vaporwave (depending on how deep and experimental you go for..) also breaks a lot with music theory, which is an ongoing trend in every new genre arising, until many successful artist coming from new genres will eventually learn it and/or these new techniques kind of become a theory and get blueprints, like you see it now a days with all the "(Deep) House Chords", "808s" and whatever mainstream music assimilated from the fresh weeds of the 90s and 00s the "underground"/new music..
It's hard to tell exactly what is so mesmerizing about Vaporwave. It may be just because it originated in the Internet, it may be much more. I appreciate that it favours a more adventurous way of working with audio and pre-existing material, experimentation and especially that it favours an electronic sound, which isn't produced for clubs. New seeds of musicians, who break with traditional ideas.
Thinking of the very lo-fi aesthetique Vaporwave carries along with it, maybe it can be compared to early 90s Grunge and their build up of antipathy toward big 80s sounds, reverbs, keyboards etc.
Vaporwave may not break with the idea of a big arrangement and many tracks, but most of it clearly has a lo-fi sound and a sense of anarchy towards guidelines production and music theory...
There were more thoughts I wanted to convey, it's difficult topic to finde the right words for, but I enjoyed you bringing Vaporwave up, even if I haven't heard any the last months. :)
Zero Books published a book called Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts by Grafton Tanner. I haven't been able to pick it up jet, but I thought it would be worth mentioning, since Oliver mentioned Mark Fisher, whose works were also published by Zero Books.
Yeah I think Tanner actually bases a lot of his writing there on Fisher's orginial ideas. I haven't read it but it looks like something worth checking out! Zero Books put out some great stuff
“Babbling Corpse” is one of my favorite books. It is very enlightening on the concept of ”vaporwave” and also extremely fascinating to read. I definitely recommend it.
Yes, that one and the book Infinite Music by Adam Harper. Harper has also some great discussions about vw here in yt.
Hey I loved this video and think you should definitely do more videos about music and critical theory and philosophy! I find this stuff fascinating!
Thanks Duncan! Well I have the discussions as a series but I'll definitely do more philosophy/music videos in the future if people want to see them :)
deep cuts Thanks for replying!
as a vaporwave artist, I don't really see vaporwave as a repetitive piece of art. I try to include different (obscure) genres into my music that aren't usually used in vaporwave. I see it more as a spectral and expressive form of plunderphonics.
Internet age muzak.
For me getting into vaporwave got me into vinyls, which got me into analog formats, which got me into reel to reel. For vaporwave started out as great sesh music, but over time shifted to a straight up love. Futurefunk is actually what first got me into it, futurefunk is like a 80's disco that never happened plus it features city pop, a genre I already adore. From there I got into the vapor essentials and quickly become obsessed with breaking my wallet on vapor vinyls.
Its all in your head
Jonathan Fay *hands
Especially the profit claims made by the copyright industry.
I think the argument of vaporwave being a meme depends on who's making the music, a lot of people are just doing it because its "cool" and some of them don't really know how to actually have their own ideas, they're just copying others.
despite the copying tho i feel that looking back at it ten years from now the sheer amount of content and the sameness of it all will gel well with some of the themes of the genre.
That is the thing, back in the 80s everyone in the new wave scene was copying each other too. Punk scene? same thing. Hiphop? Rock? etc etc etc. Same thing.
This is an amazing video mate, absolutely loved it. Definitely going to check out Fisher's stuff! Never considered Vaporwave in the way you discussed it here
MrCraze45 Fisher was a genius, you won't regret it. Thanks for the kind words!
I've noticed how vapourwave is similar to the 2010s dubstep movement. Obviously they don't sound alike but both genres have repetitions in the songs (dubstep having bass drops and vapourwave having the slowed down 70s music) and both ending up being memes instead of actual genres.
Yeah dubstep is similar in that the same sonic tropes (heavy bass, build ups to big 'drops') just get endlessly repeated ad nauseam , to the point where it's difficult to find merit in any of it
Liking the video before watching it
what if you don't like the content?
always do
Long live vaporwave.
The most beautiful mood music in the Galaxy
I recommend Deaths Dynamic Shroud. So next level and emotional
Thank you for this vid!
Brace yourself ... this may be a long one ...
I came into the vaporwave (or just vapour as Wolf suggested should be used as it is more encompassing) relatively late consciously speaking. I was aware of things like Saint Pepsi's "Enjoy Yourself" and the use of Roman busts and the like. But it wasn't until late 2017 when I did a somewhat crash course (and still unearthing things here and there) including the classic Macintosh Plus's _Floral Shoppe_ and newer classics from 2814. My Bandcamp collection has grown quite a bit because of this.
And yet, it was something that was not completely unfamiliar. For starters, I was born in the early 1980s and had a certain familiarity with that "80s/90s world": the colour schemes, the artificial sounds, technology as the future, etc. I am also intrigued by experimental music in general (I'm one of the few people who can say my favourite Beatles track is "Revolution 9") as well as electronic music at large (The Darkest Future's _Untitled_ [originally _Floral Shoppe 2_] is not out of line with Autechre). While I haven't yet heard _EccoJams Vol. 1_, one of my favourite 2013 music encounters was Oneohtrix Point Never's _R Plus Seven_. And finally, I know melancholia and temporal disassociation in music too well. One of my favourite recent artists is Leyland Kirby (and by extension, The Caretaker, The Stranger, V/Vm), who also is strongly associated with "hauntological music" (hell, Mark Fisher praised him in his writings and, at the end of last year, Kirby paid musical tribute to him whilst in Barcelona).
On this last one, I think the appeal is that the music does often paint a world that seems very familiar, comforting and, perhaps, still promising. It is basically world building through music. While I will give credit where credit is due and say that vapour does help to propagate more widely these notions, there is really nothing new under the sun and vapour is not the first (nor will it be the last) to explore these ideas. For instance, even those who love vapour can acknowledge _Blade Runner_ as a primary influence and that film came out in 1982 (it was released less than three months before my entry on earth). Temporal disassociation did not need a post-modern philosopher to talk about "spectre hauntings" ... look at T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Hell, you can even make a case that we are still continuing the a e s t h e t i c s of late 17th/early 18th-century rococco, where it was about indulging in fantasy and pleasure ... to the point where it is hard for individuals to distinguish between the two.
So basically, I hear this as no different than any other music I have heard that generates these effects or conveys these ideas. But all the same, good music is still good music, no matter what label you choose to apply to it.
P.S. I absolutely love 2814's Rain Temple. While I really enjoyed what Zimmer and Wallfisch did, 2814 could have provided a powerful score to Blade Runner 2049. It also reminded me a lot of Future Sound of London and _Dead Cities_ in particular (and that was twenty years before this album).
P.P.S. I am making music under the name キラキラ with the intention of being part of the vapour scene.
The aesthetics of vaporwave is both a parody of 90s nostalgia and consumerism, yet it's presented entirely tongue in cheek to the point where it is definitely a meme. So to answer your question, I think it's both valid criticism and a meme. Although I do think the argumentation of the meme vs. criticism is overstated and unfortunately overshadows the music itself, which I think is based more on capturing an atmosphere than it does in creating a discussion on capitalism and consumerism.
what about certain artists in the scene that create 'vaporwave' music that isn't tongue in cheek? Artists like 2814, I don't think they're making music specifically in mind to make an ironic comment, rather they like the aesthetics and sonic styles of the movement
deep cuts I was trying to clarify that in the last sentence that the consumerism angle does overshadow artists within the genre that are simply trying to capture an atmosphere, which I think 2814 does very very well.
I think an element that shoud be taken in consideration is that maybe some of those artists don't know how to make money out of it and then comes the feeling of depression and nostalgy from childhood when all the things were great and easy
A lil of both
holy shit
9:25 - 9:42
Deep cuts check out Laurel Halo, Space Afrika, and mono e aware PAN compilation
vaporwave is the best/most important thing to happen to music in this decade, if you know where to look
Agree. Not just because of the great music but also because of the political, sociological and economic implications of ignoring copyright.
Is it fair to compare the current Lo-Fi Hip-Hop movement to vapourware considering its considerable rise in popularity over the last few years and that for some people its again a movement reflecting on the past with its movie references but also again with its "aesthetic"? But then in a similar way its also seen as a meme because of its internet status? Just want to hear opinions on this because I'm personally curious to see where this scene will go in the future and if it will branch off into more scenes or something else?
I like that vaporwave is so unique to every other genre. When I hear certain artists and talk in the discord about what genre they are, you can have a legit discussion/argument over what genre something is. Vaporwave is so unique and polarizing that the second you hear it you know, "oh, yeah that's vaporwave."
Vaporwave is a mimetic form of art, but not as in a sound is being mimed, but a feeling: the longing for nothing.
I'll explain myself:
In an age where information (let's remember that information != knowledge, it'll be important later) is rapidly changing places and it's difficult to process due to the sheer amount of it, making it basically white noise, and most information in media outlets being either extremely superficial and substance-less (I.e. vapid) or just traumatic and mind-numbing, vaporwave just asks and craves for nothing. No war, no mind, no drama, no hate, no love, no NOW. It is definitely along Lo-Fi Hip Hop in that.
Speaking of hauntology, please check out SOVIETWAVE
Peter Gabriel/genesis guide.
I think that it's hard to distinguish between the side of vaporwave associated with memes and the side that could be viewed as just musical genre/subgenre/etc.
I think that the main reason for this is that vaporwave seemed to develop (or at least get some real traction in terms of popularity): 1. mostly online and 2. in a time where memes are really prevalent in online communities.
A contrast to this might be Radiohead. There are plenty of memes about Radiohead and Thom Yorke floating around, but Radiohead was around before memes (in the online community sense), yet has a fan base outside of online communities. So although there are memes about Radiohead, it doesn't have this intrinsic association with memes like vaporwave does.
I haven't really put a lot of thought into this outside of what I've written here, and I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert on either vaporwave or Radiohead. Let me know what you think.
it's kind of both.
2020, and I'm still listening to Vaporwave
Academic storm in a teacup with carefully situated jargons: discussing humanities like new musicologists once did without proper analysis just to scratch the surface of a musical topic which is based around the social or certain political ('capitalist') aspects of a piece of art -or other sorts of- music by bringing in social and gender studies, racial and historical disciplines in combination with scientific and other, technically absolutely non-relevant knowledge. It surely opens new academic doors to discussions of the semantics and meanings and other pointless aspects of the discussed area by giving music scholars and other wish-to-be-creators endless opportunities to pretentiously write books and dissertations and articles on things which are absolutely pointless even to discuss just to be able to talk about something -by referring to and quoting other people doing exactly the same- whose discussion will not even be influential or useful in any way other than it being "interesting".
What do you think they should be discussing about instead?
How can Burial be considered as hauntological? I get how BoC would, and Basinski, partially. Not sure about Burial. I'd just like to hear an opinion as I'm a big fan of him.
P.S. As always, great video Oliver
here's a direct passage from one of Fisher's articles - *The problem is that the electronic sounds produced between the 1950s and the 1990s remain sonic signifiers of the future-and, as such, they are signs that the anticipated future never actually arrived. The music of Burial and of Ghost Box is haunted by a paradoxical nostalgia: a nostalgia for all the futures that were lost when
culture’s modernist impetus succumbed to the terminal temporality of postmodernity.*
Fisher suggests that many of the production techniques used by Burial have an appreciation for the physical, yet his whole sound is very contemporary, and melancholic at that. Therefore there's a disconnect between different time periods, musical techniques etc. Plus his music kinda sounds really haunted too!
Sythwave/Chillwave next?
It looks a lot like Seapunk. You might also want to refer to the channel NewRetroWave.
Im an Anarcho-hauntologist!
Zero Books... great publisher, I've seen a lot of interesting works that blur non-fiction and fiction on there. Some other theorists that might be useful when looking at vaporwave: Fredric Jameson (His book on postmodernism and late capitalism in particular) and Jean Francois Lyotard.
Definitely - Lyotard and Jameson would be great theorists to look at if anyone wants to delve further into these ideas. Also Michel Foucault's Technologies of the Self would be good too!
Witch House review next?
do a full on history of shoegaze vid
Hmmmm....You could argue that all electronic music is a nostalgia of the future, certainly if you look at a Kraftwerk photo's recall the 30 and 40s, so vapourwave is nothing new.
Personally the glitch movement is a far more interesting idelogically, as it originally took those all too human failings, represented by the pops , crackles and the sound og say cd skipping, and creating something engaging. Check out artists like Pole, Oval, Alva Noto or SND for examples of this type of music.
I don't see where it is stated that the idea of nostalgia and lost futures is new. Hell, BOC was doing that with 70s stuff.
But it does not matter if it is new or not. What matters is if it is great! And vw is great.
@@Chichilcitlalli bored children still need to fear the reaper
@@7321janedou lol true
I had hoped you'd do this video in an aesthetic filter. Damn thumbnails
It's both.
where does this put witch house ?
I thought I have listened to a large quantity of and a wide variety of music than many people. When I came here I realized, oops, never mind!
Ive never understood why Blank Banshee exploded in fame when it is counter to the purpose of vaporwave. You could argue it is vaportrap but part of the cool thing about vaporwave is that the artists are anonymous and anti-consumerism. So I see some of the vaporwave audience really ignorant to the purpose of the music they are listening to. Good video, Oliver!
That's a good point, there are definitely styles within the vaporwave umbrella that don't completely conform to the ideas and concepts we've been talking about - Blank Banshee being a good example.
One thing I know about vaporwave is that I'm pretty damn sure I enjoy listening to it. Does anything else matter ?
That is certainly the most important thing.
Meme movement
For the political side of vaporwave, see Corp’s News at 11.
its both
Every sub genre is "the same perpetual loop" of re using similar sounds. think "alt rap" like lil uzi ad designer are putting out its all the same shit in the grand scheme of the idea, they use the same words they rap about the same stuff the production has a similar style to it. It doesn't make it a meme. 80's hair band music, pop music, pop country, its all basically re uses of the same thing that doesn't make it a meme... I understand they are putting there own twists on one thing but thats what genres are in general...
For what I understand, vaporwave is less than a decade old, and it's too early to judge how much self-sufficiency and cultural value it has - we just have to watch how it will progress musically (or will it?) for like another decade. I mean, back in early 60's who would consider rock music anything more than just...you know, youngsters with no musical education trying to parody blues and R'n'B which that generation was sort of growing on? A meme? Yes. 'cause everything new, funny and unusual in all spheres of life including art becomes a meme nowadays. Will it grow of just being a meme? As I said, we just have to wait and see. Hauntological Movement? It's hard for me to judge because I don't really get what exactly you are referring to as hauntology. I mean I do enjoy BoC or some Caretaker, but I don't really see this kind of implication behind the music, maybe it's too much a British thing and I'm not from Britain. As for me (and your point kind of touches it) vaporwave is more like a new tiny artistic decadent movement, not as global and shocking as that in late 19th century of course, but more like it's the punk of our days. A weird kid of DIY-culture or something.
this comment describes the heart of Vaporwave whereas the video mostly discusses its head.
there was a technological shift when this music first happened, that enabled any individual with a laptop and the interest to make any damn noise they wanted to and share it with the world. you take something old and archaic and unused and forgotten about, then mix it with new technological abilities and distribution platforms, and out pops something original and familiar simultaneously. Vaporwave.
similar to fifites RocknRoll and seventies Punk in this fashion.
Totally get your point, it probably is a little too early for us to properly define vaporwave's importance culturally, but that doesn't mean it's not worth discussing. I like what you said about it being like a DIY movement - it is a kind of liberated punk style, globalised because of the internet.
It already has a lot of value, just look at all the videos about it, and all the music produced. All that attention by all that people. That is value. It has had so much value already that there was the infamous redesigning of MTV's image to reflect on vw. Or how Tumblr created Tumblr.TV just to also reflect on vw's influence.
" A S S t h e t i c s "
A E S T H E T I C
it's both you silly square
Please do a guide to Kanye West :)
I feel like using "hypnagogic" as a descriptor of vaporwave is sort of disrespectful towards hypnagogic pop which is what spawned vaporwave (along with chopped & screwed), and is the more legitimate genre that in many ways pioneered the idea of hauntological music and simulacra-esque rerenderings of past cultural periods in music.
I would argue that it's not really disrespectful to call it hypnogogic as the term refers to a psychological state, rather than anything specifically tethered to music. I get where you're coming from w/r/t/ hypnogogic pop as perhaps a more 'fomed' genre - I wouldn't say more or less legitimate though
yeah ur right disrespectful is probably the wrong word, maybe it's more that bringing up the word hypnagogic evokes the inclination to bring up the genre as a predecessor to VW.
VIdeos discussing the philosophy of vaporwave are absurdly passe
Vaporwave is just an offshoot of Synthwave or Retrowave. It has a handsome sibling called Chillwave.
floral shoppe is shit tbh and i love vaporwave
What is a good album to get into vaporwave
I'd suggest either Far Side Virtual by James Ferraro which is considered a precursor to Vaporwave or the album everybody knows about, Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus
Thanks
Where can I listen to them
See the vaporwave essential guides.
Can Vaporwave it be a critique of capitalism if the artist behind it is making it for the purpose of humor or at least unaware that the movement behind the art they make entails that?
It's pretty amazing to think vaporwave is one of the first musical movements to have no place of origin in the physical world and to not die in a pool of its own Irony Lmao
Ollie on the 6th level of woke
sadly, future is no longer what it was
Gayporwave
Aren't people in every age convinced that they are presiding over the funeral of the future? Every past age thought that you can't get more future than they were. But guess what? We're their future. And someone else will occupy our future.
If pressed, I think most hauntology theorists would acknowledge that the futurelessness they talk about is more of a mood than an actual state of affairs. It's essentially the same as what people used to call the "fin de siecle," or the decadent mood.
We really need a fruit or vegetable to refer to deep cuts as. It's irritating writing deep cuts over and over. Something like melon is much more succinct and satisfying. Any ideas?
olive?
Watermelon
no memes, dude. Just write Oliver
Zuchinni
I dont know why, but zuchinni makes a lot of sense to me.
vaporwave lives and dies so fast it's gone through so many subgenres(?) such as hard vapor,ecco jams,faux utopian,etc.
I think 'faux utopia' might be the worst micro genre label I've ever heard 🤔
just the name is enough
Hiphop has soooo many genres. same can be said about rock, metal and so many others.
Maybe I'm cynical but I think to wax postmodernism about Vaporwave is to play into the the collective joke that is like a self fulfilling prophecy. It's people that didn't experience the era they are eluding to which to me is a simple response to millennials not feeling like their own identity isn't as appealing as the idealistic 80\90s motif they've imagined. I lived through part of the nineties as a teenager and let me tell you it was boring as shit. Anyway what do you think?
Future Funk is where it's at tbh
Google Trends disagrees.
I personally hate vaporwave
As a big vaporwave fan, I'm curious as to why you don't like it. Maybe there are some artists that you'll enjoy that you haven't found because you can't get past the surface stuff.
@@lofy1263 I just dont like how people can just make entire records in an afternoon and how effortless it seems. I just personally think it shows no artistic merit.
V A P E R W A V E ! !
I feel as if Vaporwave as a "Genre" was necessary for understanding the true power of the internet age.
Vaporwaves many influences in 90's culture is mostly down to escapism, living in that age using the samples in music to reflect that to younger, "Born in the wrong generation" listeners. This creates a huge "Meme" community and while some view this with complete distaste and leave it be, I think that peeling away at the surface of vaporwave reveals a truly amazing, wonderful, creative and diverse genre.
Being an entirely internet based genre allowed for a level playing field for everyone to express ideas through this strange style. Albums like "猫 シ Corp: News At 11" with haunting jazz music and samples from TV news stations just moments before 9/11 gives us a unique, personal perspective into a time long gone and a time not even remembered by younger listeners (Such as myself)
"2814: Birth of a new day" presented an amazing ambient soundtrack to a world far from home, like you're experiencing an entire movie inside your own head (I actually own the CD to this album)
Blank Banshees trio album series presented these 90's samples and aesthetics into trap music which strangely works well.
Vaporwave is a weapon, used by all to blast out ideas and emotions, completely alien to modern day music conventions.
That's why it's amazing.
I love what you wrote about as an internet-based genre it gave everyone a level playing field - this is why are is such a diversity of styles within vaporwave's umbrella term, but also the reason ideas have been spread and repeated by people to the point that the repetition obfuscates the creative stuff. As an aside you should join our listening party on the discord for 2814, sounds like you'd have a lot to talk about :)
i feel like it's also largely a platform through which to make socio-political commentary as much as it is a genre, so it's also a weapon in that sense
100% agree. Thank you for putting it into words so wonderfully. I'm sure you used some time writing that comment that you could have used elsewhere, so thanks for taking the time to write it.
Yes you are right the internet makes things possible that would be unthinkable without.
So vapor wave is Internet chill out mix tape.
Vaporwave is building new things out of the detritus of the past. it's sort of like pop art in that regard. personally, I love it.
but I also grew up in the 80s and 90s so perhaps my love for the genre has more to do with nostalgia.
It's like Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia. LOL.
Yeah I'm 42 and I love this stuff.
Love the video. Completely aboard especially the hauntology. One thing that you didn't explicitely covered is vaoprwave and its a e s t h e t i c s' relation to irony. It is "bad", almost objectively bad, but at the same time good for some sort of ironic reasons. Just like some retro fashion is ugly, almost universally agreed that it's ugly. So you like it "ironically", but then start to actually like it unironically. People (who don't understand it) have asked me if vaporwave is ironic and I have to answer that it's both ironic and unironic, or neither. It sort of transcends irony and good taste in a way that post modernist pop/trash art never was able to do.
And if you look like vaporwave's obvious influences on other genres, like for example house music in lo-fi house, you see in that genre how the same ideas about some sort of irony and play with what in a pretty stuck up genre is, or was, considered too cheesy or uncool samples or references in a way is a resistance to the older "good taste" house music where everything used to be so SERIOUS. Just look at the ironic DJ/producer names like DJ Seinfeld, DJ Playstation or DJ Windows XP, the choice of samples of emotional 80s power balads or interviews with people like 90s movie star Winona Ryder, or the way the music used to be distributed as limited edition cassettes (instead of the serious vinyl), releasing on DIY bandcamp labels instead of the big serious online DJ stores etc etc.
Sorry for the long and rambling sentences, but I hope you get my point.
Your point is on point. The influence of vaporwave and its aesthetics is immense and underrated.
Ahhhhh!!! This channel needs so much more recognition!! Definitely sharing with my friends :)
YES Emily, share it with everyone!!
I like vaporwave and all of it's sister genres because it represents a style that no other music really does. It embraces imperfections in recordings and conventionally unattractive visuals (that I've learned to adore) and sounds that just aren't found elsewhere.
I believe that the Vaporwave movement is against the Capitalist society of consumerism, not about post-modernism or Late Stage of Capitalism (what I don't think that's really correct and what created the conception of Vaporwave as a meme). But I consider that have a misunderstanding between the Vaporwave musicians that have make these two conceptions inside the movement possible to exist, considering the first one right and realistic and the second wrong and idealistic, also memetic (in the greek sense of the term). The core process of Vaporwave movement is the fight against copyrights using pop culture songs from middle 1970's, 80's and 90's and the demonstration that the development of capitalist societies and the ideology of consumerism have failed in a lot of aspects. The conclusion is that we have to do something about this. Something that needs to be superior to the capitalist society of consumerism and a development of a new kind of music with the instruments that what we have nowdays to do this. In other terms, the Vaporwave movement is about forming a new kind of society and the best genres of music that we can do after the Vaporwave.
so you see Vaporwave as a call for a kind of utopia Fabricio? I find the idea interesting, I would say though with regard to vaporwave not being about post-modernism I would agree, and writers like Fisher aren't really saying that. What they're saying is that the parameters that allowed the kind of movement like Vaporwave to be born is because we've existed in a post-modern age of art and culture
Interesting Oliver, in #serious-music-discussion at Discord the community had a big chat about this. Yes, I actually thinks that the Vaporwave movement started with Vektroid's Floral Shoppe not only as an "aesthetic-meme" movement of nostalgia and so on, but it also came with a political proposal against copyrights, consumerism, pop music... A form to evidence the capitalist system itself. Since that we have piracy, downloads and other ways to cheat the copyrights laws, now, with Vaporwave, we have a new way to cheat the capitalist consumerism system slowing down nostalgic pop music and this makes more deeps
exposure of the fails of our system. Have some discussions about this at Reddit, articles and other sites that discusses precisely these questions.
I like that copyright political proposal idea. It could also mean that the fact that music had copyright and ownership for so long (during the 80`s) and it's presence is growing day to day, vaporwave Is a statement about the impossibility to own the past, as if the past has already been claimed by record companies and held its meaning. So now its up to repurposing to rebuild new identity out of one that's been held by the cultural market.
>>> "The core process of Vaporwave movement is the fight against copyrights using pop culture songs from middle 1970's, 80's and 90's and the demonstration that the development of capitalist societies and the ideology of consumerism have failed in a lot of aspects."
Wow! Yes. You got it man.
>>> vaporwave Is a statement about the impossibility to own the past
Yes, in fact, if we analyze, almost anything has entered the Public Domain for a looooong time. Yes the past has already been claimed by corporate interest and vw is repurposing all that. The VHS effect works great to defeat TH-cam's Content ID system (imposed to YT by the copyright industry).
Great video! The interesting thing about vaporwave is how many people how vast and expansive the genre is. There are so many different sub-genres of vaporwave to where you can lost in the world or narrative that the album creates. Take fuji grid tv,which is one of many pseudonyms for Vektroid. THat album is literally just old japanese commercials looped for about 20 minutes. It seems silly, but whenever I listen to it, I feel like I'm experiencing the life of a japanese businessman who is just coming from work and just fell asleep with the TV on. Another one is WosX Brazil World Cup 2034 and its narrative of a post apocalyptic World Games. It's great and I don't any other genre could convey such feelings. There are definitely meme-y parts of it, but I think the genre as a whole has way more to offer than just being a meme.
I really like the fact that it's very varied in what you want to do with it, you can just load tons of samples onto eachother like Saint Pepsi or make something with almost no samples and very trap influenced like Blank Banshee
Great point, there are a lot of facets to vaporwave that don't perhaps get as much attention as the more obvious choices, perhaps because they don't use those obvious vaporwave visuals/aesthetics as much as others do.
i needed this video, i'm very pleased.
Glad to be of service!