The fog of globalization – A critique and defense of Vaporwave
Even if you’ve never heard of the label for it, you’d know the music to hear it – relaxed, warm electronic grooves with the odd chorus-drenched saxophone solo or blue-eyed soul sample. It’s like mall music, ironically chopped and screwed to act as a pastiche of early digital-era commercialism. And when you’d hear it, you’d probably think “This must have been made in the 80s.” You wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but “vaporwave” is a very current, budding movement in underground music culture, with literally hundreds of albums released by anonymous or monikered producers on Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and elsewhere in the streaming sphere.
At the risk of suggesting the trite “90s kid” adage, have you ever had a melody or image from an old commercial or obscure computer game stuck in your subconscious? Do the warm analog synth timbres of artists like Boards of Canada take you into a familiar atmosphere that can’t be fully articulated? This vague, fleeting nostalgia, stirred and conjured by A/V images of mass-produced cultural artifacts (commercials, industrial films, documentaries), is at the aesthetic core of vaporwave, and serves as a major point of contention for critics and listeners. Alternately dystopian/utopian themes in the music of Macintosh Plus, coolmemoryz, and Oneohtrix Point Never’s EP Memory Vague bring to mind the culture industry of the 80s and 90s, and it does so in a way that engages those monolithic qualities with the forward-looking, democratized space of internet creativity.
Having listened to a lot of vaporwave lately, considering its place in the post-everything condition is certainly valuable to understanding remix culture as a whole. The word itself, stemming from “vaporware” (software that is announced to the public, but never released and/or officially cancelled), essentially describes itself. Like “vapor” software, the aesthetics of the music reflect a sort of nostalgia for its form and not so much content – a form that is re-appropriated to comment on creativity in the cynicism of the internet age. This is evident in the genre’s fixation with old computing technology, blatant (and sometimes obnoxious) Japanophilia, ironic use of yuppie lounge muzak, and classical, Reboot-esque animation aesthetics and conventions.
Call it what one may – a legitimately engaging facet of remixing culture, or short-lived, oversaturated hipster dreck – the genre certainly has its important place in the sphere of possibilities in the Web 2.0 era. By fetishizing early computing and establishing its aesthetic as an artifact, the music of the movement speaks volumes about the value of collective memory and fleeting nostalgia in the post-global, post-commodity world.