Writing about vaporwave in 2016 is almost impossible. Neophytes often seem baffled by the genre, assuming they've heard of it at all. Meanwhile, fans insist that vaporwave is dead. How do you write about music that most people have never heard of and that fans claim doesn't exist any more? Or just as important: why?
I think the continued relevance of the genre is explained in the history of vaporwave itself. Vaporwave arose in reaction to huge economic and social forces that are still very much a part of our lives: globalization, runaway consumerism, and manufactured nostalgia chief among them. There is no other kind of music that explicitly concerns itself with these aspects of our zeitgeist. And if vaporwave still maters, it's because those things do also.
If you've never heard of vaporwave, the slowdown, remixed, and appropriative music genre defined at least in part by an obsession with '80s and '90s consumer culture—the first genre to be born and live its life entirely on the Internet—that's certainly OK. In fact, it's sort of the point. Vaporwave, itself a kind of musical parody of pop consciousness, never strived for mass appeal. It doesn't need our validation. That's true for any artifact of counterculture: mass acceptance would weaken its claim to authenticity. Forcing it into a form fit for mass appeal would dilute its identity. For an historical example, think of the music critic Lester Bangs' quote about how the '60s died as soon as it was OK to have long hair in the Midwest.
That's why signal-boosting vaporwave might seem gauche to some fans and creators. Purveyors of a genre so rarified were almost obligated to bury it alive, to announce its death publicly before its actual time. It seems almost prudent to end the project while the relatively small groups of people passionate about vaporwave are still able to police the borders of the genre's identity. But the reasons for vaporwave being created in the first place are still very much relevant: cycnicsm about capitalism, sarcastic takes on the unachieved utopias of previous decades, consumerism, escapism, globalization, etc. Vaporwave's vision isn't exhausted yet, which keeps it fresh, pertinent, and growing in the form of fractured subgenres like "future funk" and "mall soft".
So vaporwave is dead. Long live vaporwave.
To pick any single point in time that a music genre developed is a kind of arbitrary exercise. In the case of vaporwave, do we go back to underground electronic music in Detroit in the '80s? The early DIY scene? No Wave? Stockhausen? The dialectic is so large, Lord, and my vessel is so small. Best to keep it simple.
So let's start in 2010 with electronic artist Daniel Lopatin releasing the album Ecco Jams Vo.1 under the pseudonym "Chuck Person." This album is like the Mayflower of vaporwave, or the foundational stone.
Listening to it, you can hear that the title is a play on the word "echo." It's an obvious nod to the production on the album, of course, which features slowed down, "chopped and screwed" remixes of pop '80s jams. But the echo is also temporal. The album is composed of sounds from the past reemerging. Their pop gloss has been smudged and stretched out into an almost spectral sound. The effect is that it sounds like the ghosts of shopping trips past are visiting us. As critic Simon Reynolds wrote in Retromania: Pop's Addiction to its Own Past, these works "relate to cultural memory and the buried utopianism within capitalist commodities, especially those related to consumer technology in the computing and audio-video entertainment area." Musical difference would later complicate and divide the genre that these tracks inspired, but the preoccupation with technology and consumerism would remain a common thread binding subsequent projects together under the same larger ideological umbrella.
James Ferraro's 2011 album Far Side Virtual is usually paired with Ecco Jams Vol. 1 as a founding document of vaporwave.
Ferraro's take on vaporwave was slightly shifted from Lopatin's, emphasizing the upbeat, hopeful, soundtrack to '90s consumer capitalism: crisp elevator music, uptempo synth strings, and automated voices. Just check out the song names: "Global Lunch," "Palm Trees, Wi-Fi and Dream Sushi," "Condo Pets," "Starbucks, Dr. Seussism, and While Your Mac Is Sleeping." It's retrofuturism, but one that shows us what the joyful promises of early '90s Internet culture would feel like completely unmoored from politics and history. In other words, it's utopian.
As Ferraro himself explained in an interview,:
"Far Side Virtual" mainly designates a space in society, or a mode of behaving. All of these things operating in synchronicity: like ringtones, flat-screens, theater, cuisine, fashion, sushi. I don't want to call it "virtual reality," so I call it "Far Side Virtual." If you really want to understand "Far Side," first off listen to [Claude] Debussy, and secondly, go into a frozen yogurt shop. Afterwards, go into an Apple store and just fool around, hang out in there. Afterwards, go to Starbucks and get a gift card. They have a book there on the history of Starbucks—buy this book and go home. If you do all these things you'll understand what "Far Side Virtual" is—because people kind of live in it already.
All of this is right there on the surface of Far Side Virtual. Listen to the entire album, if you can spare the time. Put it on in the background as a soundtrack to work to. It's crisp, upbeat, and pleasant. The sounds that it's composed of are recognizable to me, like familiar voices from my past or little nodules of experience from my childhood. I grew up in the late '80s/early '90s, and an upbeat sound collage of voices from a Utopia that couldn't quite pull itself off aren't just simply pleasing—they feel like part of my identity. Could it really be that the AOL "You've Got Mail" voice is to me what the Madeline was to Proust?
The first album to be considered vaporwave proper was Floral Shoppe, released in late 2011 by the graphic artist/producer Ramona Xavier (predominatly known by the stage name Vektroid) but credited to her alias "Macintosh Plus." The previous albums pointed the way, but Floral Shoppe was it: the lodestone that embodies all the most salient elements of vaporwave. Check out this standout track, "リサフランク420 //現代のコンピュー," or "Computing of Lisa Frank 420 / / Contemporary."
The song features a Diana Ross track, "It's Your Move," chopped and slowed to an awkwardly relentless zombie shuffle. The track is disassembled and then put back together, brought back from the dead with all of the slickness, the "product" completely sucked out of it. And somehow it sounds even more sensual, and certainly more fragile, than the original. Floral Shoppe strikes the delicate balance between being a parody of consumerism and actually really nice music to chill to. It was the just-right balance that nearly all successful vaporwave songs would replicate.
But more than just the sound of vaporwave, the aesthetic of vaporwave is embodied on the cover of Floral Shoppe. Take a look at it: the retro computer graphics, the Roman bust, the pixilated city skyline, song titles in Japanese. These things would form the core of a series of visual references vaporwave incorporated into its identity and music. It doesn't hurt that they also easily doubled as Internet memes. And there are others you might recognize: Arizona Iced Tea, nugs of marijuana, VHS, palm trees, Fuji bottled water.
Like the music, the name is a hybrid.
Visual jokes, of course—little tiny ghosts of the failed promises of consumerism (were we ever really going to find true happiness in a bottle of iced tea?), its cheapness and vulgarity—that point us towards where the name "vaporwave" itself comes from. Like the music, the name is a hybrid. It's a combination of the term "vaporware," a corporate advertising term for products that are advertised for release but are never actually intended to make it to market. Half of the genre's name comes from an insider term for manipulation of the public's desires. The second half comes from Marx's waves of vapor, "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." The genre's name comes from these failed promises, and through its music sort of offers up an alternative history of post-Cold War America. One way it explicitly does that is by appropriating '80s and '90s commercials. Like in this vid/song pairing from electronic musician Skylar Spence, former known as Saint Pepsi, called "Enjoy Yourself."
The video appropriates McDonald's crescent moon-headed crooner Mac Tonight, an advertisement character used by the company from 1986 to 1989. It's a kind of oddball marketing campaign, one that I remember from my own childhood as slightly disturbing, turned into a weird nostalgic inside joke. But it's a joke that wouldn't work unless there were also some actual longing it was playing off of. The original ad was not only meant to bolster McDonald's after 4 p.m. dinner campaign, it also presented a dream landscape of stars, velvety sky, and a city skyline whose very anonymity hints at freedom unmoored from specificity of place and limits of identity. The campaign, which won a Clio Award for advertising, was itself playing off of 1980s Baby Boomer nostalgia for the '50s: the sunglasses-wearing Ray Charlse-esque crooner singing Bobby Darin's song "Mack the Knife" was anything but subtle. And it's important to remember that Darin's song was itself an appropriation of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht's version written for The Three Penny Opera. In this sense, Saint Pepsi's video—and vaporwave's appropriation of music originally packaged as a consumer product—is a kind of grassroots reengagement with a culture that's normally spoonfed to the public by the C-Suites.
Although it might mimic the aesthetics of capitalism, the anti-place of the American mall, and the sounds of a tranquil permanent present, it has more in common with punk.
At this point, it should be clear that vaporwave has obvious antecedents in American music and culture. And although it might mimic the aesthetics of capitalism, the anti-place of the American mall, and the sounds of a tranquil permanent present, it has more in common with punk. It's political. Its first priority isn't making the charts; in fact, its identity is bound up in resisting commercial success, in mocking it. It's really simple to make. In fact, most of it is made at home and released on sites like Bandcamp. And it's also really, really funny. And like punk, vaporwave has fractured, synthesized, and broken off into new subgenres of music, with different artists emphasizing certain sounds or ideas.
Canadian producer Blank Banshee is an example of a direction that vaporwave has moved in, where the trap beat is emphasized and the political edge blunted. It's probably more approachable than a lot of music in other vaporwave subgenres (such as my favorite, Mall Soft, which are literally sounds that approximate mall soundtracks), but builds on the basic premise of the genre.
Golden Living Room goes in another musical direction entirely. The album Welcome Home (and you can't get much more vaporwave than that album cover) was actually performed using real instruments, not just synths and computers. And it's hauntingly beautiful. It maintains some of the same political preoccupations as earlier vaporwave, but incorporates a much larger matrix of sounds and musical styles to make its point. The fact that it can be played on instruments, and that it draws from so many varied sources, really speaks to the crossover compatibility vaporwave has with things like lo-fi, sound collages, and avant garde music more generally.
News of vaporwave's death has been a long time coming. Some say the genre peaked in 2013. People were discussing it on Reddit last year. And maybe the most obvious nail in the genre's coffin was when MTV and Tumblr incorporated vaporwave tropes into the visual aspects of its rebranding last summer.
But giant companies weren't the only ones to appropriate the vaporwave aesthetic. Drake's video for "Hotline Bling," with its minimalist neon pastels and visual echoes of 80's lounge, was accused by some of being a sort of "tribute to vaporwave." And Tom Barnes at Mic called the cover of Kanye West's latest album "brutally simple vapor wave aesthetic." Outside of the music world altogether, this month saw the surfacing of a robotic Donald Trump destroying the world "in an absurd vaporwave video." For a genre that has been declared dead for years, vaporwave continues to remain relevant enough to maintain a presence in our collective imaginations, even if many people aren't necessarily aware of the genre itself. Things can matter to us and remain relevant without our knowing it.
To call a genre "dead" can mean two things: either the genre has outlived its usefulness as a product on the market (i.e. a change in style), or that it no longer has any relevance to our lives. The first can't be true because vaporwave never was economically "successful." The second can't be true because we're still haunted by the ghost utopias of a failed consumer paradise. Vaporwave continues to provide us with a necessary expression of our moment in American history, a wry take on our economic and cultural decline.
When people call vaporwave "dead", it might be more useful to think of the pronouncement as an appropriation of the language of marketing itself, of a planned or synthetic obsolescence, employed before the act of "selling out" in order to protect the integrity of the genre. Vaporwave is dead because it's not a product in the way that hip hop, pop, or country music have become. It was never for sale that way, so in a sense it was always "dead."
Long live vaporwave.