Vaporwave

Vaporwave originated on the Internet as an ironic variant of chillwave,[29] drawing on the retro style's "analog nostalgia"[6] as well as the work of hypnagogic pop artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, who were also characterized by the invocation of retro popular culture.[30] "Hypnagogic pop" was coined by Wire journalist David Keenan in August 2009, only a few weeks after "chillwave", to describe a host of new underground acts who were inspired by the memories of their childhoods in the 1980s. The two terms were often used interchangeably with each other.[31] According to Vice's Ezra Marcus, vaporwave was one of several short-lived internet genres to emerge during the era: "there was chillwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, vaporwave, cloud rap, and countless other niche sounds with gimmicky names. As soon as one microgenre flamed out, another would take its place, and with it a whole new set of beats, buzz artists, and fashion trends."[32] Ash Becks of The Essential notes that sites like Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound "seemingly refused to touch vaporwave throughout the genre’s two-year 'peak'."[14]

The template for vaporwave came from the albums Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (Daniel Lopatin as "Chuck Person", August 2010) and Far Side Virtual (Ferraro, October 2011).[28][14][34] Eccojams featured chopped and screwed variations on popular 1980s pop songs with album artwork that resembled the packaging of the 1992 video game Ecco the Dolphin,[5] while Far Side Virtual drew primarily on "the grainy and bombastic beeps" of past media such as Skype and the Nintendo Wii.[28] According to Stereogum's Miles Bowe, vaporwave was a fusion between Lopatin's "chopped and screwed plunderphonics" and the "nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro’s Muzak-hellscapes".[10] A 2013 post on a music blog presented those albums, along with Skeleton's Holograms (November 2010), as "proto vaporwave".[35]

The cover artwork for Floral Shoppe (2011) by Macintosh Plus features elements that would come to exemplify the vaporwave aesthetic, including retro computer imagery, Japanese lettering, and pixelated graphics.[20]

Inspired by Lopatin's ideas, suburban teens and young adults used Eccojams as a starting point for what would become vaporwave[5] while drawing on the postmodern, surreal themes explored by Far Side Virtual and Eccojams.[36] Vaporwave artists were "mysterious and often nameless entities that lurk the internet," academic Adam Harper noted, "often behind a pseudo-corporate name or web façade, and whose music is typically free to download through Mediafire, Last FM, Soundcloud or Bandcamp."[3] According to Metallic Ghosts (Chaz Allen), the original vaporwave scene came out of an online circle formulated on the site Turntable.fm. This circle included individuals known as Internet Club (Robin Burnett), Veracom, Luxury Elite, Infinity Frequencies, Transmuteo (Jonathan Dean), Coolmemoryz, and Prismcorp. Following the release of Ramona Xavier's New Dreams Ltd. (credited to "Laserdisc Visions", July 2011), a number of producers took inspiration from the style, and Burnett used "vaporwave" to tie the disparate group together.[37][nb 1] Xavier's Floral Shoppe (credited to "Macintosh Plus", December 2011) was the first album to be properly considered of the genre, containing all of the style's core elements.[20]

Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan.[37] After a flood of new acts turned to Bandcamp for distribution, various online music publications such as Tiny Mix Tapes, Dummy and Sputnikmusic began covering the movement.[14] In September 2012, Blank Banshee released his debut album, Blank Banshee 0, which reflected a trend of vaporwave producers who were more influenced by trap music and less concerned with conveying political undertones.[20] Bandwagon called it a "progressive record" that, along with Floral Shoppe, "signaled the end of the first wave of sample-heavy music, and ... reconfigured what it means to make vaporwave music."[5].

In 2013, YouTube began allowing its users to host live streams, which resulted in a host of 24-hour "radio stations" dedicated to microgenres such as vaporwave.[38] In 2015, Rolling Stone published a list that included vaporwave act 2814 as one of "10 artists you need to know", citing their album Birth of a New Day (新しい日の誕生, Atarashī Hi no Tanjō).[39] That same year, the album I'll Try Living Like This by Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv was featured at number fifteen on the Fact list "The 50 Best Albums of 2015",[40] and on the same day MTV International introduced a rebrand heavily inspired by vaporwave and seapunk,[41] Tumblr launched a GIF viewer named Tumblr TV, with an explicitly MTV-styled visual spin.[42] Hip-hop artist Drake's single "Hotline Bling", released on July 31, also became popular with vaporwave producers, inspiring both humorous and serious remixes of the tune.[5]

Following the initial wave, new terms for offshoot genres were invented, some of which gesture at the genre's inherent absurdity, such as "vaportrap", "vapornoise" and "vaporgoth".[16] By 2016, according to Bandcamp Daily's Simon Chandler, vaporwave subgenres included "eccojams", "utopian virtual", "mallsoft", "future funk", "post-Internet", "late-nite lo-fi", "vaportrap", "broken transmission" (or "signalwave"), "vapornoise" and "hardvapour".[43]

Vaporwave-style images created by Wikipedia editors. (Wikipe-tan featured on top)

Vaporwave was one of several microgenres spawned in the early 2010s that were the brief focus of media attention.[32] Users on various music forums, as quoted by Vice, variously characterized the genre as "chillwave for Marxists", "post-elevator music", and "corporate smooth jazz Windows 95 pop".[11] Its circulation was more akin to an Internet meme than typical music genres of the past, as authors Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth wrote in 2017,

Vaporwave's cultural practices knowingly replicate and parody the addictive, almost compulsory participation that feeds social networks, where the voluntary labor of the user community drives the system and generates value. Anyone with an Internet connection can produce vaporwave ... The uniformity of these memes is encouraged by their rapid imitation among the genre's hyperactive online subculture, fueled by affective contagion.[44]

Pitchfork contributor Jonny Coleman defined vaporwave as residing in "the uncanny genre valley" that lies "between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that could be real."[29] Also from Pitchfork, Patrick St. Michel calls vaporwave a "niche corner of Internet music populated by Westerners goofing around with Japanese music, samples, and language".[45] Vice writer Rob Arcand commented that the "rapid proliferation of subgenres has itself become part of the "vaporwave" punchline, gesturing at the absurdity of the genre itself even as it sees artists using it as a springboard for innovation."[16]

Vaporwave is often described as a "dead" genre,[46] particularly by a faction of its fans.[20] Music critic Scott Beauchamp wrote that vaporwave's stance is more focused on loss, the notion of lassitude, and passive acquiescence, and that "vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online".[47] He suggested that expressions of hypermodulation inspired both the development and downfall of vaporwave.[47] Conversely, Harper wrote in 2017 that the genre's demise was merely a popular "talking point" and "typical" as a "subcultural narrative of an outside scene killed off by outside observers."[46]

Speaking about the "supposedly subversive or parodic elements" of vaporwave in 2018, cultural critic Simon Reynolds said that the genre had become redundant, in some respects, to modern trap music and mainstream hip hop. He opined: "What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Their role is redundant. Rap and R&B ... is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence."[48]

In a 2018 Rolling Stone article that reported the Monkees' Mike Nesmith's enthusiasm for the genre, author Andy Greene described vaporwave as a "fringe electronic subgenre that few outside irony-soaked meme enthusiasts have even heard of, let alone developed an opinion on."[49] Nesmith praised the genre and attributed its sound to be highly reminiscent of psychedelic trips.[49]

The genre is cited for espousing an ambiguous or accelerationist relationship to consumer capitalism.[51][3] Dummy Mag's Adam Harper wrote in 2012 that "these musicians can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound."[3][nb 2] He noted that the name itself was both a nod to vaporware and the idea of libidinal energy being subjected to relentless sublimation under capitalism.[3] Michelle Lhooq of Vice argued that "parodying commercial taste isn't exactly the goal. Vaporwave doesn't just recreate corporate lounge music – it plumps it up into something sexier and more synthetic."[11]

Music educator Grafton Tanner wrote, "vaporwave is one artistic style that seeks to rearrange our relationship with electronic media by forcing us to recognize the unfamiliarity of ubiquitous technology ... vaporwave is the music of 'non-times' and 'non-places' because it is skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space".[54] Commenting on the adoption of a vaporwave- and seapunk-inspired rebrand by MTV International, Jordan Pearson of Motherboard, Vice's technology website, noted how "the cynical impulse that animated vaporwave and its associated Tumblr-based aesthetics is co-opted and erased on both sides—where its source material originates and where it lives".[42]

In early 2016, the satirical publication Rave News reported that prominent vaporwave producers had scheduled an emergency summit in Montreal to discuss "creeping fascism" in the scene. Although the article was facetious, its comment section attracted many vaporwave fans who defended such political beliefs.[21] In 2017, Vice's Penn Bullock and Eli Penn reported on the phenomenon of self-identified fascists and alt-right members appropriating vaporwave music and aesthetics, describing the so-called "fashwave" movement as "the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal" and reflective of "a global cybernetic subculture geared towards millennials, propagated by memes like Pepe the Frog, and centered on sites like 4chan".[21][nb 3] The Guardian's Michael Hann noted that the movement is not unprecedented; similar offshoots occurred in punk rock in the 1980s and black metal in the 1990s. Hann believed that, like those genres, there was little chance fashwave would ever "impinge on the mainstream".[55]

In 2017, Beauchamp proposed a parallel between punk's "No Future" stance and its active "raw energy of dissatisfaction" deriving from the historical lineage of Dada dystopia, and vaporwave's preoccupation with "political failure and social anomie".[47] By 2019, pink vaporwave-inspired hats that promoted 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang became popular among his supporters. National Review commentator Theodore Kopfre reported that it was part of a trend indicating that Yang had "replaced Donald Trump as the meme candidate."[56]

Future funk expands upon the disco/house elements of vaporwave.[16] It takes a more energetic approach than vaporwave and incorporates elements of French house, albeit produced in the same sample based manner as vaporwave.[57] Most of these samples are drawn from Japanese city pop records from the 1980s.[7][8]

Hardvapour emerged in late 2015[58] as a reimagination of vaporwave with darker themes, faster tempos, and heavier sounds.[16] It is influenced by speedcore and gabber, and defines itself against the utopian moods sometimes attributed to vaporwave.[58]

Mallsoft magnifies vaporwave's lounge influences.[16] It may be viewed in connection to "the concept of malls as large, soulless spaces of consumerism ... exploring the social ramifications of capitalism and globalization".[59]

Fashwave (from "fascist"[60][55]) is a largely instrumental fusion of synthwave and vaporwave that originated on YouTube circa 2015.[61] With political track titles and occasional soundbites,[21] the genre combines Nazi symbolism with the visuals associated with vaporwave and synthwave.[47] According to Hann, it is musically derived from synthwave,[55] while Heavy contributor Paul Farrell writes that it is "considered to be an offshoot from the harmless vaporwave movement."[60] A similar offshoot, Trumpwave, focuses on Donald Trump.[21][60]

Simpsonwave was a YouTube phenomenon made popular by the user Lucien Hughes.[18][17] It mainly consists of videos with scenes from the American animated television series The Simpsons set to various vaporwave tracks. Clips are often put together out of context and edited with VHS-esque distortion effects and surreal visuals, giving them a "hallucinatory and transportive" feel.[19]