Vaporwave: Vapid, Trendy, Self-Conscious yet Sublime

A word of warning – this one could get long. I’ll try to restrain myself.

This year I discovered Vaporwave, a genre with a silly name (if, perhaps, an apt one). Vaporwave has existed for some time, the foundation arguably being laid by Daniel Lopatin, under the alias Chuck Person, with his 2010 release Eccojams Vol. 1 but it had, for all that time, existed only on the periphery of my musical perspective. The major reason for this is simply that it all came off as trying a bit too hard, being too self-consciously hipster, as tends to be the case with these Tumblr fad microgenres. I found Witch House interesting yet unimpressive and ultimately lackluster, possessing rather more bark than bite. After giving Seapunk a go and coming away from that experience with a bad taste in my mouth I figured I could just pass on Vaporwave entirely, based largely on the absurd name touted in hushed tones by the slavering fans of the genre, transparently seeking their peerlessly ‘unique’ self-identities and egoistic absolution by worshipping at the altar of something that appeared a paragon of underground, progressive music. I had no time for it.

I still have no time for that, and I’m not going to attempt to holistically defend the community and fanbase that this music has spawned – much of it is riddled with childish self-contextualizing, meme-circulating, and uncritical, imbalanced adoration.

However let’s talk about the music. Let’s talk about the aesthetics, themes, and tropes wielded by this art movement and why they, perhaps, transcend the shaky social environment from whence they came.

Put simply and directly, Vaporwave is a nostalgic collage of retro sounds and vibes, heavily processed and repurposed into a passively anti-establishment statement that immerses the listener in a euphoric, rough-edged sense of comfort using the shallow, commercial musical ideas that came out of the 80s and 90s. In a much more indirect way than, say, Black Metal or Godspeed You, Black Emperor, it embodies a punk aesthetic that opposes the glossy, commercial sheen of pop by wielding an often jarring, dystopian rendition of that very aesthetic. James Ferraro’s seminal Far Side Virtual is an absurdly incidental sounding collage of Casio demo-track keyboard sounds and mall jingles, littered with lifeless, computer-generated voice samples that set an unsettlingly consumerist tone. While this album, much like Chuck Person’s Eccojams, arguably predates true Vaporwave I think it embodies the dissatisfied, mocking, counter-culture tone as prominently as any.

This element of the genre really appeals to me, and while it’s easy to deny that simply sampling and regurgitating commercial music constitutes a punk-esque anti-establishment statement (especially when much of the music leans on the quality of some of those sources taken out of context) I think that this dystopic idea really helps bring the aesthetic underpinnings together. One thing that is important about the appeal of Vaporwave is the overall Cyberpunk flavour of it, setting a blissful, cynical soundtrack to the Megacorporation ruled futures that exist in the minds and works of men like William Gibson or Richard K. Morgan. An obvious manifestation of this is the ridiculous use of Japanese characters. While this is arguably a return to the foolish practice of using weird characters in Witch House to make works of the genre ‘more difficult to search online’ (please) it is, I think, a little more meaningfully applied here. There’s something dislocating, for an English speaker always immersed in only the one familiar language, to listen to a track without being able to read the title. Plus it evokes images of the fast-moving, neon futurism that is so much a part of modern Japanese culture.

Again, all this might seem a bit hard to swallow, and while, as I said, I think that all these elements really add to the consumption of the genre, one thing that really sets Vaporwave apart from its flash-in-the-pan Tumblr-spawned predecessors is the quality of the music. Artists like Luxury Elite and Saint Pepsi create really relaxing, enjoyable vibes simply by chopping and screwing, and then endlessly looping small samples of catchy beats from the late disco era. It’s really just Synthwave pared down into the most easy-listening possible form – and it doesn’t suck. A lot of the artists present a real talent for ambient soundscapes, such as Oneohtrix Point Never and DARKPYRAMID, while others like Blank Banshee or Subaeris riddle those same euphoric, retro synth pads with cliche modern trap beats.

It took me a bit, and I don’t think my skepticism wasn’t very much well-founded – but I really enjoy this music, and I do it without feeling (or needing to feel) the slightest but tongue-in-cheek or facetious about it. Much of it is relaxing, chilled out stuff to listen to on a lazy Sunday morning, and there are real gems in there, genuinely interesting soundscapes and timbres, the kinds of innovations I largely found missing in other related genres. All this is brought full circle by the greater themes present here, the pessimistic look at a shallow, vapid future built on commercialization and cheap plastic, where artistic ideals are consigned to slow euthanization in the darkened back-alleys of some gleaming metropolis.

Whether it sticks around or not, I think Vaporwave has already been more influential outside its own sphere than any of it’s predecessors, I don’t think it’s aesthetics or tropes are confined to their own hipster-happy inside-joke world, there’s more going on here, these guys are onto something. Witch House, Seapunk, these were closed loops, fun for the people that used them to feel trendy, but ultimately just internet fads, unable to decide whether they’re serious or not, lacking substance. There’s more happening here, a beating heart that has something to give to music and art on the whole.

I really dig it.