Anyone who believes that underground music should be gritty and artisanal, like classic punk or classic house, is likely to hate vaporwave. But vaporwave is only doing what the cassette underground did in the '80s, and it met similar reactions then. On both sides of the Atlantic, the style that became known as indie was independent music looking in the mirror, becoming self-aware about "the way things are." And that's why it became so popular: people could already understand what the independent music medium meant, since it performed an inverse reflection of the music industry. It seemed more appropriate if music on cassette was naive, childlike, charming in its eccentricities, archaisms and technical flubs, even a bit lethargic, and accompanied by hand-drawn artwork. The C86 bands and their American counterparts, such as Beat Happening and their label K, were emblematic of this during the '80s. Explicitly invoking the spirit of punk rock, they imitated children, played out of time and out of tune as if they didn't know any better. They also shifted back in time a decade and a half, embracing the kitsch of '60s Brill Building pop and rock & roll before it became rock, both in sound and sight. This image of indie music-making became far more influential than that of an avant-garde electronic engineer putting out cassettes, because it sort of made sense that that's what indie would sound like. Just as it sort of makes sense that vaporwave is what the internet would sound like.Now, over the past year, one notorious internet label is repeating the history of the naive indie bands and the way they represented a self-image of their creative context and "the way things are" with remarkably similar detail: PC Music. Even in its self-aware name, the London-based PC Music announces itself as a product of the digital age. And again, not just the digital age, but its history—note how outdated the term "PC" seems today. Increasingly filling rooms in London, it's probably the first entirely web-based label to have become a widespread talking point in the music press, and it doesn't even sell music, operating only through a SoundCloud account linked to a dedicated website. Like Beat Happening and the C86 bands, PC Music and its artists—GFOTY, Hannah Diamond, Lipgloss Twins, Dux Content—have been controversially cute, infantile, poppy, kitsch, sentimental, bad taste. Where there seems to be any nostalgia involved in their music, it looks back to dance-pop of the turn of the millennium or early grime—the same time delay the '80s indie bands felt. "Hey QT" is the name of the kitschy pop song that SOPHIE and PC Music's founder A.G. Cook recently collaborated on, meeting cries of outrage from (especially older) music fans. And "cutie," as Simon Reynolds remembered , was a name for the scene of the C86 scene and their twee shenanigans.Just like the classic punks, PC Music can be heard as dramatizing the decline of good taste at the hands of modernity, and in 2014 that means noble underground traditions like all that monochrome club/post-club music that rakes reverentially and melancholically through 30 years of analogue production all being displaced by digital decadence, rampant excess and fucking children. PC Music are trolling old ravers, the generation that built the hardcore continuum; they're trolling old punks and their insistence on realism. They're saying, "We might as well sound like this. In a world of gloss and accelerated desire, this is what society made us." And in this regard, they're punks.They're not the only ones to adopt this aesthetic, either. DIS magazine, now a key source for the new digital pop art and its accompanying sounds, has the same flavour. The dance label #Feelings has a hashtag in its name, its manager Ben Aqua has releases calledand, and its store sells a t-shirt that reads "NEVER LOG OFF." The signs and connotations of the digital medium are appearing all around online music in the same way that punk wore its gritty origins on its sleeve.And if all this digitally aware music feels wantonly crap and infantile to some listeners, I guess that's exactly how the fans of the rock acts that immediately preceded (or perhaps caused) punk felt. Am I suggesting that vaporwave and PC Music ought to be accorded the same respect and legendary status as The Ramones and the Sex Pistols? No. And to point to a Hall Of Fame to justify a recent punk gesture would be to spectacularly miss the point.But as any popular-music nerd might tell you, it's not punk itself that's interesting; it's what came after, what it enabled: the creativity and culture that lay in its wake and that transcended leather jackets and safety pins. Punk is a gesture, a scream, but post-punk built new musical worlds. When vaporwave first turned up, it seemed like the latest in a series of increasingly bizarre microgenres to have spun out of '00s hipsterism. But today, vaporwave has countless practitioners, even its own Reddit page , and though someone's always insisting that the fun has been spoilt now, it shows no sign of stopping. But what vaporwave might have done, for maybe hundreds of artists all over the world, is get people started on making music through a radically simple step—in vaporwave's case, sampling. Already, artists like Contact Lens, Saint Pepsi, 회사AUTO and Metallic Ghosts are venturing into new, less sample-based productions; labels like Business Casual 87 are trying new sounds; and SPF420, having cut its teeth on vaporwave, is booking online artists of all kinds. One strain seems to merge some of vaporwave's sonic and conceptual world with hi-tech beats, best summed up in tracks by the likes of Drip-133 or Subaeris Of course, not all music in the online underground is vaporwave, or akin to PC Music or #Feelings. These are just those elements within it that have some self-awareness about the digital medium and its cultural connotations, which results in a certain aesthetic (that can be intentional or not, the effect is largely the same). And like the image of indie as naive, it has proved popular because it plays to expectations of the digital, positive and negative. But not all online music is "about" or "because of" the internet or the wider digital world, and the term "online underground" I use doesn't imply any one style or aesthetic, only a mode of distribution.Occasionally, however, you see the term "internet music" or "net music," which tends to imply music that is somehow internet-like, conflating it with music that's online, much like the phrase "net art" can imply the internet as a subject matter just as much as a medium. The difference can be seen in the comparison of a website like Rhizome's tumblr (internet or post-internet art) with deviantART (which is just art that happens to be on the internet). To confuse "internet music" with music that is merely online is to confuse, as so many people do, indie music—a rugged, maybe naive rock or pop sound—with independent music—music that is produced away from the major music industry. No kind of music, and certainly no particular kind of "bad music" (poor quality music, naive music, excessive music) flows as a natural consequence of a certain mode of distribution, whether independent or online.But like punk did, vaporwave and PC Music hint at the moment of aesthetic self-definition felt by an emerging generation of musicians and fans that have quite different experiences, values and expectations from previous generations of underground music practitioners and fans. Not only do they remain largely unmoved by the need to collect music as an accretion of physical objects, many of them probably don't even have a single batch of mp3s they think of as their music collection. They may have never been to a physical record shop and see no reason to, since such places have, to them, a bit of a dad vibe. They don't have a habit of buying music, but will shell out for something worthwhile. The music they like doesn't appear live or even DJ'd near where they live, and they don't listen to the radio for it, only the odd podcast. They don't tend to read the same magazines or websites as many of us do, and have little sense of a great popular music canon they're obliged to engage with as a right of passage.When someone on the vaporwave Reddit assembled a giant chart of the genre to date, they not only misdefined hypnagogic pop, which had been coined by David Keenan inmagazine in 2009 when discussing different artists, but consequently neglected scores of physical releases from the pre-online underground that would have been appropriate: releases on Olde English Spelling Bee, Not Not Fun, even Paw Tracks. At best, they must have been oblivious. These are music fans for whom, with a punk-like year-zero effect, the online underground is basically all there is.You might conclude that all this spells the death of underground musical culture. But even without the larger-scale economic structures on which musical cultures often rest, the online underground nevertheless has the most important elements necessary for it: passion and community. In a reflection of the way computers and other such devices are designed—for individuals—music making in the emerging online underground tends towards solo artists rather than bands or live events. But labels, as communal and aesthetic focal points, are thriving even without cashflow. Through DIY streaming platforms like SPF420—a kind of lo-fi Boiler Room—this community can put on live events. As the technology improves and becomes more accessible (perhaps through some form of dedicated website), it raises the possibility of widespread, high-quality live gigs taking place throughout the online underground: a live culture to match the high sound quality and easy distribution of recordings through, say, Bandcamp. And if you believe that a community that meets through machines and almost never in real life is no community at all—that might be the generation gap.This isn't the end of the story. There's still the matter of who owns the software and hardware on which the online underground runs, and what they want to do with it. SoundCloud, for example, may have lost a few underground friends recently when it announced it was going to host advertising. It seems possible that one day soon, at the behest of the major entertainment industry, sample-detection algorithms might make sampling on any part of the online underground very difficult, and from hip-hop to vaporwave, sampling has been an easy entry into music making. And then, as always, there's the way music making fits into our wider cultural and economic lives—or doesn't. It might not be the case that a Western, urban, capitalist musical culture without a professionalised industry is a greatly impoverished one, but it might. The internet tends to amplify real-world problems as well as level them, and the online underground might only fill up with people who have the time, resources and confidence to make strange music, and those things can be in short supply in places where civilization is measured in terms of "hardworking families."But if the online underground is a new kind of punk, it presents some incredible opportunities and, ultimately, no less than a reboot of underground music. Or even beyond that, a reboot of independent music, or of popular music (music made by the people) at large. After decades, punk has become the establishment—so many levels of pop-musical culture are shot through with the realism and hand-made feel it struggled for towards the end of last century, and yet it is sold and mediated as if it was still the place and hallmark of true spontaneous creativity. It isn't any more.