SP had nothing to do with vaporwave. He was starting a music career, but his album was very good. This was a problem because vaporwave was political music in a post-political world; it was never supposed to exist. Vaporwave was an unlikely and fragile cultural phenomenon, dependent on the ephemeral presence thing. SP just kinda ruined that. Everything after was an imitation; hence why this article acknowledges the Marxism faded.
I would like to mention the LoA2K project[1] as well; an online library of missing and deleted vaporwave albums. Its website is modeled like an old Geocities page, with a fully functional web version of Winamp[2] for streaming the albums... A great resource for finding some "lost" vaporwave releases or simply discovering obscure music.
Since this article goes through the timeline I thought I'd give my thoughts on how I see it. I feel like it's hard to emphasize, or even remember how subversive the tracks felt in the early days. Listening to easy-listening tracks poorly chopped was just not cool, it was weird, even other online people thought you were weird and that the music you were listening to was bad, and that was a lot of fun.
I think the bad chopping is one of the most sorely missing things from the newer songs. When the tracks were more actively alienating or punishing to listen to, it made them more interesting, and helped justify the liberal sampling. There was an effort to make the easy listening become harder to listen to.
I wouldn't say it lost its "political" roots because I'd like to think it was more than mere political music, but it definitely did lose something where tracks often felt like ideas, like each was saying "what about this? Isn't this weird and interesting? Does this make you feel something about the modern world, consumer culture, the job you have or the one you will be applying for, etc.?" That has seemed to turn into mostly pure nostalgia, rather than anything challenging or interesting.
I think those characteristics are why people sensed its impending doom early. A genre about ideas can't survive the race-to-the-bottom effect of popularity, especially if a core component is engaging with feelings of alienation by actually being alienating. That's why future funk quickly sprouted alongside, and eventually cannibalized vaporwave, because we wanted the non-alienating version. But all that was was straightforward sampling of great pop music we hadn't heard of with no attribution, which eventually lead people to listen to the original Plastic Love 10 years later because it turns out to be better than the remix.
Despite everything I wrote, a recent album by desert sands feel warm at night did really blow me away.
I think DSFWAT are probably one of the best musical discoveries I've had in the last couple of years. One of the few times YouTube has actually recommended something I liked.
Like a lot of flash in the pan genres a little bit peels off and makes its way to other genres.
Vaporwave was seemingly on the way out months after it became a thing but a lot of what it was doing made its way into music. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ has a lot of the same sampling approaches and the aesthetic has been VW inspired too.
> it definitely did lose something where tracks often felt like ideas, like each was saying "what about this? Isn't this weird and interesting?
You can say this (and people do say this) about literally any music genre, and you will be missing the mark every single time for the lowest common denominator. Vaporwave died because of this lack of critical thinking which reads it as merely random or experiments but it wasn't, and of course it wasn't. No worthwhile art ever is.
> I think you're really picking that quote out of context
Sure, because it is the meaningless part of what you said and exemplifies the whole softening effort. One can do this softening with any cultural value, and we are all incentivized to under capitalism. This is literally what vaporwave was about. The default Cisco hold music is the greatest vaporwave track because it embodies the brutality of the softening that the subject craves as a haven for comfort in a heartless world. In a sense, corporate purpose-made music is the only genuine vaporwave. This is why vaporwave cannot exist as a living art form. Vaporwave is the art we cannot have. It's the beauty in the brutality. But without the brutality, it's just nothing.
Edit: No you didn't use those words. I was just referencing other comments here and other common takes about vaporwave. I will edit the comment and remove the scare quotes.
Love Vaporwave. Still think it was one of the most beautiful random genres to ever come out. I listen to mallsoft, specifically cat corps palm mall mars regularly. What I find even more interesting is I occasionally try to the original source tracks for the samples, and I just find vw version more interesting to me, despite being of the age to appreciate the source material.
Every time I move away from VW and the sounds start to sound stale, some random genre offshoot pulls me back in with full force and takes over my brain completely.
Lately its the whole broken transmission / signalwave genre:
Once you start getting into the different genres of Vaporwave, you start wondering are you still in Vaporwave? Where does VW end and the subgenres start?
That image is where I got my start in this, years ago. My question is along the lines of getting further and further away from VW through these genres. Until Im listening to a totally non-ironic, very pretty piano medley with some white noise in the background. Is that still VW I wonder
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 69.5 ms ] threadImpossible. Hit Vibes killed vaporwave in 2013.
Edit: Nevertheless, critical support for even acknowledging the genre's political origins.
Is vaporwave a lost ancient civilization?
[1] https://loa2k.neocities.org/
[2] https://webamp.org/
I think the bad chopping is one of the most sorely missing things from the newer songs. When the tracks were more actively alienating or punishing to listen to, it made them more interesting, and helped justify the liberal sampling. There was an effort to make the easy listening become harder to listen to.
I wouldn't say it lost its "political" roots because I'd like to think it was more than mere political music, but it definitely did lose something where tracks often felt like ideas, like each was saying "what about this? Isn't this weird and interesting? Does this make you feel something about the modern world, consumer culture, the job you have or the one you will be applying for, etc.?" That has seemed to turn into mostly pure nostalgia, rather than anything challenging or interesting.
I think those characteristics are why people sensed its impending doom early. A genre about ideas can't survive the race-to-the-bottom effect of popularity, especially if a core component is engaging with feelings of alienation by actually being alienating. That's why future funk quickly sprouted alongside, and eventually cannibalized vaporwave, because we wanted the non-alienating version. But all that was was straightforward sampling of great pop music we hadn't heard of with no attribution, which eventually lead people to listen to the original Plastic Love 10 years later because it turns out to be better than the remix.
Despite everything I wrote, a recent album by desert sands feel warm at night did really blow me away.
Vaporwave was seemingly on the way out months after it became a thing but a lot of what it was doing made its way into music. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ has a lot of the same sampling approaches and the aesthetic has been VW inspired too.
You can say this (and people do say this) about literally any music genre, and you will be missing the mark every single time for the lowest common denominator. Vaporwave died because of this lack of critical thinking which reads it as merely random or experiments but it wasn't, and of course it wasn't. No worthwhile art ever is.
Sure, because it is the meaningless part of what you said and exemplifies the whole softening effort. One can do this softening with any cultural value, and we are all incentivized to under capitalism. This is literally what vaporwave was about. The default Cisco hold music is the greatest vaporwave track because it embodies the brutality of the softening that the subject craves as a haven for comfort in a heartless world. In a sense, corporate purpose-made music is the only genuine vaporwave. This is why vaporwave cannot exist as a living art form. Vaporwave is the art we cannot have. It's the beauty in the brutality. But without the brutality, it's just nothing.
Edit: No you didn't use those words. I was just referencing other comments here and other common takes about vaporwave. I will edit the comment and remove the scare quotes.
Lately its the whole broken transmission / signalwave genre:
https://intertelecom.bandcamp.com/
https://ct57.bandcamp.com/
Once you start getting into the different genres of Vaporwave, you start wondering are you still in Vaporwave? Where does VW end and the subgenres start?
Here's a list of vaporwave subgenres with example albums: http://i.imgur.com/XE8fzLr.jpg
There have been a few new subgenres since that list was published in 2014(?), most notably hardvapour [sic] and metrosong.