The Consumerist Nostalgia Fantasy that is Vaporwave

A seminal classic.

A washed-out pink background with a black checkerboard sprawling out toward the horizon is juxtaposed with a high-fidelity photo of the bust of Helios sitting in the foreground, while a low-res image of a city skyline plays against the glistening ocean at sunset.

This eclectic mix of imagery is the cover art for Vektroid’s Floral Shoppe (フローラルの専門店), released under her one-time alias Macintosh Plus (MACプラス) on December 9th, 2011.

In 2014 this album, in particular the song Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing (リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー), was propelled to internet fame at the forefront of the emerging vaporwave genre. It took easy-listening pop melodies, interlaced them with slow, stretched synths, cut and looped a host of vocal samples, and released them out into the world of music in the form of a lumbering aural Frankenstein.

And it was so fucking good.

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Vaporwave

Vaporwave traces its origins to chillwave and art pop, combining them with a cynical veneer of post-irony that resonates with children of the 90's. It's an exploration of the false nostalgia evoked within us from an era none of us lived in, while also being a commentary on the throwaway consumerism of the twenty-first century. Vaporwave is to music what pop art was to the visual arts.

It made its mark by taking on the remnants of other genres and amalgamating them into a cornucopia of violet lights and echoing synths, played against pop vocal samples that have become so ubiquitous as to be part of the cultural framework of the modern West.

Vaporwave, as Floral Shoppe came to define, is music designed to be ignored. It sits at the edge of your awareness, the half-forgotten sounds of decades past played against each other fleetingly, never firm enough for the conscious mind to firmly grasp. It pushes you out with banality only to pull you back in, creating a trancelike state truer to the grind of daily life.

It's that grind that resonates most with young people growing up in the throes of late-stage capitalism, where the happy veneer of 80’s prosperity has been usurped by the slow, inexorable push for productivity in a world now dominated by big data and machines.

The 80’s that never was

Vaporwave plays off the tropes that come from the idea of the 80’s – the bright Pepsi commercials, the palm trees swaying in the summer breeze, the revived notion of the plaza and the rise of mall culture.

The genre itself, however, takes these tropes and turns shows how hollow they are on their own merits.

The musicality in vaporwave, though not always aurally pleasing, exists to make a political point on the destruction of humanity through consumerism and hyper-capitalism. It’s a sardonic nod to the corporate propaganda pumped out in advertisements of every shape, colour and size and plastered to the walls of shopping centres across the world, exhorting us to buy, buy, buy.

The wry humour behind much of the genre belies a critique of the world that stemmed from the careless overconsumption of the 80s, and seems to argue for an accelerationist approach as the only viable solution.

Vaporwave rapidly extended out of music and into the visual to become an aesthetic that was synonymous with mid-2010’s online culture. It became a jarring fusion of marble statues and crude low-polygon 3D models set against backgrounds of neon, all covered with artificial graphical artefacts and VHS blur.  

And all of it was a cry for help from a generation that never experienced the past, and felt as though they would never experience the future.

Nothing says 'vaporwave' like Japanese script, crude 3D dolphins, and purple.

 

The future that never came to be

Vaporwave drew on what we wanted the 80’s to be – all neon purple, bright, brash, and offering an optimistic vision of the future that never came to be.

It’s no surprise that vaporwave consumers were predominantly born in the 90s, too late to experience the gleaming promised land of aerobics exercise championships and retrofuturism, and just in time to live through the Cambrian explosion of technology and a war on terror.

Vaporwave follows in the footsteps of other speculative fiction genres like raygun gothic or atompunk, showing audiences what might have been. It was developed by a generation that looked with longing at a time when the future must have still seemed bright, and we would have hovercars by 2000, and maybe the world wouldn’t become an Orwellian dystopia.

The aesthetic may have lost its popularity as synthwave and mumble rap gained prevalence, but vaporwave did something that not many genres have been able to accomplish – it merged the angst and cognitive dissonance of an entire generation with the consumerist fantasies peddled by megacorporate entities, and turned it into something incredible.