dear weirdos, summer is here! and to mesummer means cruising in my car, along the seaside, during sunset, whilelistening to '80s smooth jazz tracks *aaah* except the fact that the seaside is probably an 8-bit background, and the car is from an old vhs tape, and i'm actuallylistening to vaporwave. and i also after 30 degrees, but that's another problem, let's talk about vaporwave.
Takarazuka Theater, i don't want to provide you with a historyof the genre, or give you a lecture about who's a legit vaporwave artist ornot. i want to try and answer this question with you: what does vaporwave mean?i'm using vaporwave here as an umbrella term for a new type of aesthetic$. oh sorry.
a e s t h e t i c. that's the problem when talking about aesthetics: it is not a concept, eitheryou feel it or you don't. so vaporwave is not just a new type ofmusic or art, it is a new approach, a new sensibility towards pop culture and therecent past in particular. vaporwave is but a stream in the big big ocean ofthe internet culture so it's good sense that they share some basic traits. firstit's not always clear whether it's serious content or it's a joke. becausetraditionally you have this clear division between serious content youdidn't laugh about
and then afterwards jokes about said seriouscontent, while nowadays on the internet jokes are often about other jokes andthis means that jokes are serious content themselves.internet jokes often have a sad, bitter or outright cynical and vulgar core,probably because we have understood as internet users that online you cannotsolve real life problems, you can just deal with them, you can express them, in alight and bright form, so that you can carry them with you and not suffer thatmuch, but in this way you are preventing yourself from tryingand #ã§@ try solving them at least in your mind and this means we live in a verycynical world. second, partially connected
to the first point: it is always aboutgoing meta. it is always a reference about a reference about a reference aboutanother reference. in order to understand one single internet joke you mightneed very different types of cultural capital.and third, it evolves so quickly and dies out very quickly. vaporwave wasdeclared dead about four to five years ago but don't we agree to disagree? moreon this later. for now let's start with the basics, which means:if you want to understand something first read the name tag. thank you school teachers. vaporwave as a word isderived from the word vaporware. vaporware in computer industry, bothsoftware and hardware, is a product which
has been officially announced but neverproduced never released, nor officially cancelled. so it is the annunciation of aproduct but also the remains of it. it's very fascinating that if it doesn'texist it doesn't matter anymore if it's from the past or from the future.in this sense vaporwave could be considered a form of retro-futurism.retro-futurism is a form of aesthetic$ that it's about the future as it usedto be, as we used to imagine it in the past. in this case vaporwave talks aboutthe future as we once saw it in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s as a multimedialreality. i personally consider vaporwave yet another reincarnation of surrealism,because it follows the rules of the
"exquisite corpse" game: taking visual or musical elements out of their original context, chopping them, mixingthem, changing them, and then putting them together and watching them acquire a newmeaning. but we can even go further back, to when evensurrealism began, or has its roots at least. pre-romanticism, and the love18th century europe had for ruins. ruins are peculiar element of the landscape.they have survived the civilization which created them so they have to bere-contextualized, they are forced to be put in a new context, and they may... ignite different emotive reactions in the viewer.
you can feel a sort of gloomor fear while walking among ruins because things have died there; or youcan feel nostalgia for how humanity used to be; or you can feel a purely mentalenjoyment because of their oddity as opposed to the familiarity of nowadaysarchitecture, and this is what we call or at least used to call the picturesque. itis not a case that broken or intact roman and greek statues are everywhere in vaporwave art, much like ruins where everywhere in european art from the endof the 18th to the start of the 19th century. but what is the most prominent typeof ruins today, when everything is virtual? dreams. dreams from the past,dreams about the future. multimedial
dreams, when consumerism, globalization,communications would give us a future of endless hedonism and youth. consumerismapparently has its own arcadia and it's set in the 80s and 90s of the lastcentury. and this is where retro-futurism and surrealismreally kick in. so all these multimedial debris from the end of the last centuryis brought together...and how does it look like? painfully unsophisticated. the colors really hurt your eyes, the rendering isembarrassing, and the sounds are muffled open on purpose. so yes it is a big i can'tbelieveidressedthatway to everything we considered cool 20 yearsago, but it's not so simple. vaporwave is
not just a rediscovery of what we oncethought was cool, because today we are producing material which sounds andlooks uncool on purpose, so if we are producing new fake debris fromyesterday it means that it tells us something about who we are. if you breakone rule you are probably ignorant, if you break them all you are verysophisticated and perhaps you have a purpose. emotional responses to theunsophisticated sophistication of vaporwave can be very complex and ambiguous and mixed, but i have tried to find some basic poles of attraction forour heart when we look and listen to vaporwave art. first, humor. it's kitsch, youremember your once thought it was lit, you are
embarrassed and it feels awkward and youlaugh you laugh out of a sort of bitter and amused embarrassment. and you try to make it even worse if you can. or it can be eerie, or disquieting, or gloomy. i haveread somewhere that vaporwave has this characteristic of bringing togethervirtual debris from the recent past and turning them in an open door to atranscendent dimension of our heart, it turns them into something mystical. and ithink it is true. it's like a memento mori, or a ghost in the shell movie. (but not the last one, not the...) and third, we can feel nostalgia. we can make a dip into the past
and yearn for that complete naivety andthat full expectations again. cynicism is the last resort of the sentimentalsafter all. it helps that the 80s 90s and early 2000 are the timewhen the great part of those who nowadays engage in vaporwave werechildren, and so the collective naivete of an era is sealed to the individualnaivete of childhood, for many of us, a childhood made of old movies, video games,and windows 95 errors. so what is that feels equally funny disquieting andnostalgic? the dissolution of meaning. the dissolution of meaning we once fueledinto the products we bought. i can't believe i gave to those goods those messages, thosemeanings, those hopes. i can't believe
those hopes i had fell out of fashion.and so what can we do? we can laugh about our past naivete, or we can long for itagain, or find in this dissolution a disquieting message about humanity as a transient being. alas poor yorick. but what does vaporwave mean to you? and what kind ofmoods does it convey to you? music-wise my personal favorites arelate night lo-fi, which is the - i slept all night on the floor in ginza inthe middle of the street because i was waiting for the takarazuka theater to beopen and homeless people were looking at me as if i was a ghost and i didn't knowwhat the heck i bought at the konbini - kind of music. i might tell you aboutthis someday. and also my first favorite.
future funk. imagine an endless 80s 90sanime ending. tokyo at night which was celebrated somuch in the anime from the 80s and 90s, something which nowadays doesn'thappen so so often, and you see that tokyo is not anymore a place of hopesand expectations, but in those times it actually was, and you are like therecaught in that moment forever. remember guys. the past might be past but thenostalgia the last forever.
dear weirdos, summer is here! and to mesummer means cruising in my car, along the seaside, during sunset, whilelistening to '80s smooth jazz tracks *aaah* except the fact that the seaside is probably an 8-bit background, and the car is from an old vhs tape, and i'm actuallylistening to vaporwave. and i also after 30 degrees, but that's another problem, let's talk about vaporwave.
Takarazuka Theater, i don't want to provide you with a historyof the genre, or give you a lecture about who's a legit vaporwave artist ornot. i want to try and answer this question with you: what does vaporwave mean?i'm using vaporwave here as an umbrella term for a new type of aesthetic$. oh sorry.
a e s t h e t i c. that's the problem when talking about aesthetics: it is not a concept, eitheryou feel it or you don't. so vaporwave is not just a new type ofmusic or art, it is a new approach, a new sensibility towards pop culture and therecent past in particular. vaporwave is but a stream in the big big ocean ofthe internet culture so it's good sense that they share some basic traits. firstit's not always clear whether it's serious content or it's a joke. becausetraditionally you have this clear division between serious content youdidn't laugh about
and then afterwards jokes about said seriouscontent, while nowadays on the internet jokes are often about other jokes andthis means that jokes are serious content themselves.internet jokes often have a sad, bitter or outright cynical and vulgar core,probably because we have understood as internet users that online you cannotsolve real life problems, you can just deal with them, you can express them, in alight and bright form, so that you can carry them with you and not suffer thatmuch, but in this way you are preventing yourself from tryingand #ã§@ try solving them at least in your mind and this means we live in a verycynical world. second, partially connected
to the first point: it is always aboutgoing meta. it is always a reference about a reference about a reference aboutanother reference. in order to understand one single internet joke you mightneed very different types of cultural capital.and third, it evolves so quickly and dies out very quickly. vaporwave wasdeclared dead about four to five years ago but don't we agree to disagree? moreon this later. for now let's start with the basics, which means:if you want to understand something first read the name tag. thank you school teachers. vaporwave as a word isderived from the word vaporware. vaporware in computer industry, bothsoftware and hardware, is a product which
has been officially announced but neverproduced never released, nor officially cancelled. so it is the annunciation of aproduct but also the remains of it. it's very fascinating that if it doesn'texist it doesn't matter anymore if it's from the past or from the future.in this sense vaporwave could be considered a form of retro-futurism.retro-futurism is a form of aesthetic$ that it's about the future as it usedto be, as we used to imagine it in the past. in this case vaporwave talks aboutthe future as we once saw it in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s as a multimedialreality. i personally consider vaporwave yet another reincarnation of surrealism,because it follows the rules of the
"exquisite corpse" game: taking visual or musical elements out of their original context, chopping them, mixingthem, changing them, and then putting them together and watching them acquire a newmeaning. but we can even go further back, to when evensurrealism began, or has its roots at least. pre-romanticism, and the love18th century europe had for ruins. ruins are peculiar element of the landscape.they have survived the civilization which created them so they have to bere-contextualized, they are forced to be put in a new context, and they may... ignite different emotive reactions in the viewer.
you can feel a sort of gloomor fear while walking among ruins because things have died there; or youcan feel nostalgia for how humanity used to be; or you can feel a purely mentalenjoyment because of their oddity as opposed to the familiarity of nowadaysarchitecture, and this is what we call or at least used to call the picturesque. itis not a case that broken or intact roman and greek statues are everywhere in vaporwave art, much like ruins where everywhere in european art from the endof the 18th to the start of the 19th century. but what is the most prominent typeof ruins today, when everything is virtual? dreams. dreams from the past,dreams about the future. multimedial
dreams, when consumerism, globalization,communications would give us a future of endless hedonism and youth. consumerismapparently has its own arcadia and it's set in the 80s and 90s of the lastcentury. and this is where retro-futurism and surrealismreally kick in. so all these multimedial debris from the end of the last centuryis brought together...and how does it look like? painfully unsophisticated. the colors really hurt your eyes, the rendering isembarrassing, and the sounds are muffled open on purpose. so yes it is a big i can'tbelieveidressedthatway to everything we considered cool 20 yearsago, but it's not so simple. vaporwave is
not just a rediscovery of what we oncethought was cool, because today we are producing material which sounds andlooks uncool on purpose, so if we are producing new fake debris fromyesterday it means that it tells us something about who we are. if you breakone rule you are probably ignorant, if you break them all you are verysophisticated and perhaps you have a purpose. emotional responses to theunsophisticated sophistication of vaporwave can be very complex and ambiguous and mixed, but i have tried to find some basic poles of attraction forour heart when we look and listen to vaporwave art. first, humor. it's kitsch, youremember your once thought it was lit, you are
embarrassed and it feels awkward and youlaugh you laugh out of a sort of bitter and amused embarrassment. and you try to make it even worse if you can. or it can be eerie, or disquieting, or gloomy. i haveread somewhere that vaporwave has this characteristic of bringing togethervirtual debris from the recent past and turning them in an open door to atranscendent dimension of our heart, it turns them into something mystical. and ithink it is true. it's like a memento mori, or a ghost in the shell movie. (but not the last one, not the...) and third, we can feel nostalgia. we can make a dip into the past
and yearn for that complete naivety andthat full expectations again. cynicism is the last resort of the sentimentalsafter all. it helps that the 80s 90s and early 2000 are the timewhen the great part of those who nowadays engage in vaporwave werechildren, and so the collective naivete of an era is sealed to the individualnaivete of childhood, for many of us, a childhood made of old movies, video games,and windows 95 errors. so what is that feels equally funny disquieting andnostalgic? the dissolution of meaning. the dissolution of meaning we once fueledinto the products we bought. i can't believe i gave to those goods those messages, thosemeanings, those hopes. i can't believe
those hopes i had fell out of fashion.and so what can we do? we can laugh about our past naivete, or we can long for itagain, or find in this dissolution a disquieting message about humanity as a transient being. alas poor yorick. but what does vaporwave mean to you? and what kind ofmoods does it convey to you? music-wise my personal favorites arelate night lo-fi, which is the - i slept all night on the floor in ginza inthe middle of the street because i was waiting for the takarazuka theater to beopen and homeless people were looking at me as if i was a ghost and i didn't knowwhat the heck i bought at the konbini - kind of music. i might tell you aboutthis someday. and also my first favorite.
future funk. imagine an endless 80s 90sanime ending. tokyo at night which was celebrated somuch in the anime from the 80s and 90s, something which nowadays doesn'thappen so so often, and you see that tokyo is not anymore a place of hopesand expectations, but in those times it actually was, and you are like therecaught in that moment forever. remember guys. the past might be past but thenostalgia the last forever.