Vaporwave: The Soundtrack to the Internet

An Aesthetic Examined

Vaporwave is difficult to write about, because it is difficult to determine what precisely it is. It’s a music genre, it’s an internet joke, it’s a bizarre aesthetic. It’s both devoid of meaning, yet full of it; ironic but serious. Most people come across vaporwave in snippets, if they come across it at all. A meme on Twitter, a music video recommended to them on YouTube, a soothing pink-blue image on Reddit. Vaporwave is available only on the internet, not in real life. Its inspirations are real; dilapidated malls, 1980s techno-orientalism, classical statues, but vaporwave itself is not. It has leaked out into the real world. You might see a vaporwave t-shirt, or a vinyl record of vaporwave music, but the idea of vaporwave is stubbornly confined to the internet. When you see vaporwave in real life, it is just a simulacrum, pure vaporwave only exists on the net.

Attempting any kind of definitive history of vaporwave is futile. Determining any genealogy is difficult enough, but the task becomes impossible when it comes to a movement birthed in the dark, deep corners of the internet. Pointing to one obscure blog or defunct forum as the origin point does not get us anywhere. An etymology is possible, however. The name ‘vaporwave’ comes from ‘vaporware’ a term from the computer industry meaning a product, usually software, that is announced to the public, but is never released, never manufactured or very late – it disappears like vapour. Knowing the origins of a word is useful but what really gets us somewhere is locating some early milestones in vaporwave’s history. Vaporwave is first and foremost a genre of music. The rest of the aesthetic, its strange, disconnected signifiers and unique visual style stems from the music – vaporwave looks as it sounds. So how does it sound?

Probably the earliest vaporwave album is Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 by American musician Daniel Lopatin. Lopatin would later go on to gain fame as the composer of the soundtrack for Uncut Gems but Eccojams is arguably his most influential work as it would help to spawn an entire musical genre. Eccojams, and vaporwave as a whole incorporates many elements of what is called ‘plunderphonics’. Coined by John Oswald in his essay ‘Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative’, plunderphonics takes the artistic technique of collage and applies it to music, creating new songs out of already existing music. For his album Lopatin used samples from famous 80s pop music including a Michael Jackson song and Toto’s ‘Africa’. The samples were digitally transformed, however, slowed-down, pitch-shifted, laden with reverb. The hooky nature of many of the original songs vanish, the (momentary) joy they were meant to inspire disappears and is instead replaced by pathos. Yet, the music isn’t depressing – there’s a tropical undertone to everything, but also an emptiness and mystery. It feels like scrolling through your phone late at night, face lit up by blue light, balcony door open and a warm breeze stirring the curtains. It’s more like Michael Mann’s film remake of Miami Vice than the 80s TV original. Lopatin cuts up the musical samples in such a way as to emphasise the existentialism in the lyrics. ‘Africa’ gets reduced to the line ‘hurry boy, she’s waiting there for you’. Song B4 samples a slow-dance romantic ballad and uses the lyrics ‘there’s nobody here/there’s just you and me’ but cuts out their latter half creating what amounts to a bleak cry of despair. The sound of Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 proved to be a blueprint for an entire musical genre, but as did its album art. Adopting the sample-reliant approach of music, the album’s cover features a cropped and manipulated image from Ecco the Dolphin, the 1992 Sega videogame featuring a time-travelling dolphin that fights aliens. Tellingly, Eccojams cuts the videogame hero out of his own videogame cover, and instead features a menacing pixelated shark and a rocky shoreline.

The second of what I consider to be the trio of key vaporwave albums is James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Far Side Virtual sounds like the early to mid-internet, that period somewhere between the computer revolution of the 1990s and Windows XP. It’s clean and corporate. Muzak transformed into music turned into art. Created entirely on Apple’s Garage Band software, in order to achieve that plasticky, ‘cheap, digital sound’ that Ferraro was looking for, the album brings to mind the utopian nightmare of American Beauty; life is so good that unhappiness is the only viable response. Visually, Far Side Virtual touches on the common vaporwave trope of technology, its cover featuring an image of a Manhattan street taken on Google Streetview and iPads with surrealistic collages on them. Musically, the album accosts the listener with a cavalcade of too-jolly synths, computerised voices informing you to take a look at the ‘virtual sushi menu’, corporate jingles and software start-up tones. The effect is numbing and disorientating – critic Jonah Weiner called it ‘antagonizingly, alienatingly, wondrously bland’ – yet there is something magical about it too. In an era of increasingly politicised corporations and postmodern advertising, there’s something to be said about the end of history optimism of 1990s commercial culture; listening to Muzak at the World Trade Center mall must have been a beautiful experience. Ferraro has stated that ‘If you really want to understand Far Side, first off, listen to Debussy and secondly, go into a frozen yogurt shop. Afterwards, go into an Apple store and just fool around, hang out in there. Afterwards, go to Starbucks and get a gift card. They have a book there on the history of Starbucks—buy this book and go home. If you do all these things you'll understand what Far Side Virtual is — because people kind of live in it already.’ Whether you consider this is a day well spent, or vaguely dystopian, is up to you.

It could be fair to call Eccojams and Far Side Virtual a sort of proto-vaporwave. They were the forerunners of the movement, its early adopters, but the seminal vaporwave album, and its defining image, would be Floral Shoppe by American musician Macintosh Plus. If Far Side Virtual was a riff on the 1990s, then Floral Shoppe is a look at 1980s; an 80s that is foggy, at once in the future and in the past, but the 1980s nonetheless. The iconic album cover is neon pink, featuring green Japanese text (a nod to American fears of Japanese economic takeover; see Die Hard for example), a Greek bust of the sun god Helios, and a pre-9/11 New York skyline. This mash up of seemingly incoherent images is pure vaporwave and spawned endless imitative pictures with marble statues, retro OS graphics, palm trees, pastel colours and nighttime cityscapes becoming a staple of the vaporwave aesthetic. Eventually, following the success of the album, and the growth of the genre this aesthetic became separated from the music itself, growing into its own purely visual language of memes and edits. The music on Floral Shoppe is also representative of vaporwave. It combines the nostalgia of Eccojams and its sampling of pop hits with the irony and satire of Far Side Virtual, using the by-now-familiar bag of vaporwave tricks of looping, slowing, reverb and pitch shifting. Like the other two albums, the artist vanishes becoming almost incidental to the music itself. Unlike a singer-songwriter album where the artist is the music, here the art disappears behind the music and into a haze of ironic corporatism and pre-millennial nostalgia. Floral Shoppe like the best vaporwave, has the remarkable ability to create a nostalgia for a time and place that one has never experienced. It doesn’t matter if one didn’t live through the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, vaporwave still creates a nostalgic feeling, a hope for a lost futuristic past. As one commenter under a vaporwave video put it, ‘I'm 26 now, so many memories listening to this when I was 40’. Some critics have described vaporwave as a sort of ‘hypnogogic pop’, dreamy and sedated and surreal – there’s not much other music that can make you feel the way that vaporwave does and that’s what makes it special.

Vaporwave coheres as a genre of music; it coheres as an aesthetic; but does it cohere as anything else? What, if anything, is vaporwave trying to say? Musicologists and critics have tried to get to the heart of this question, but as is often the case, their jargon and over-analysis confuses rather than illuminates. Vaporwave itself is ambiguous about many things, chiefly its own seriousness. Are the depictions of commercialism and capitalism a dire warning or gentle satire, or perhaps, genuinely admiring? Any answer can be read into vaporwave. A Marxist interpretation is popular amongst critics and it argues that the genre is a critique of the excesses of capitalism. That is certainly a viable reading, especially for the earlier examples of the genre. There is a loneliness and emptiness present in much of the best vaporwave that showcases the alienation that capitalism can bring, melting all that is solid into air.

Yet, there is also a hint of celebration in vaporwave, connected to the philosophy of accelerationism. Influenced by philosophers like Nick Land, accelerationists believe in a speeding up and intensification of capitalism and technology. ‘Bring it on!’ they say, and vaporwave says that well – it has more than a whiff of Marc Andreesen’s reactionary futurism. There’s a beauty and excitement in the best of both capitalism and technology that is unparalleled. Left-wing critics rail against it, but they conveniently forget that their ideal societies were ones of enormous aesthetic and spiritual ugliness. Mao’s China never produced something as stunning as the Downey McDonald’s, let alone Trump Tower.  If you depict something long enough you start to love it. Vaporwave may have started out critiquing capitalism but these days it is broadly sympathetic. The irony has worn off, the parody has dropped and left us with YouTube mixes celebrating 1980s offices and Windows 95. That’s a sign of vaporwave reaching a creative dead-end. Vaporwave has not waned, but it has certainly stagnated. Brief micro-genres like mallsoft, fashwave, and Simpsonwave cannot revive it. Yet, vaporwave’s existence is still remarkable. From humble internet origins it grew to have real cultural influence. For many people, including myself, there are moments when only vaporwave can hit the spot, so I for one am glad that it had the success that it did. And hey, ten years, is a pretty good run for something that started as an ironic parody.

This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.