What am I missing here?! Is this Mallsoft or is it Late Night LOFI? I can't tell I'm trying to reconnect with my son
but all he cares about is aesthetics Have you or a loved one ever found
yourselves in one of these scenarios? my name is Pinkas and I'm here to help
it is my belief that every man woman and child should have the opportunity to understand
and appreciate great art This great education system of ours has failed when
it comes to the teachings of vaporwave and I'm here to make things
comprehensible for you I've taken an online course and watched over three
videos on the subject so let me help me help you. Call the number on the screen
and plan an appointment with my secretary and remember better sub to
Pinkas the vaporwave subgenres have become so
numerous and distinct that it's close to a joke at this point however I will try
my best to differentiate the biggest ones and provide some examples for each
genre I just want to start off by saying that I'm not very knowledgeable about
music theory or any type of actual musical history but I know how to Google
and you guys have been asking so let me provide. I'm also of course gonna include
some notes about the aesthetics for each genre as that is more of my "expertise" euuhh...
what I'm known for at least First let's start off with what's not vaporwave often associated with the vaporwave
because of its similarity but being it's entirely own unique genre we have "Synthwave" mainly influenced by French house and synth-heavy movie soundtracks
from the 80s by artists like Vangelis and John Carpenter. Synthwave was born
around the mid-2000s by artists like Kavinsky, College and Justice while
others had dabbled with similar styles before it's these artists that
introduced the pure Synthwave style that we think of today, it became popular around
the same time as a vaporwave greatly contributing to the confusion between
the genres. Synthwave started reaching the mainstream after the release of the
movie Drive that had a soundtrack which consisted of synthwave music, most
famously "nightcall" by Kavinsky and "A real hero" by Electric Youth and College the music feels more like pop than vaporwave, it's less reliable on samples and more minimalistic in terms of effects
and processing it also consists of original compositions and tend to have a
faster tempo than vaporwave along with more high fidelity sound than vaporwave's lo-fi aesthetic and of course the music is mostly based around
hard-hitting 80s Synths. I've already gone into depths about the outrun aesthetic
which is the equivalent of synthwave. I did that in my video called the vaporwave vs. outrun but if for some unexplainable reason you haven't seen
that yet just think of retro sports cars, long
dark grids, wireframe mountains and a bright orange / yellow Sun. if you have
ever ventured into the depths of YouTube recommendations after listening to some
vaporwave your Future Funk you've probably come across Mariya Takeuchi's - plastic love this song almost single-handedly revived
the genre that is city pop, Japanese pop music from the late 70s and 80s inspired
by American pop music and genres like R&B, funk and soft rock. City pop came out
of the boom that was the Japanese- -economy during the 80s, years that were
defined by optimism and positivity towards the future. The genre is more
defined by which feelings it evokes rather than strict genre rules, mellow
and calming tones sound similar to muzak- or background music, transporting us to
an entertaining night out in the city- were fancy restaurants and clubs were
the destination for evening. "City Pop"s name comes from the lyrics often
referencing an urban lifestyle along- with the artwork that often also
appreciated this rich and prosperous daily life of the new capitalistic
Japan. The aesthetics used in Citypop are defined by a chill calming vibe,
summery feel and the urban lifestyle some of the most influential artists
contributing to the city pop aesthetic are Hiroshi Nagai and Eizin Suzuki,
japanese illustrator creating album covers for some of the biggest city pop
labels in japan. Summery artwork inspired by California and the West Coast, palm trees, American cars and all around chill vibes, these have been reused and
repurposed in recent years for the Vaporwave and Future Frank aesthetic
respectively, Future Frank producers also have a habit of sampling city pop songs
and artists which can explain why people tend to
associate city pop with vaporwave now that that's out of the way let's get
back to what this video is really about..."vaporwave"... the origins of vaporwave can almost be
traced back to one single person and that person is Daniela Lopatin aka Oneothrix
point never aka sunset Corp aka Chuck Person aka Chuck the duck...okay okay I
made that last one up Lopatin a big fan of Plunderphonics started his vaporwave venture by releasing music clips onto YouTube under the pseudonym sunsetcorp
back in 2009, not long after he came out with the album Chuck Person's ecocojams
vol. 1 the name and album art was inspired by the video game Ecco the
Dolphin, everybody's favorite dolphin the album has been hailed as pretty much the
origin point of everything we- consider vaporwave today and while
still relevant Eccojams now refers to a specific type
of vaporwave music that tried to capture the essence of this groundbreaking album,
chopped up distorted pop samples being repeated sometimes throughout the entire
song rather than smooth transitions between
different samples and rhythms echo jams- often use hard cuts: while subgenres like Future Funk tends
to speed up an old Japanese pop song and stay with that speed for the rest of the
song eccojams will mainly slow down the song
but also change the speed of the song multiple times during playback making it
sound heavily eerie and distorted some other notable effects in the genre are
heavy use of reverb glitching echo and distortion the aesthetics of echo jams
are mostly defined by the projects of Daniel Lopatin; the Chuck Pierce eccojams release and the sunsetcorp music videos the eccojams album has some
pretty distinctive visuals featuring distorted graphics that has been put
together to look like the cover of Ecco the Dolphin for Sega CD. Media fired one
prevalent eccojams producer also has a profile pic on discogs that suggests
an underwater video game influence, could- this also be a place where seapunk and
vaporwave crossed over for the first time We know that eccojams was released
around one year before the tweet that- launched seapunk was ever made,
so maybe vaporwave or eccojams as it- was called during the time actually
played a part in the creation of seapunk? that question is gonna become too much
to handle in this video so let's get back to sunsetcorp, the video's
release on this youtube channel mostly consists of video clips taken from old
80's and 90's commercials and then adding heavy glitch and distort
effects to them as well as looping it almost like if you were playing in back
on that VHS cassette that your little sister spilled milk in cereal all over
before throwing it out the window and then you had to go out and look for it
because they'd do anything to see this sexy boy again Lopatin refers to the
theme of these videos as bizarre science- fiction which can be contributed to the
eccojams genre as a whole among those who strayed the furthest away from
the light of vaporwave we have vaportrap having its roots in trap and
hip-hop music this specific style started emerging from the vaporwave
umbrella mainly because of one artist Blank Banshee. The genre was established when Blank Banshee released the album blank
Banshee 0 in 2012, while perhaps one of the genres that sounds the least like
traditional vaporwave it still has some rather vaporwave'y
characteristics, the sample usage is very similar to what we were used to from
vaporwave slowing down and pitch shifting startup
sounds from a Macintosh retro video game sound effects and popular culture but
adding those hard-hitting trap beats while some parts of the Blank Banshee
album can be hard to argue as fitting inside the term Vaporwave there is
definitely Vaporwave themes throughout also there's the album cover the face of
Lara Croft on top of a neon colored gradient imagery that feels right at
home with established vaporwave artwork the aesthetics tend to be closely
associated to this Blank Banshee release early computer graphics along
with some retro computer symbols or shortcuts especially from old Microsoft
OS or just computers themselves some glitch effects are also highly encouraged
along with rather mismatching imagery combining this digital world with the
real world similar to the jokey genre of vapormeme where you just slap anything
closely related to Greek statues and pastel colors and make some artwork out
of it. Blank Banshee started off in theband Shinjuku Mad. (I hope I said that right) his role was producing and mixing what
his friend Curtis Ferguson did the vocals and songwriting among the songs the duo released we have this song called resistor (SHINJUKU MAD - RESISTOR) that Blank Banshee would later remix and
release as the now legendary song Dreamcast At the spot for the most party-friendly of the subgenres we have Future Funk, generally consisting of
sped up disco and pop songs from the 80s and early 90s, with heavy ties to
Japanese city pop music and anime originally inspired by European house
music acts such as Daft Punk's discovery album songs consisting of a high tempo
at around 128 bpm featuring phat disco bass lines together with chopped up
looped samples from the chorus of a song creating an almost euphoric feeling
where only the best part of the song gets played over and over again, the
samples usually originate from Japanese- Citypop or western disco from the 80s
the popularity of future Frank has also brought some hate towards the genre it's
commonly referred to as easy to make being lowbrow and lacking depth A fair point I agree, but it's my interpretation
that future funk has a strong bond to aestheticism itself whereas a aestheticism
is the appreciation of art for art's sake where it doesn't need to serve a
political or moral or other purpose Future Funk does the same with audio, it
doesn't try to tell you some political message about capitalism or communism, it
isn't there to give you a deeper meaning of life or really any substance, it's joy
in its purest form it's music meant to be enjoyed and only that, it takes you to
a state of bliss and keeps you there with your anime girlfriend and all of
Jackson 5 cheering you on while you rock the dance floor. The future Frank
aesthetic is mostly inspired by anime and some disco, I'm gonna go out on a
limb here and say that this anime aesthetic it was mostly headlined by MACROSS82-99
and Yung Bae both using anime
straight out of the gate Macross being the first with his 2013 album "sailorwave" taking artwork from the anime Sailor Moon and Yung Bae coming a year
later with BAE a lot of the albums these guys made set
the standard for what future Frank would eventually look
like in the future music videos usually consists of a repeated gif from a
classic anime show a girl dancing or a glimpse into a big city Utopian Virtual sounds like the background music you would hear while
playing through SimCity 3000 it all started with James Ferraro's "farside
virtual" and early vaporwave release that was inspired by simulation video
games like Second Life in Sim City along with the capitalist world of Starbucks
Apple and New York City a very clean sound consisting of simple piano
arpeggios and samples taken from- computer software and games during the
late 90s and early 2000s, it embodies the retro futuristic fantasy utopia we've
seen in these games it has a rather positive and calming vibe to it
something too good to be true yet- remains emotionless and distant with the
corporate aesthetic. James Ferraro- is quoted as saying that the album farside
virtual was inspired by ringtones and that he songs were supposed to be released
as them as well, they never were but we can hear the influence of old pylophonic ringtones the aesthetics of this genre tends to be
focused around early 3d graphics and imagery that looks too plasticy and
clean to be realistic while in 3d software today we have
detailed roughness displacement and normal maps to help us get those
realistic creases and imperfections on our models and graphics the art from
utopian virtual is clearly inspired by the age where that wasn't the standard
graphic that looks so clean that it doesn't appear real, belonging more in
a computer simulation. typical themes in the artwork are luxury, big city
lifestyle, penthouse apartments and palm trees if you have ever found yourself in
the dreamlike state inside an empty nineties futuristic shopping mall then
the music you would hear from the speakers would probably be Mallsoft,
jazzy chill lounge vibes based on muzak ake background or elevator music, it
shares some similarities with utopian virtual as they both have that
background music feel to them as well as taking place in a hyper capitalist
dreamworld, mallsoft typically consists of looping tracks that doesn't really go
anywhere but keeping us in a hypnotized and relaxed state it's music
that's played for us but not actively listen to the music is often processed
so it sounds like it's coming from distant and blown out speakers the visuals consists of what you would have
guessed, empty retro shopping malls both 3d renders and real-life pictures the
malls themselves seem to have a lot of green plants within them palm trees are
especially prevalent the images of said malls usually have a distorted filter on
top of them or two, glitchy text is also encouraged some pink purple colors tend
to occur but are not required the same goes for neon lights and Japanese text not to be confused with late-night lo-fi hip hop which is what you would find if
you search for this on the YouTube or most other places on the Internet
late-night lo-fi is a sub-genre of vaporwave that takes samples from the
eighties pop and jazz music and turns the lo-fi dial up a couple of notches as
well as slowing things down especially on something like midnight televisions
self-titled album you can really feel the low quality audio like if the album was
playing through an old CRT TV and then re-recorded from that TV and put onto a
cassettes it feels like something you would see on
your parents TV in between the commercials and late night programming, a
test card of sorts or the teaser for what's coming on later tonight but in a
distorted way the aesthetic is mostly based on these old CRT TV images
low-quality imagery in the 4:3 format probably inspired by the eccojams
aesthetic made by Daniel Lopatin on the sunsetcorp YouTube channel, his
videos for the songs end-of-life entertainment scenario #1 and nobody here
are the perfect examples of this low-quality style the colors tend to be
washed out into a dark smudge of colors because of the heavy filtering and low
quality images some vcr text on top of the screen is also pretty common
replicating old teletext is also a standard thing to do within this
aesthetic style along with the TV schedule screens in general there's a
theme was staring at a TV with nothing on it
and embracing the feeling VHS POP is closely related to late-night lo-fi with
a more positive and upbeat tempo that's about it lofi Jazzy 80s tracks
that are a bit richer in sound than the darker more distorted late-night lofi,
the sound isn't quite as blown out as its late-night counterpart instead of
something that would have come out of a broken old TV with a bad signal we get a
slightly more clean and crisp sound this genre is the closest the vapor wave gets
to synth wave in any way shape or form but compared to synth wave VHS pop is
still a bit slower and lacks those crystal clear synth cords that we
associate with synthwave the perfect example of VHS pop is the album
Palm Haze by Miami Vice one of the more colorful aesthetics vibrant and full of
life just like the music pink is of course a color that tends to
repeat itself along with the bright blue that we've seen so many times before the
cover for Palm haze by Miami Vice is perhaps the most influential and most
known from the genre it closely resembles the cover of Hayao Yamaneko
"rest in paradise" probably being taken from the same source footage, colorful,
dreamy and retro are the key words to VHS pop visuals it's hard to defend Faux-Utopian as a separate sub-genre and I'm not really gonna make an attempt on
arguing for its existence the definition in the image that I'm constructing this
video around states that faux utopian takes the utopian virtual style and
turns it on its head presenting a much darker and more surrealistic vision of a
future that never was, the music takes elements of utopian virtual sometimes
with eccojams techniques and presents it with a darker twist now eco virtual
album atmospheres definitely have some tracks with those darker sounds on it
compared to what you would normally associate with an utopian virtual album
placing Macintosh pluses floral shop under this label also works at least
some of the songs where there's crossover between eccojams and utopian
virtual do sound a bit unsettling it's easy to make some similarities a dark
cyberpunk future when listening to Faux- utopian music, whereas utopian virtual
sells us this utopian fantasy, Faux Utopian tries to sell it but glitches halfway
there and shows us for a few moments that everything is not what it seems.
That's basically how I would sum up Faux- utopian. Very similair to Utopian Virtual, but a bit more unsettling and some eccojams sprinkled
in faux utopian doesn't have a very distinct aesthetic it's mainly
influenced by surreal commercial and corporate imagery, it should be mentioned
that macintosh pluses floral shop was the first album to introduce the Greek
statue as part of vaporwave art something that will be carried over to
almost all the other vaporwave subgenres and vaporwave as a whole
due to the extreme popularity of the song Lisa Frank 420 / modern
computing the song had over 40 million views on YouTube before being taken down by Sony, the most popular version still up today sits at around 8 million views
making it a first impression of vaporwave for a lot of people before we
had vaporwave there was something called hypnagogic pop, hypnagogic pop
is a broad term for a genre of music that psychedelic in nature which draws
heavily from lo-fi analog technology and nostalgic 80's and 90's popular culture
now you might say hey sounds a lot like the discription of vaporwave, well you are correct hypnagogic pop can be considered as a
parent genre of vaporwave both James Ferraro and Daniel Lopatin are considered
pioneers of the hypnagogic pop genre and it is what a majority of their music was
defined us before we got the label vaporwave to put this type of music in now
hypnagogic drift is a version of this type of music with a more ambient
drifting feeling and using the sampling techniques we normally associate with
vaporwave, hypnagogic drift transports you through a dreamlike state
and space it's one of the earliest forms of vaporwave through the album's
Holograms and the self-titled skeleton by skeleton I'm not 100% sure if his
name is actually skeleton there's just some Asian signs here so you know
I just Google translated so yeah if you know please help me out. albums and imagery
tend to be rather surreal and dreamlike very low quality covers similar to eccojams but without the sea and videogame themes because of the influence of
skeletons, telepath and Hong Kong express this genres aesthetic is defined by a
heavy Asian influence as all aforementioned artists use mostly Asian
titles and imagery on their albums that's the video my dudes I have included
some links in the description with my sources and also a spotify playlist for
each genre that you should really check out I know there are more vaporwave subgenres out there like broken transmission and signal noise it's just
that the video would be way too long and I've already wasted enough time
on on making it but who knows maybe I'll make a part two you one day. I didn't make
this video to narrow the field of what vaporwave is or what type of art you can
make but rather help you if you really like that SimCity vaporwave music but
never knew where to find more of it or you loved the late night lofi aesthetic
but didn't know what it was called. I hope this has been somewhat educating
and entertaining and I would really appreciate it if you left a like on
the video I mean you don't have to if you feel like the video was garbage but
you know it helps the channel out it helps me out and it makes me feel like I
didn't just waste 200 hours on making this long-ass video alright thanks for
watching that's all for now and stay tuned for more vapor goodness
