Vaporwave — Down the Rabbit Hole

when browsing online it's common to find commenters referencing and linking to videos containing a strange and exotic style of music usually as a tongue-in-cheek joke this music always has an undeniable 80s or 90s theme to it but instead of being upbeat the tracks are stretched and modified with heavy reverberation to give it a distant atmospheric feeling the music is often paired with imagery depicting retro style 3d computer graphics with VHS post-processing effects new listeners will often note how Pleasant yet eerie it is and frequently solicit more what these people usually don't expect to find is an enthusiastic community dedicated to an extremely recent form of music which they have dubbed vaporwave and it's difficult to tell the degree of irony behind this enthusiasm so the question is what exactly is vaporwave the man popularly credited with starting the vaporwave genre as an American named Daniel laputan an electronic music artist with a focus on the noise sub-genre Noise music as its name suggests is an anti art style that recontextualizes any sort of sound as music usually without a beat or melodic structure Wahpeton spent the early 2000s creating Noise music that was much more pleasant to listen to compared to his contemporaries as creations The Village Voice described his music as quote serenity tinged with desolation you however after facing little success in the scene Wahpeton decided to use his audio production abilities towards a different end on July 19th 2009 he uploaded three videos onto his YouTube channel under the name sunset Corp one of these videos called nobody here in all under case letters managed to find minor success in this video he combined a heavily modified version of the song lady in red by Chris de Burgh with an old cheap computer-generated animation the other two videos were very similar with old low fidelity video on top of remixed old songs most who found these videos reacted positively citing how relaxing yet unsettling it felt the next year law patent released an album under the pseudonym Chuck person entitled Chuck person's echo jams Volume one the three songs that had appeared on his sunset Corp YouTube channel were included along with 12 other tracks sampling a wide variety of popular 80's and 90's artists including Phil Collins Janet and Michael Jackson Toto and Fleetwood Mac the album curiously was only released on cassette tapes but this didn't stop people from ripping the cassettes onto the internet la Patton's fascination with commercial media was obvious to the listeners the album's name echo jams is spelled with two C's as a reference to the old Sega Mega Drive game Ecco the Dolphin and the album artwork is a collage of the game's cover art including some of the typeface from the title lobaton's music relied heavily on genre awareness drawing attention to itself by altering the audio to give it a retro quality as well as making it skip as though there was some error in playback though it's difficult to garner any meaningful statistics about people's opinions many listeners interpreted the sedating yet unnerving sound of the remixed pop songs to reflect the sedating and unnerving effects of popular media as well as citing the innocent excitement for the future in a new digital age the community that built around this music was quiet for over a year but this changed with the release of two albums heavily inspired by the derivative works of Daniel Wahpeton on October 25th 2011 James Ferraro released the album far side virtual building upon the self-aware method of Wahpeton he heavily utilized MIDI files that attempted to imitate real instruments but dip deep into the uncanny valley making music that makes no attempt to hide its electronic origins to add to this effect he created the entire album in GarageBand a generic audio editing suite built into Apple computers and I Battaglia of the National online magazine gave his feedback quote the concept for the album in as much as a concept seems to exist stems from second life and SimCity virtual online worlds that play like fantasy video games while focusing on such mundane matters as the accumulation of status and goods Ferraro intended the album to act as a reflection of the modern life he said that quote if you really want to understand farside 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 Farsight virtual is because people kind of live in it already the unsettling feeling of la patents work resonated through Ferrara's farside virtual as well with music critics praising it for its criticism of and fascination with a wanton ly corporate society while James Ferraro popularized the style to the critics another artist gave this still unnamed genre a stronger appeal on the Internet on December 9th of 2011 just over a month after the release of far side virtual an electronic artist named Ramona Xavier released the album floral shop under the pseudonym Macintosh Plus this album returned to the remixed and derivative style of Wahpeton but in a way that was more accessible to listeners untrained by Noise music and it was quickly passed around online even though a still lacked conventional appeal perhaps the most immediately odd feature was that all of the song names were in Japanese even though Xavier is American and the album was comprised of remixes of western songs and was released to a Western audience however when translated one of Xavier songs reads chill diving with echo a nod to law patents 2010 release the album cover specifically replicated the 90s PC aesthetic with striking yet soft colors while the album itself conjured images of the 90s while remaining definitely distinct from it Jonathan Dean a critic for tiny mixtapes calm remarks about floral shop that quote it took pop music nearly a century to catch up to the idea of the found art object here he refers to a style of art from the 1910s that took mundane objects and recontextualized them as art to challenge its definition in the same way many online critics observed the way that Xavier was taking old music and recontextualizing it into a later time period so it could be understood differently as both a criticism and celebration of nostalgia building on Ferraro's works inspired by the online success of floral shop amateur producers began creating their own derivative music mimicking the style of la baton and xavier by taking tracks from the 80's and 90's slowing them down and adding effects to create a sense of space the barrier to entry was low and a large rush of work was released onto the internet chiefly on the website Bandcamp the visual art to accompany these songs was in keeping with the collage style of all three of the aforementioned progenitor albums appropriating real retro imagery rather than making any themselves as songs were posted the artists struggled to fit a name to the genre and most simply invented something that sounded right though many names were dreamt up there was one that eventually found general use vaporwave this name is very close to the word vaporware a term used in the electronics industry to describe hardware or software that is announced but never released for many it conjured images of empty 90s computer-generated landscapes it was perfect artists began playing with the genre making it difficult to pin a specific set of definitions to it in general however the visual aesthetic stayed the same and macintosh pluses use of the japanese language to help obscure the songs became a trend these artists would mostly attempt to remain anonymous as well perhaps in part due to fear of litigation for sampling the music for whatever reason this anonymity became a central part of the theme of vaporwave and most artists worked under pseudonyms which were often references to 90s computer culture vaporwave artists Wolfenstein OSX expressed his view and vision of vaporwave in one of his videos saying quote it literally was a glorification of stealing other people's art and marketing it under something else with foreign languages another artist under the name VHS de Bodhi winda or VHS tape rewind er explained that quote overall I think the artists want to maintain a mystique and an anonymity that makes it more about the music and what you are presenting than about the person behind it though this counterculture ideal was certainly an element of the appeal it also drew in some who were exhausted with the modern world and the brutal way it disseminates its media artists eco virtual is quoted as saying the whole appeal of vaporwave is its use of remaining unknown that in a world where nothing is private it is refreshing to find something that feels like it was found in the dumpster of a thrift shop where it does not matter where it came from or who made it only that it takes you elsewhere somewhere distant from reality as more music and visuals were created however vaporwave would go from a small curiosity to a wide internet phenomenon as more people discovered the vaporwave genre new artists began making their own vaporwave songs many of them missing the irony that characterized the genre and simply copying the aesthetic and sound this was assisted by the rising popularity of one of the songs from floral shop called visa food n ku4 20 / denden alone queue which most people shortened to lisa frank 420 this song was mostly seen as an odd curiosity but some people ended up enjoying the relaxing droning melody of this rendition of Diana Ross's music most however seemed to see it as a joke and those who did often labeled the people with more enthusiastic interest as pretentious and snobbish band camp was flooded with songs by artists who seemed more interested in creating low-effort works rather than exploring the genre some even tease the community with songs such as vaporwave more like Gaber wave a song which overlaid vaporwave with sounds from a gay pornographic film vaporwave became a meme something to laugh about prod and tease people started pasting the word aesthetic in monotype across online posts and youtube comment sections in dismissal of vaporwave as an obnoxious artsy movement people began to believe that vaporwave was petering out and the phrase vaporwave is dead became a meme unto itself summarily smashed the attention on the genre dissipated as did the interest of many of its fans despite this dismal outlook a significant number of people had discovered a newfound interest thanks to vapor waves spread online the community that remained splintered into smaller groups who created their own subgenres combining the sound of vapor wave with other electronic styles some ironically began creating vapor wave music inspired by the noise sub-genre while others fused it with electronic dance music and techno creating a sound reminiscent of the aesthetics of cyberpunk some artists even abandoned the concept of using pop music as a base preferring to emulate the feeling of vapor wave recontextualizing a style rather than an actual product experimental artists would usually attempt to create new names for their subgenres but they always would tie back to the overarching term of vapor wave much in the way that black metal death metal power metal and many other styles are still considered metal assisting this movement was a new independent music label created in 2014 under the name dream catalog which exclusively released vapor wave and it's numerous subgenres here many important names in the new vapor wave movement were established and as the catalog grew so did the number of people either returning to the genre or finding it for the first time many consider this a coming-of-age period for the genre Gianluca pet in his article test-tube genre explains that quote the new test which vapor wave may be the first to pass is surviving the big squeeze the moment when an idea has its day in the digital Sun if an idea has the legs to stand under the weight of trending on Twitter people will eventually grow bored and leave it alone only then can it truly grow and evolve nurtured by a genuine fan base that think of it as more than a passing fad he goes on to say that vapor wave has undergone an evolution that normally takes a music scene decades to achieve vapor wave also saw minor influences in certain other media for example the game oxen-free features a soundtrack that while not purely vapor wave has strong influences from it Norman the man who wrote the game's soundtrack said quote the vibe was kind of that everything's running through a VHS player 20 times unseen by most of the world vaporwave grew and evolved but at the time pet zooty's article was written there was no way for him to know that a second wave of sudden popularity would threaten the genre again I want you to promise me pay attention in Sunday school a stereo where you wanna listen on February 29th 2016 a YouTube user under the name Lucien Hughes posted a video entitled Sunday School stylized with a familiar monotype font the video chiefly consists of the song teen pregnancy by black Banshee paired with the episode of The Simpsons entitled Bart's girlfriend with VHS tearing and other effects added to give it a vaporwave aesthetic though this wasn't the first Iran eclis humorous video Lucien Hughes had done by pairing vaporwave in the Simpsons it was the first to receive widespread attention and it suddenly became a viral success as of writing Sunday school has nearly 3.2 million views again vaporwave was pulled back into public Internet attention along with the reductionist attitude that had nearly smothered the genre entirely this time however instead of reacting poorly people were taken by the oddly powerful pairing of the music and video perhaps aided by the introduction of a familiar family cartoon Lucian was joined by a number of other youtubers who mimicked his style and these videos received a pretty bullet ention as well none of the music for these videos was original but instead were all appropriated from already produced vaporwave in a sense these videos were recontextualizing music that was already recontextualizing older music the internet was quick to jokingly name this new style of video Simpson wave while some people tease the videos and the people who made them there was a significant portion that defended them and their artistic significance the majority of viewers however seemed more confused than anything else though these Simpson Way videos similarly brought a new audience to view vaporwave the genre did not suffer the same sort of near-death experience as it did during its first rise to fame and so far it seems that this popularity hasn't affected the genre much at all so far except that it has increased the audience though most internet denizens seem to see vaporwave as a joke some would say that it's part of the point of the genre to be self-aware enough to recognize the ridiculousness of nostalgia and taking oneself too seriously however the new vaporwave artists seem also to be interested in creating sonic landscapes and strong emotional responses from their listeners especially as a critical response to modern technological life what the genre will do next is anyone's guess but after surviving its time in the spotlight it seems that it will only continue stronger than ever you hey everyone thanks for watching if you want to help support this series and get your name in the credits you can go to my patreon page I'll leave a link in the description backers get access to exclusive content including audio books and essays on topics covered in down the rabbit hole also keep your eyes peeled for a very special announcement for a very special project I've been working on I'm really excited to show you guys besides that I hope you enjoy the video and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Fredrik Knudsen

Views: 1,189,841

Keywords: Vaporwave, aesthetic, simpsonwave, Wolfenstein OS X, 80s, 90s, music, noise, Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, derivative, recontextualize, recontextualizing, Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro, Ramona Xavier, Oneohtrix Point Never, Vektroid, Lisa Frank 420, Eco Virtual, VHS Tape Rewinder, Dream Catalogue, documentary, dtrh

Id: w_T1nkER3vA

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 08 2016