Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s. It is defined by its mimetic embrace of Internet culture and its sampling of smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s, with the tracks typically manipulated by chopped and screwed techniques and other effects. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.
Originating as an ironic variant of chillwave, vaporwave was loosely derived from the experimental tendencies of the mid-2000s hypnagogic pop scene. The style was pioneered by producers such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin, and Ramona Xavier, who each used various pseudonyms. A circle of online producers were particularly inspired by Xavier’s Floral Shoppe (2011), which established a blueprint for the genre. The movement subsequently built an audience on sites Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan while a flood of new acts, also operating under online pseudonyms, turned to Bandcamp and SoundCloud for distribution. Following the wider exposure of vaporwave in 2012, a wealth of subgenres and offshoots emerged, such as future funk, mallsoft, and hardvapour.
In terms of music aesthetics, the genre can be traced back to a retro culture and fascination through the 1970s to 1990s, especially the 1980s, and sometimes also the early 2000s. Technology, video games, post-modernism, consumer culture as well as the design, advertising and music aesthetics of this period influenced the style, especially at the beginning. The most important musical influences include the Plunderphonics genre, but also Smooth Jazz, New Age, Ambient, Muzak and video game music. Many musicians and critics viewed the genre as a satire, especially when it was written before 2013. Later Vaporwave was increasingly viewed as a separate (satirical) form of criticism of consumption, capitalism or the condition or development of society in general. Still others see the production of Vaporwave simply as an attempt to create a certain mood among the listener; this special “vapor wave feeling” can arise, for example, as a result of indulging in a memory of a past that never existed in the light-heartedness shown or was never experienced, spread out in people. This is particularly evident in the more recent releases, which, in comparison to those of the early days of Vaporwave, are less and less based on samples of pop songs from the 80s.
Since its inception, the genre has become one of the main sources of income for the Bandcamp online record store. Since the genre largely takes place on Internet music platforms such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Reddit, 4chan or Mixcloud and Internet video platforms such as YouTube and only a few “real” events take place, Vaporwave is a spatially decentralized one Music genre for which no clear country of origin or similar can be made out.
Etymology
The term vaporwave is a combination of the words vaporware – software or hardware that was announced to the public and was late or never came on the market – and -wave, a common word ending in the names of music genres.
Characteristics
Vaporwave is an Internet-based microgenre that was built upon the experimental and ironic tendencies of genres such as chillwave and hypnagogic pop. It draws primarily on musical and cultural sources from the 1980s and early 1990s while also being associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and technoculture. The name derives from “vaporware”, a term for commercial software that is announced but never released. Vaporwave is defined largely by its surrounding subculture while its music is inextricable from its visual accountrements. It extends to visual formats as much as it does music and embraces the Internet as a cultural, social, and aesthetic medium. Additionally, it is sometimes suggested to be “first and foremost a visual medium”, as academic Laura Glitsos writes, “In this way, vaporwave defies traditional music conventions that typically privilege the music over the visual form.”
Musically, vaporwave subverts dance music from the 1980s and 1990s. It consists of “brief, cut-up sketches”, cleanly produced, and composed almost entirely from samples, along with the application of slowed-down chopped and screwed techniques, looping, and other effects. Critic Adam Trainer writes of the style’s predilection for “music made less for enjoyment than for the regulation of mood”, such as corporate stock music for infomercials and product demonstrations. Musicologist Adam Harper described the typical vaporwave track as “a wholly synthesised or heavily processed chunk of corporate mood music, bright and earnest or slow and sultry, often beautiful, either looped out of sync and beyond the point of functionality.”
The visual aesthetic (often stylized as “ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ”, with fullwidth characters) incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes, as well as anime, Greco-Roman statues, and 3D-rendered objects. VHS degradation is another common effect seen in vaporwave art. Generally, artists limit their source material between Japan’s economic flourishing in the 1980s and the September 11 attacks or dot-com bubble burst of 2001 (some albums, including Floral Shoppe, depict the intact Twin Towers on their covers).
History
2009–2011: Origins and early scene
Vaporwave originated on the Internet as an ironic variant of chillwave, drawing on the retro style’s “analog nostalgia” as well as the work of hypnagogic pop artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, who were also characterized by the invocation of retro popular culture. “Hypnagogic pop” was coined by Wire journalist David Keenan in August 2009, only a few weeks after “chillwave”, to describe a host of new underground acts who were inspired by the memories of their childhoods in the 1980s. The two terms were often used interchangeably with each other. According to Vice’s Ezra Marcus, vaporwave was one of several short-lived internet genres to emerge during the era: “there was chillwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, vaporwave, cloud rap, and countless other niche sounds with gimmicky names. As soon as one microgenre flamed out, another would take its place, and with it a whole new set of beats, buzz artists, and fashion trends.” Ash Becks of The Essential notes that sites like Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound “seemingly refused to touch vaporwave throughout the genre’s two-year ‘peak’.”
The template for vaporwave came from the albums Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (Daniel Lopatin as “Chuck Person”, August 2010) and Far Side Virtual (Ferraro, October 2011). Eccojams featured chopped and screwed variations on popular 1980s pop songs with album artwork that resembled the packaging of the 1992 video game Ecco the Dolphin, while Far Side Virtual drew primarily on “the grainy and bombastic beeps” of past media such as Skype and the Nintendo Wii. According to Stereogum’s Miles Bowe, vaporwave was a fusion between Lopatin’s “chopped and screwed plunderphonics” and the “nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro’s Muzak-hellscapes”. A 2013 post on a music blog presented those albums, along with Skeleton’s Holograms (November 2010), as “proto vaporwave”.
Inspired by Lopatin’s ideas, suburban teens and young adults used Eccojams as a starting point for what would become vaporwave while drawing on the postmodern, surreal themes explored by Far Side Virtual and Eccojams. Vaporwave artists were “mysterious and often nameless entities that lurk the internet,” academic Adam Harper noted, “often behind a pseudo-corporate name or web façade, and whose music is typically free to download through Mediafire, Last FM, Soundcloud or Bandcamp.” According to Metallic Ghosts (Chaz Allen), the original vaporwave scene came out of an online circle formulated on the site Turntable.fm. This circle included individuals known as Internet Club (Robin Burnett), Veracom, Luxury Elite, Infinity Frequencies, Transmuteo (Jonathan Dean), Coolmemoryz, and Prismcorp. Following the release of Ramona Xavier’s New Dreams Ltd. (credited to “Laserdisc Visions”, July 2011), a number of producers took inspiration from the style, and Burnett used “vaporwave” to tie the disparate group together. Xavier’s Floral Shoppe (credited to “Macintosh Plus”, December 2011) was the first album to be properly considered of the genre, containing all of the style’s core elements.
2010s: Popularity
Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan. After a flood of new acts turned to Bandcamp for distribution, various online music publications such as Tiny Mix Tapes, Dummy and Sputnikmusic began covering the movement. In September 2012, Blank Banshee released his debut album, Blank Banshee 0, which reflected a trend of vaporwave producers who were more influenced by trap music and less concerned with conveying political undertones. Bandwagon called it a “progressive record” that, along with Floral Shoppe, “signaled the end of the first wave of sample-heavy music, and… reconfigured what it means to make vaporwave music.”.
In 2013, YouTube began allowing its users to host live streams, which resulted in a host of 24-hour “radio stations” dedicated to microgenres such as vaporwave. In 2015, Rolling Stone published a list that included vaporwave act 2814 as one of “10 artists you need to know”, citing their album Birth of a New Day (新しい日の誕生, Atarashī Hi no Tanjō). That same year, the album I’ll Try Living Like This by Death’s Dynamic Shroud.wmv was featured at number fifteen on the Fact list “The 50 Best Albums of 2015”, and on the same day MTV International introduced a rebrand heavily inspired by vaporwave and seapunk, Tumblr launched a GIF viewer named Tumblr TV, with an explicitly MTV-styled visual spin. Hip-hop artist Drake’s single “Hotline Bling”, released on July 31, also became popular with vaporwave producers, inspiring both humorous and serious remixes of the tune.
Following the initial wave, new terms for offshoot genres were invented, some of which gesture at the genre’s inherent absurdity, such as “vaportrap”, “vapornoise” and “vaporgoth”. By 2016, according to Bandcamp Daily’s Simon Chandler, vaporwave subgenres included “eccojams”, “utopian virtual”, “mallsoft”, “future funk”, “post-Internet”, “late-nite lo-fi”, “vaportrap”, “broken transmission” (or “signalwave”), “vapornoise” and “hardvapour”.
Vapor Wave as an art form
The aesthetics (aesthetics) called art form and design of the music genre is characterized primarily by Greek busts (or statues), various elements from the 1980s and early 1990s (among other (parts of) computer interfaces and US or Japan typical consumer goods and advertising ) and “vacation motifs” such as palm trees, beaches and sunsets. In terms of color, the pictures are often in neon or pastel colors. Artist and song names consist largely of Japanese characters or monospace characters.
Some design elements, such as antique busts, raster textures or perfect glass bodies, can be traced back to earlier graphics in the area of 3D computer graphics. The three-dimensional scenes were primarily designed by researchers such as John Turner Whitted to demonstrate the properties of the technologies under investigation. In addition to the bizarre aesthetics, it is also the content-related proximity to the motifs of the Vaporwave (for example real-time graphics in video games), which is why genre representatives use this visual language.
Vapor Wave aesthetics in the mass media
In 2015 the international television network MTV replaced its old design with a new design inspired by the two music and art trends Vaporwave and Seapunk, which was largely promoted by the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards.
The blogging platform Tumblr also underwent a rebranding in 2015, in which the page was renewed with a design clearly based on Vaporwave and other music and art styles inspired by the 1990s.
Hardvapor took hold in late 2015, as a reinvention of the genre with darker atmospheres, faster times and heavier sounds. He is influenced by speedcore and gabber, and is considered to be opposite to the aesthetics of vaporwave. According to Rob Arcand, from Vice, the genre is roughly between vaporwave and distroid, writing that similar music software is used within hardvapour “not for some special fixation, but simply because at the moment they are the cheapest and accessible on the market “.
Critical interpretations
Parody, subversion, and genre
Vaporwave was one of several microgenres spawned in the early 2010s that were the brief focus of media attention. Users on various music forums, as quoted by Vice, variously characterized the genre as “chillwave for Marxists”, “post-elevator music”, and “corporate smooth jazz Windows 95 pop”. Its circulation was more akin to an Internet meme than typical music genres of the past, as authors Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth wrote in 2017,
Vaporwave’s cultural practices knowingly replicate and parody the addictive, almost compulsory participation that feeds social networks, where the voluntary labor of the user community drives the system and generates value. Anyone with an Internet connection can produce vaporwave… The uniformity of these memes is encouraged by their rapid imitation among the genre’s hyperactive online subculture, fueled by affective contagion.
Pitchfork contributor Jonny Coleman defined vaporwave as residing in “the uncanny genre valley” that lies “between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that could be real.” Also from Pitchfork, Patrick St. Michel calls vaporwave a “niche corner of Internet music populated by Westerners goofing around with Japanese music, samples, and language”. Vice writer Rob Arcand commented that the “rapid proliferation of subgenres has itself become part of the “vaporwave” punchline, gesturing at the absurdity of the genre itself even as it sees artists using it as a springboard for innovation.”
Vaporwave is often described as a “dead” genre, particularly by a faction of its fans. Music critic Scott Beauchamp wrote that vaporwave’s stance is more focused on loss, the notion of lassitude, and passive acquiescence, and that “vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online”. He suggested that expressions of hypermodulation inspired both the development and downfall of vaporwave. Conversely, Harper wrote in 2017 that the genre’s demise was merely a popular “talking point” and “typical” as a “subcultural narrative of an outside scene killed off by outside observers.”
Speaking about the “supposedly subversive or parodic elements” of vaporwave in 2018, cultural critic Simon Reynolds said that the genre had become redundant, in some respects, to modern trap music and mainstream hip hop. He opined: “What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Their role is redundant. Rap and R&B… is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence.”
In a 2018 Rolling Stone article that reported the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith’s enthusiasm for the genre, author Andy Greene described vaporwave as a “fringe electronic subgenre that few outside irony-soaked meme enthusiasts have even heard of, let alone developed an opinion on.” Nesmith praised the genre and attributed its sound to be highly reminiscent of psychedelic trips.
Consumer capitalism
The genre is cited for espousing an ambiguous or accelerationist relationship to consumer capitalism. Dummy Mag’s Adam Harper wrote in 2012 that “these musicians can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound.” He noted that the name itself was both a nod to vaporware and the idea of libidinal energy being subjected to relentless sublimation under capitalism. Michelle Lhooq of Vice argued that “parodying commercial taste isn’t exactly the goal. Vaporwave doesn’t just recreate corporate lounge music – it plumps it up into something sexier and more synthetic.”
Music educator Grafton Tanner wrote, “vaporwave is one artistic style that seeks to rearrange our relationship with electronic media by forcing us to recognize the unfamiliarity of ubiquitous technology… vaporwave is the music of ‘non-times’ and ‘non-places’ because it is skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space”. Commenting on the adoption of a vaporwave- and seapunk-inspired rebrand by MTV International, Jordan Pearson of Motherboard, Vice’s technology website, noted how “the cynical impulse that animated vaporwave and its associated Tumblr-based aesthetics is co-opted and erased on both sides—where its source material originates and where it lives”.
Contemporary politics
In early 2016, the satirical publication Rave News reported that prominent vaporwave producers had scheduled an emergency summit in Montreal to discuss “creeping fascism” in the scene. Although the article was facetious, its comment section attracted many vaporwave fans who defended such political beliefs. In 2017, Vice’s Penn Bullock and Eli Penn reported on the phenomenon of self-identified fascists and alt-right members appropriating vaporwave music and aesthetics, describing the so-called “fashwave” movement as “the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal” and reflective of “a global cybernetic subculture geared towards millennials, propagated by memes like Pepe the Frog, and centered on sites like 4chan”. The Guardian’s Michael Hann noted that the movement is not unprecedented; similar offshoots occurred in punk rock in the 1980s and black metal in the 1990s. Hann believed that, like those genres, there was little chance fashwave would ever “impinge on the mainstream”.
In 2017, Beauchamp proposed a parallel between punk’s “No Future” stance and its active “raw energy of dissatisfaction” deriving from the historical lineage of Dada dystopia, and vaporwave’s preoccupation with “political failure and social anomie”. By 2019, pink vaporwave-inspired hats that promoted 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang became popular among his supporters. National Review commentator Theodore Kopfre reported that it was part of a trend indicating that Yang had “replaced Donald Trump as the meme candidate.”
Offshoots and subgenres
Future funk
Future funk expands upon the disco/house elements of vaporwave. It takes a more energetic approach than vaporwave and incorporates elements of French house, albeit produced in the same sample based manner as vaporwave. Most of these samples are drawn from Japanese city pop records from the 1980s.
Hardvapour
Hardvapour emerged in late 2015 as a reimagination of vaporwave with darker themes, faster tempos, and heavier sounds. It is influenced by speedcore and gabber, and defines itself against the utopian moods sometimes attributed to vaporwave.
Mallsoft
Mallsoft magnifies vaporwave’s lounge influences. It may be viewed in connection to “the concept of malls as large, soulless spaces of consumerism… exploring the social ramifications of capitalism and globalization”.
Fashwave
Fashwave (from “fascist”) is a largely instrumental fusion of synthwave and vaporwave that originated on YouTube circa 2015. With political track titles and occasional soundbites, the genre combines Nazi symbolism with the visuals associated with vaporwave and synthwave. According to Hann, it is musically derived from synthwave, while Heavy contributor Paul Farrell writes that it is “considered to be an offshoot from the harmless vaporwave movement.” A similar offshoot, Trumpwave, focuses on Donald Trump.
Vaportrap
Vapotrap (union of the terms “vaporwave” and ” trap “) is a mainly instrumental subgenre that combines the sounds and style of the vaporwave with the beats and rhythms of the trap.
Dream Wave
Dreamwave is a subgenre composed of dreamlike and emotional melodies and arpeggios, often combined with evanescent landscapes and atmospheres that recall the ethereal voices of dream pop music of the 80s, creating a feeling of euphoria and relaxation at the same time. Dreamwave calls to nostalgia, wraps its listeners in a hypnotic and ephemeral realm but at the same energetic rich in samples, natural scenes, background sounds, cinematographic motifs and philosophical and psychological texts. Dreamwave is also considered a sub- genre of synthwave music, in fact it is considered the most “chill” side of synthwave, with slow rhythms and elements taken from cinematographic soundtracks.
Other sub-genres of the vaporwave are broken transmission (or “signalwave”), “utopian virtual”, ” post-Internet “, ” late-night lo-fi “, “VHS pop” and ” vapornoise “.
Related Trends
Simpsonwave
Simpsonwave was a YouTube phenomenon popularized by the user Lucien Hughes . It mainly consists of videos with scenes from the American television series The Simpsons accompanied by various vaporwave songs. Videos are often put together out of context, with a distortion reminiscent of old VHS and with surreal visual effects, which give an almost hallucinatory atmosphere.
Fashwave
The Fashwave (union between ” Fascist ” and ” synthwave ” ) is a mainly instrumental sub-genre of vaporwave and synthwave born on YouTube in about 2015. With titles of political significance and quotations, the genre combines fascist symbolism with visual elements associated with vaporwave music.
Trumpwave
Another branch is that of Trumpwave, focused on Donald Trump. Vice writes that Trumpwave leverages the ambivalence of vaporwave towards capitalist culture, electing Trump as today’s heir to the much mythologized 1980s, a decade that stands out for its racial purity and unrestrained capitalism “.
Animewave
One of the most popular used in most videos is the Animewave, with images (mostly GIFs) of Japanese cartoons (mostly old 80s or 90s anime ) popular in Italy and not. One of the most popular is Sailor Moon, followed by Creamy and other (mostly female) cartoons of idol and non.