Vaporwave is another one of those satirical subgenres born on the internet that really only people on the internet hear about and have a small community for. It has a strong emphasis on the arts aesthetic and less so on the music but with vaporwave I think more people into this subculture do actually listen to the music and are more involved in making the music of the genre.
The aesthetic is that 90s nostalgic aesthetic with a specific color palette and key items that make it vaporwave. With vaporwave what you tend to see is roman statues, windows 95, nihilistic comments done in japanese, glitch art, tropical settings and certain beverages like fiji water, arizona tea and sizzurp of all things. I'm not going to lie with vaporwave aesthetic art you do see mention of drug abuse like sizzurp aka lean or purple drank which is promethazine with codeine mixed with sprite and jolly ranchers, xanax pills, marijuana and sometimes over the counter cough syrups like nyquil. Why is this so? Well I think it has to do with the music which I will get into now:
Vaporwave music is a satire on contemporary consumerist society (whenever I say that to people they call me a hipster =/) and an avenue for nostalgia through sampling 80s and 90s pop, rnb, smooth jazz and muzak or easy listening/elevator music. Its a form of plunderphonics which if you don't know is essentially when you use audio piracy to revision a track making simple edits to make it something new. With Vaporwave what you're looking to do is get a deep vocal sound by slowing down the speed and make it really low fidelity with reverb and phaser or echo effects to get that vaporwave sound. Listen to some vaporwave and you'll understand what i'm talking about. I feel like for it to have a really vaporwave sound it has to have a drone in the background and with applying those effects you can attain that and also get a kind of lighter grainier sound that seems to resemble vapor.
The name vaporwave doesn't actually constitute that vapor sound though the name comes from vaporware which is when a business puts adverts out about an upcoming product that may seem too good to be true and ends up being too good to be true they never release it but get all this attention for that product. It's nonexistent. I think that's where the nihilism came from with vaporwave because we know nihilism is the philosophy of life being meaningless all religions being false just your life being a big pile of nothing but that doesn't mean its a bad thing because if you know your life is meaningless then you can make the best of it by having fun or wearing your "yoloswagg" as it were lol. So we have the vapor in vaporware and wave actually being a marxist term to describe something that perpetuates itself and is meaningless in its philosophy giving it even more nihilist swag.
All in all classic vaporwave is uninspired in its creation making use of its source content as a crutch for whether the song is good or not by itself but focusing on the vibe by the artist making the edit to whether its good vaporwave or not. There are of course subgenres within vaporwave like vaportrap for example that still has that vaporwave vibe and those iconic synths that really bring vaporwave to a new level as an artform to progress the genre which I believe is why this genre didn't die out fast like some other genres because there is room to explore with vaporwave and the vaporwave community welcomes that. One thing I really enjoy about this genre is the satire on consumerist society the nihilism in it (I'm not a nihilist myself but I enjoy nihilistic remarks) the fact that you can make a vaporwave track in around a minutes time and the fact that alot of the big vaporwave lp releases are released on cassette tape <3
Here comes the time where I share some videos to help you explore vaporwave for yourself giving you some examples and some interesting videos on the subject to help you grasp it.
How to Make Vaporwave by Frank Jav Cee
How to Make Vaporwave by Frank Jav Cee
Vaporwave: A Brief History by Wolfenstein OS X
V A P O R W A V E L P ' S playlist by myself
-Saint Pepsi
-Oneohtrix point never aka chuck person
James Ferraro
Blank Banshee
T E L E P A T H
Internet Club
More Things to Check out:
Most Famous Record Label: http://dreamcatalogue.net/
The Archive of the Vaporwave Library Project: https://web.archive.org/web/20150219214318/http://vaporwave.me/
The Vaporwave Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/
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