I feel like vaporwave was dead as soon as people started taking it seriously. Seeing the genre at its inception - a critique on how corporations will use substanceless nostalgia to bolster sales - turned into that very thing with this faux-80s-revival music, that for one reason or another sounds nothing like what was actually popular in the 80s, has left quite the sour taste in my mouth.
Like, the very idea was to take old “nostalgic” stuff and mangle and distort into something only vaguely resembling that. The idea was to provoke those feelings in you while also detaching from what might actually make one nostalgic. After all, most of the audience can’t remember the 80s or 90s having been a child or not born yet. The idea is to poke fun at how corporations manufacture nostalgia by doing exactly that, except in a ridiculous and obvious way so that people would be in on the joke and so that it would be a transformative work of sorts. But people fell for the trick anyway and now we have kids who weren’t alive in the 80s yearning for the 80s listening to music that doesn’t resemble 80s music. It’s weird.
In short: I agree with the author. There are burgeoning genres and music cultures that may resemble vaporwave if you don’t know what it’s origin and intentions were, but the actual message behind vaporwave is lost to history in lieu of its aesthetic. The irony was, in fact, lost.
As someone who enjoyed vaporwave as it was being produced, “the idea” behind vaporwave was that it sounded good.
It may have sounded good because it touched on nostalgic sounds for millennials, but there wasn’t a wide spread movement “… to provoke those feelings in you while also detaching from what might actually make one nostalgic”
Like, the very idea was to take old “nostalgic” stuff and mangle and distort into something only vaguely resembling that. The idea was to provoke those feelings in you while also detaching from what might actually make one nostalgic. After all, most of the audience can’t remember the 80s or 90s having been a child or not born yet. The idea is to poke fun at how corporations manufacture nostalgia by doing exactly that, except in a ridiculous and obvious way so that people would be in on the joke and so that it would be a transformative work of sorts. But people fell for the trick anyway and now we have kids who weren’t alive in the 80s yearning for the 80s listening to music that doesn’t resemble 80s music. It’s weird.
In short: I agree with the author. There are burgeoning genres and music cultures that may resemble vaporwave if you don’t know what it’s origin and intentions were, but the actual message behind vaporwave is lost to history in lieu of its aesthetic. The irony was, in fact, lost.