User:Pdougherty1/sandbox
Untitled |
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Vaporwave | |
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Etymology | Vaporware |
Stylistic origins | |
Cultural origins | Early 2010s, cyberculture[4][11] |
Typical instruments | |
Derivative forms | |
Subgenres | |
Other topics | |
The term Y2K Aesthetic describes a visual style prevalent in the late 90s and early 2000s. Examples of the Y2K Aesthetic in commercial and industrial design, architecture, fashion, music, and art have been collated by the Tumblr blog Institute for Y2K Aesthetics.
Characteristics
[edit]Even Collins, founder of the Institute For Y2K Aesthetics Tumblr blog, outlines a set of key identifiers of the Y2K Aesthetic in an interview with Paper Mag:
- Translucency
- Gradients
- Motion
- Overlays
- Warping/Perspective
- Curves + Blobs
- 'Futuristic' / Techno fonts, shiny sleek 3D text and interfaces
- Technological motifs
- Synthetic feel, shiny materials, metallics
- Alien / warped human / sleek-cyborg imagery
- Rave culture influence
- Future-optimism
- Tribal/World influence, with a futuristic twist
- Space themes
- Revival of 60s space age & 70s futurism
- 'Surreal' CGI
History
[edit]2009–2011: Origins and early scene
[edit]Vaporwave originated on the Internet as an ironic variant of chillwave,[18] drawing on the retro style's "analog nostalgia"[6] 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.[19] "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.[20] According to Vice, 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."[21] 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'."[14]
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).[23][14][24] 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,[5] while Far Side Virtual drew primarily on "the grainy and bombastic beeps" of past media such as Skype and the Nintendo Wii.[23] 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".[10] A 2013 post on a music blog presented those albums, along with Skeleton's Holograms (November 2010), as "proto vaporwave".[25]
Inspired by Lopatin's ideas, suburban teens and young adults used Eccojams as a starting point for what would become vaporwave[5] while drawing on the postmodern, surreal themes explored by Far Side Virtual and Eccojams.[26] 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."[3] 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.[27] 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.[17]
2010s: Popularity
[edit]Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan.[27] 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.[14] 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.[17] 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."[5]
Following the initial wave, new terms for offshoot genres were invented, some of which indicate the non-seriousness of vaporwave, such as "vaportrap" and "vaporgoth". 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."[15] 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).[28] 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",[29] and on the same day MTV International introduced a rebrand heavily inspired by vaporwave and seapunk,[30] Tumblr launched a GIF viewer named Tumblr TV, with an explicitly MTV-styled visual spin.[31] 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.[5]
Critical interpretations
[edit]It initiates a lot of important conversations about power and money in the industry. Or... everything just sounds good slowed down with reverb?
—Aaran David Ross of Gatekeeper, speaking about vaporwave[32]
Vaporwave was one of several microgenres spawned in the early 2010s that were the brief focus of media attention.[21] Pitchfork contributor Jonny Coleman defines 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."[18] 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".[33] Michelle Lhooq of Vice wrote that "according to commenters in various music forums, it's 'chillwave for Marxists,' 'post-elevator music,' "corporate smooth jazz Windows 95 pop". She explained 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."[11]
Music writer Adam Harper of Dummy Mag describes vaporwave as having an ambiguous or accelerationist relationship to consumer capitalism, writing 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, a name for products that are introduced but never released, and the idea of libidinal energy being subjected to relentless sublimation under capitalism.[3] 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 sceptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space".[34]
Speaking 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".[31] Xavier described her 2012 album Contemporary Sapporo ([札幌コンテンポラリー] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) as "a brief glimpse into the new possibilities of international communication" and "a parody of American hypercontextualization of e-Asia circa 1995".[35] Critic Simon Reynolds characterized Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person project as "relat[ing] to cultural memory and the buried utopianism within capitalist commodities, especially those related to consumer technology in the computing and audio/video entertainment area".[36] Speaking about the "supposedly subversive or parodic elements" of vaporwave in 2018, Reynolds said that the genre had become redundant, in some respects, to modern trap music and mainstream hip hop: "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."[37]
In 2017, The Brooklyn Rail's Scott 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".[38] Beauchamp writes 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".[38][nb 1] He suggested that expressions of hypermodulation inspired both the development and downfall of vaporwave.[38]
Offshoots and subgenres
[edit]- Vaportrap integrates trap beats.[40]
- Mallsoft magnifies vaporwave's lounge influences.[15] 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".[41]
- Future funk expands upon the disco/house elements of vaporwave.[15] It takes a more energetic approach than vaporwave. It incorporates elements of French house, albeit produced in the same sample based manner as vaporwave.[42] Most of these samples are drawn from Japanese city pop records from the 1980s.[7][8]
- Simpsonwave was a YouTube phenomenon made popular by the user Lucien Hughes.[43][44][45][46] It mainly consists of videos with scenes from the American animated television series The Simpsons set to various vaporwave tracks. Clips are often put together out of context and edited with VHS-esque distortion effects and surreal visuals, giving them a "hallucinatory and transportive" feel.[47]
- Fashwave (a portmanteau of "fascist" and "synthwave"[48]), is a largely instrumental subgenre of vaporwave and synthwave[16] that originated on YouTube circa 2015.[49] With political track titles and occasional soundbites,[16] the genre combines Nazi symbolism with the visuals associated with vaporwave and synthwave.[38] The offshoot Trumpwave focuses on Donald Trump.[16][nb 2]
- Hardvapour emerged in late 2015[50] as a reimagination of vaporwave with darker themes, faster tempos, and heavier sounds.[15] It is influenced by speedcore and gabber, and is viewed as oppositional to the vaporwave aesthetic.[50] According to Vice's Rob Arcand, the genre lies somewhere between vaporwave and distroid, writing that hardvapour uses similar music software tools "not out of any special fixation with them, but simply because they're now the cheapest and most accessible tools around."[15]
- According to Bandcamp Daily's Simon Chandler, as of 2016, there also existed "broken transmission" (or "signalwave"), "utopian virtual", "post-Internet", "late-night lo-fi", and "vapornoise".[40]
Notable artists
[edit]- 2814[28][51]
- Blank Banshee[52]
- Daniel Lopatin (Chuck Person, Oneohtrix Point Never)[53]
- Giant Claw[54][55]
- James Ferraro[56]
- Ramona Xavier (Macintosh Plus, Vektroid, Laserdisc Visions)[57]
- Ryan DeRobertis (Saint Pepsi, Skylar Spence)[58]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]Footnotes
- ^ Cultural theorist Dominic Pettman, professor of Culture and Media at the New School for Social Research, notes that the Internet causes users to have micro-experiences of "hypermodulation".[39]
- ^ 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 fashwave as "the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal".[16] Vice writes that Trumpwave exploits vaporwave's perceived ambivalence towards the corporate culture it engages with, allowing it to recast Trump as "the modern-day inheritor of the mythologized 80s, a decade that is taken to stand for racial purity and unleashed capitalism".[16] The Guardian's Michael Hann notes that the movement is not unprecedented; similar offshoots occurred in punk rock in the 1980s and black metal in the 1990s. Like those genres, Hann believes there is little chance fashwave will ever "impinge on the mainstream".[48]
Citations
- ^ Ward, Christian (January 29, 2014). "Vaporwave: Soundtrack to Austerity". Stylus.com. Archived from the original on June 2, 2017. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
- ^ Tanner 2016, p. 3.
- ^ a b c d Harper, Adam (December 7, 2012). "Comment: Vaporwave and the pop-art of the virtual plaza". Dummy. Archived from the original on April 1, 2015. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
- ^ a b c Harper, Adam (5 December 2013). "Pattern Recognition Vol. 8.5: The Year in Vaporwave". Electronic Beats. Archived from the original on 23 February 2014. Retrieved 8 February 2014.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Han, Sean Francis; Peters, Daniel (May 18, 2016). "Vaporwave: subversive dream music for the post-Internet age". Bandwagon.asia. Archived from the original on December 30, 2016. Retrieved January 7, 2017.
- ^ a b c Schilling, Dave (September 18, 2015). "Songs of the Week: Skylar Spence, Vampire Weekend's Chris Baio, and the Return of Chillwave". Grantland. Archived from the original on November 19, 2015.
- ^ a b Markowitz, Douglas (10 October 2018). "5 Vaporwave and Future Funk Tracks to Get You Ready for YUNG BAE". Phoenix New Times.
Finally, we truly come full circle with the oldest and, oddly, the most recently popular entry on our list. Indeed, the prevalence of music made with samples of Japanese city pop has led to a reappraisal of the genre by modern listeners. In other words, fans of future funk got sick of cut product and went straight to the source.
- ^ a b "La City Pop, bande-son de vos apéros estivaux". Slate (in French). 11 July 2018.
Tout a commencé sur Tumblr, avec le vaporwave, un genre de funk rétrofuturiste, qui est allé puiser dans la City Pop une esthétique liée à la culture pop japonaise des années 1980.
- ^ Aux, Staff. "AUX". Aux. Aux Music Network. Archived from the original on September 23, 2015. Retrieved January 2, 2016.
- ^ a b Bowe, Miles. "Band To Watch: Saint Pepsi". Stereogum. Archived from the original on July 21, 2016. Retrieved June 26, 2016.
- ^ a b c d e f Lhooq, Michelle (December 27, 2013). "Is Vaporwave The Next Seapunk?". Vice. Archived from the original on April 26, 2014. Retrieved April 10, 2014.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
chicago
was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Trainer 2016, p. 419.
- ^ a b c d Beks, Ash. "Vaporwave is not dead". The Essential. The Essential. Archived from the original on December 10, 2015. Retrieved December 8, 2015.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Arcand, Rob (July 12, 2016). "Inside Hardvapour, an Aggressive, Wry Rebellion Against Vaporwave". Thump. Vice Media. Archived from the original on December 31, 2016. Retrieved January 30, 2019.
- ^ a b c d e f Bullock, Penn; Kerry, Eli (January 30, 2017). "Trumpwave and Fashwave Are Just the Latest Disturbing Examples of the Far-Right Appropriating Electronic Music". Vice. Archived from the original on February 6, 2017. Retrieved February 6, 2017.
- ^ a b c Beauchamp, Scott (August 18, 2016). "How Vaporwave Was Created Then Destroyed by the Internet". Esquire. Archived from the original on April 3, 2017. Retrieved April 1, 2017.
- ^ a b Coleman, Jonny (May 1, 2015). "Quiz: Is This A Real Genre". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on July 30, 2017.
- ^ Trainer 2016, p. 416.
- ^ Trainer 2016, p. 409.
- ^ a b Marcus, Ezra (May 12, 2017). "Wave Music Is a Marketing Tactic, Not a Microgenre". Vice. Archived from the original on August 4, 2017.
- ^ "Chuck Person: Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 - Spectrum Culture". Spectrum Culture. 4 December 2016. Retrieved 8 January 2018.
- ^ a b Colton, Stefan (15 April 2017). "Love in the Time of VHS: Making Sense of Vaporwave". The Politic.
- ^ Bowe, Miles (October 13, 2013). "Q&A: James Ferraro On NYC's Hidden Darkness, Musical Sincerity, And Being Called "The God Of Vaporwave"". Stereogum. Archived from the original on October 16, 2013. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
- ^ Trainer 2016, p. 420.
- ^ Simpson, Paul. "Biography". AllMusic. Retrieved 4 July 2016.
- ^ a b Galil, Leor (February 19, 2013). "Vaporwave and the Observer Effect". Chicago Reader. Archived from the original on January 25, 2014.
- ^ a b "2814". Rolling Stone. 10 New Artists You Need to Know. November 25, 2015. Archived from the original on July 3, 2016. Retrieved June 27, 2016.
The next-level gambit paid off with second album 新しい日の誕生, an unparalleled success within a small, passionate pocket of the internet.
- ^ "The 50 Best Albums of 2015". Fact. The Vinyl Factory. December 9, 2015. Archived from the original on January 30, 2016. Retrieved December 11, 2015.
- ^ Lange, Maggie (August 29, 2015). "The Crowd-Sourced Chaos of MTV's Vaporwave VMAs". GQ. Condé Nast. Archived from the original on December 10, 2015. Retrieved December 8, 2015.
- ^ a b Pearson, Jordan (June 26, 2015). "How Tumblr and MTV Killed the Neon Anti-Corporate Aesthetic of Vaporwave". Motherboard (Vice). Vice Media, Inc. Archived from the original on December 6, 2015. Retrieved December 8, 2015.
- ^ Friedlander, Emilie; McDermott, Patrick D. "A Recent History of Microgenres". The Fader. Archived from the original on April 4, 2017.
- ^ St. Michel, Patrick (December 3, 2014). "10 Essential Japanese Netlabels". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on March 16, 2016.
- ^ Tanner 2016, p. 10.
- ^ 情報デスクVIRTUAL - 幌コンテンポラリー. Tiny Mix Tapes. Archived from the original on December 25, 2013. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
- ^ Reynolds 2011.
- ^ Reynolds, Simon; Finauro, Beatrice (December 10, 2018). "A fantasy of a life without constraints". Collectible Dry. Archived from the original on January 8, 2019. Retrieved January 8, 2019.
- ^ a b c d Beauchamp, Scott (April 2017). "Attention Online Shoppers..." The Brooklyn Rail: 23–24. Archived from the original on March 31, 2017. Retrieved April 2, 2017.
- ^ Denton, Shane (May 29, 2016). "Hyperdistractions". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on April 3, 2017. Retrieved April 2, 2017.
- ^ a b "Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour". Bandcamp Daily. 21 November 2016.
- ^ Kilby, Dylan (August 7, 2016). "Disconscious - Hologram Plaza - Sunbleach". Sunbleach Media. Archived from the original on September 1, 2016. Retrieved August 7, 2016.
- ^ Victoria, Elisa (August 16, 2017). "Future funk, el género musical que te va a alegrar la vida" (in Spanish). Archived from the original on January 15, 2018. Retrieved January 14, 2018.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
geek.com
was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Lozano, Kevin (June 14, 2016). "What the Hell Is Simpsonwave?". Pitchfork Media. Archived from the original on June 22, 2016. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
- ^ Song, Sandra (June 6, 2016). "What Is Simpsonwave? A Brief Introduction Via Scene Staple, Lucien Hughes". Paper. Paper Communications. Archived from the original on June 8, 2016. Retrieved June 8, 2016.
- ^ Robson, Kurt (July 7, 2016). "We spoke to the creator of Simpsonwave, and it's about to end". The Tab. Archived from the original on July 12, 2016. Retrieved July 20, 2016.
- ^ Blevins, Joe. ""Simpsonwave" is the most wack, tripped-out Simpsons meme ever". The A.V. Club. The Onion. Archived from the original on June 3, 2016. Retrieved June 4, 2016.
- ^ a b Hann, Michael (December 14, 2016). "'Fashwave': synth music co-opted by the far right". The Guardian. Archived from the original on December 20, 2016.
- ^ Coleman, Jonny (December 19, 2016). ""Fashwave" Is Fascist Synthesizer Music and Yes, It's an Actual Thing". LA Weekly. Archived from the original on December 20, 2016.
- ^ a b Broomfield, Matt (April 28, 2016). "Inside 'hardvapour', the internet's latest microgenre". Dazed. Archived from the original on March 27, 2017. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
- ^ O'Neal, Sean. "Vaporwave is no longer a joke on 2814's Rain Temple". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 2 February 2019.
- ^ "Blank Banshee Returns, beloved vaporwave artist returns after three years between albums". The FADER. 10 October 2016.
- ^ "Oneohtrix Point Never Shares Remastered Version Of His Vaporwave Classic Eccojams". The FADER. Archived from the original on July 30, 2017. Retrieved July 24, 2017.
- ^ "Giant Claw announces new album Soft Channel on Orange Milk". FACT Magazine: Music News, New Music. 29 June 2017. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
- ^ "Music Review: Giant Claw - Soft Channel". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
- ^ "A Conversation With James Ferraro, Critical Futurist". Spin.com. August 18, 2016. Archived from the original on March 25, 2017. Retrieved March 14, 2017.
- ^ "Vektroid releases noisy collaborative album as CTO & Ray Sherman; No Earth coming in 2017". Tiny Mix Tapes. Archived from the original on March 1, 2017. Retrieved February 28, 2017.
- ^ "Vaporwave Dude Saint Pepsi Will Now Be Known to the World as Skylar Spence | Thump". Thump. Archived from the original on March 1, 2017. Retrieved February 28, 2017.
Bibliography
- Reynolds, Simon (2011). Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1-4299-6858-4.
- Tanner, Grafton (2016). Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts. John Hunt Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78279-760-9.
- Trainer, Adam (2016). "From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory". The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-932128-5.
External links
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Category:2010s in music
Category:Art pop
Category:Contemporary art movements
Category:Cyberpunk culture
Category:Electronic music genres
Category:Experimental music genres
Category:Internet memes
Category:Microgenres
Category:Words coined in the 2010s
Category:21st-century music genres
Category:Nostalgia
Marketing
[edit]Key Selling Points
[edit]The MOST popular classical guitar piece THE most talented, charismatic and hottest guitarist of the day!
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[edit]ARANJUEZ will be advertised as a February SBS product:
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