Music like memes: Why vaporwave defines postmodern popular music

Imagine yourself walking through a shopping mall. Vast corridors lined with rows upon rows of shops stretch out in front of you, continuing endlessly. You hear the familiar sounds of sleek, breezy muzak wafting in the air — but something in its timbre doesn’t seem quite right. Upon inspection, the bland, utopic melody becomes punctuated with an eerie sense of blankness. You begin to take notice of the facelessness of shoppers passing by. In their hurried quest to purchase, they have all blurred into one. Bright signage and gaudy storefronts compete for your attention, but drown each other out in their own oversaturation of hoopla. All at once, you are overstimulated yet take into consideration none of the sensations. Paying closer attention to the soundtrack now, you prod at the glossy frivolousness in search of something deeper, yet you find…absolutely nothing. You take note of the sense of hollowness it plants inside of you and the subsequent ringing it leaves in your ears. This make-believe experience depicts exactly how listening to Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing makes me feel.

The question here is, what is the point of discussing the song in 2020? It’s been almost a decade since this track first hit the internet, and the general online musicscape seemed to already have moved on from the vaporwave (micro)genre eons ago. It was the first-ever (allegedly) genre to “live its entire life from birth to death completely online” (Beauchamp, 2016). By taking a few steps backward to the early 2010s, the emergence of vaporwave could tell us a lot about why popular music of today can no longer be divorced from online technology, and Lisa Frank 420 is one of the anthems that foretells it.

Though not the first of its genre, Lisa Frank 420 is ostensibly the most well-known vaporwave song. Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing, stylized as リ サ フ ラ ン ク 420 / 現 代 の コ ン ピ ュ, is the second track off of Floral Shoppe (フ ロ ー ラ ル の 専 門 店), an album by electronic artist Vektroid (pseudonym of Ramona Xavier). It was released in 2011 by American record label Beer on the Rug on the independent music streaming and selling site Bandcamp, under Vektroid’s alternative moniker of Macintosh Plus. The song was first circulated on online music forums where it amassed a small following and underwent mixed reviews from critics. Later popularization of the song was due to its usage in covers, Vine videos, and remixes, along with photoshopped variations of its album art, which led to the snowballing of its reach.

The generic markers that have come to be associated with vaporwave are epitomized in the musical stylings of Lisa Frank 420. Essentially a remix of the 1984 Diana Ross song It’s Your Move, Lisa Frank 420 features a slowed down, pitch lowered Ross droning over a chopped and screwed reworking of the instrumentals. Save for the slowed riff after the hook, the majority of the structure consists of simple cutting and looping selected sections from the sample. After the riff, however, the production abruptly transitions into something more eerie, disruptive, and distorted. With intrusive and strange sounds entering the background, the main melody melts into a stretched, delayed groove. The resultant sludgy texture and echoey timbre evoke a sense of hypnagogic languidness, placing the listener in an elusive state, a common affective feature within the genre. The hazy reverb, stuttered rhythm, and overly polished mixing of the song have come to serve as a model representative of the dominant sounds in vaporware.

The birth of vaporwave could be traced back to 2011, with the releases Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (Oneothrix Point Never, 2010) and Far Side Virtual (Ferraro, 2011) being cited by many as key precursors to the genre. Eccojams’ slowed and slurred tracks of repeated 80s pop choruses were described by its creator as “a simple joke’’ created “just for fun”, bolstering the impression of vaporwave as a nonsensical internet meme (wosX-, 2015). Concurrently Ferraro’s release was being perceived as a “digitized ode to a rapidly changing world” (Ibid.), locating the basis of sound samples and references that later artists entering the genre were to draw from. Using the motifs of globalization and internet culture, Far Side Virtual also established the primary subjects of concern in vaporwave. Both albums were published online and disseminated across various interconnected media platforms, gaining popularity amongst online channels like Tumblr, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and YouTube. Such websites allowed the formation of a niche cultural following for the scene, by offering a platform that assumed a promoter role, providing a communal space for online rituals “facilitating views, likes, and shares’’ resulting in “platform subscriptions, [and] memberships” (Schrembi & Tichbon, 2017). The 4chan /mu/ board, in particular, was also a significant site of discourse for the growing fanbase. Debates and investigations surrounding anti-consumerist implications embedded amongst these proto-vaporwave works were usually popular topics, later influencing the key sociopolitical analyses and cultural understanding of Lisa Frank 420. Within this digitized environment of participatory culture, audiences of vaporwave had consolidated the genre through value creation and forging a sense of collective consumer identity online (Ibid.). This had culminated in a niche community that was readily receptive to Lisa Frank 420, especially since the song is determinately a synthesis of the familiar sonic and thematic elements presented by Far Side Virtual and Eccojams.

Anonymous (2017). A seinfeld themed edit of the Floral Shoppe album cover. [image] Available at: https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/83331294/ [Accessed Dec. 2018].

Since its emergence, the legitimacy of vaporwave as a genre has long been contested. Alternatively, it also became classified as merely an internet meme due to its satirical and online-exclusive origins. Usage of the term meme in this instance follows Dawkins’ (1976) definition of a vehicle of cultural information meant to be shared and spread. In which case, yes, the definition can of course be applied to the works of vaporwave but doesn’t necessarily undermine its status as a codified genre. The two traits are not at all mutually exclusive, evidenced in the potential for Lisa Frank 420 to operate as a musical work and as a meme simultaneously, as well as its ubiquitous appearance within other meme formats. This attribute is thanks to the technology surrounding and facilitating its online spread. In fact, vaporwave operates as a sort of antigenre. It can be understood as attempting to reconstruct a new cultural understanding of the preexisting genres it lifts from, reimagining their implications through transmutation of the relevant sonic and visual artefacts derived. Its dissemination amongst its fans generated a new communal retrospective of the genres it samples from. A return to past fantasies of the future, to get away from the current, the future of the past. Lisa Frank 420 intrinsically offers a meta “parody of pop consciousness” (Beauchamp, 2016) in it’s negating and subsequent reshaping of the machinations of It’s Your Move.

The assemblage of Lisa Frank 420 allows it to be characterized as a form of plunderphonics (Oswald, 1985), a musical collage built upon samples and lifting from other completed musical works. Currently accessible public enclaves hosting a plethora of musical works from any and every era, past or present, can easily be searched for and made use of with the simple click of a button. The “contemporary pieces [yielding] from sonic components clearly created at a range of past times’’ provides audiences with an “uncanny, dislocating, evocative, and exciting” (Kirby, 2009) context that is completely unheard of. This situation, however, is dependent on the assumption that audiences are already acquainted with popular music of previous times and the associated circumstances. Thus, hearing “something utterly ‘now’ formed at many different periods’’ (Ibid.) demonstrates one of the most common postmodern manners of music consumption. An entirely novel listener experience has been brought upon the usage of complete recordings as samples. Such recordings are already contextually located within specific timeframes in history and carry with them apparent meanings. This climate of sharing and cross fertilization is indicative of the rapid democratization of music production. Consumers today are able to break from their position as just passive receptors of musical products by actively downloading and manipulating the very songs they were previously used to only listening to. Circuits of production and exchange are redefined, no longer operating in a one way direction now that “participants are operating as cultural producers as well as cultural consumers… also [as] consuming producers” (Schrembi & Tichbon, 2017). Extant works of any sort could be transformed and recontextualized to have a new sound and new meaning by anybody, “relocating cultural intermediation from the producer domain to the consumer realm” (Ibid.).

Another aspect governing the cultural codification of Lisa Frank 420 lies in Macintosh Plus’ anonymity, emblematic of the ever fluctuating play of identity amongst artists of the genre who take on multiple aliases to stay unknown. This practice is partly an ingenious method of legal protection as staying incognito “enables artists to ‘steal’ or remix other artists’ music/art and market the output as something else” (Ibid.) without the concern of copyright liabilities. Assuming a more culturally sensitive lens, the added obscurity of the artists and their ever growing list of handles insinuates subversion of ownership and individual identity. This network of unknown, fluid aliases holds a twisted mirror to the internet generation. Nothing is private in today’s world of excessive sharing, yet nothing published onto the virtual stratosphere could be regarded as authentically real. Vaporwave at once feeds into the unreliability of this digital reality whilst also countering its pervasive lack of privacy. Reducing the credibility of artists as entities, we can never be certain who exactly is behind each release. Macintosh Plus could easily flit between being Ramona Xavier, Vektroid, or even assume a separate persona entirely in her releasing of new projects. Sure, her signature sound may consistently traverse her works, but the mysteriousness of her persona and it being divorced from the listening experience keeps each differentiated release singularly unique and exciting. This principle of facelessness extends to vaporwave as a subcultural community. Reiterating the meme-ability of Lisa Frank 420, the track has spurred hundreds of thousands of spin offs, parodies, remixes, covers, and is constantly referenced online. Anyone could easily leave their own mark on the song whether it be syncing its instrumentals to the vocals of Death Grips’ Lord of the Game (Death Grips, 2011 & theta, 2014) or manip Jerry Seinfeld’s face onto the album artwork (Anonymous, 2017). Yet not one individual can claim to be solely responsible for the version of the song of relevance, the work — or meme — simply stands on its own. Such means of creative engagement speaks to how Lisa Frank 420 functions as a shared cultural resource. Through this antithetical counteraction against traditional ideas of ownership and production, vaporwave has been aptly described as a “digital punk movement” of “anonymous art for anonymous people” (wosX-, 2015).

With a mode of formulation centered on the borrowing and absorption of styles to construct new pieces, Glitsos (2017) raises the point of musical intertextuality as integral to the cultural movements of vaporwave. It is an amalgamation of precedent genres and musical influences, that had “emerged from a host of heavily intertextual electronic musics available since the turn of the millennium” (Ibid.). Macintosh Plus takes this a step further by necessitating the utilization of a fully formed sonic product in building her track. There is a heavy reliance on the existent sound and contexts of It’s Your Move in the production of Lisa Frank 420, to the point where it wouldn’t be able to exist on its own without anchoring onto Ross’s piece. To be frank, elements that have been added to the original track are simply the superimposed distortion effects. Removing components of the sample from Lisa Frank 420 would leave the song silent for the first 5 minutes, followed by a collection of odd noises for the remaining duration and not much else. Resident melon and possibly the most widely known Internet music critic of the decade, Anthony Fantano (2012), ascribes the appeal of Lisa Frank 420 to the “songwriting and the ways that [It’s Your Move] was produced as opposed to how the sounds were manipulated” by Macintosh Plus, going so far as to refer to the edits as “boring” and “uninspired”. Even with this being the case, it does not invalidate the song at all. On the other hand, Lisa Frank 420’s inherent dependence on It’s Your Move is constructive to the self-conscious role vaporwave plays in acting as a commentary on popular music.

Postmodern deconstructionist values are embedded into the paradoxical scene set by Lisa Frank 420. Multiple conflicting dimensions of meaning coexist and, in their syllogism, are being toyed with. The complex entanglement of influences and implications within the song upsets the established modes of cultural understanding but opens up the opportunity for audiences to derive our own wholly unique interpretation. To illustrate, my understanding of Lisa Frank 420 could be disassembled into three main perceptible constituents. Obviously in its final stage these compositional distinctions are not as clearly discernible as how it has been laid out in the following description, but the purpose in portraying it as so offers a more digestible explanation. Delving into the first contextual layer of the It’s Your Move sample, Lisa Frank 420 puts forth an awareness of seemingly universal “pop music” tropes. Banking on the listener being able to classify It’s Your Move as a stand-in for mainstream pop products it calls back to, the concept of reimagining past genres and musical intertextuality arises. To put it like this, those who may not have heard Ross’ song before could most likely listen to it once and be able to discern its generic roots in soul pop and its subject matter of relationship woes. Simply through an examination of its instrumentation, form, and lyricism. This could be assumed as the conventional approach in listening to music. Audiences make sense of a song based on taking note of its sonic features alongside deducing the associated contexts which have been linked to the genre through popular perception.

The second level of understanding is conceived in the Lisa Frank 420 edit. The aforementioned pop tropes undergo mutation — through audio remixing and a reassembling of the lyrics — to create a new level of understanding which foregrounds the narrative of perpetuated consumption. This nexus between the unadulterated sample and aforementioned alterations is the locus where It’s Your Move takes on the personality of Lisa Frank 420, contorting the indentations — musical and cultural — put in place by Diana Ross. In the coming together of the above two levels of connotations, an entirely new signification appears (Glitsos, 2017). The final, completely novel contextual layer, is the reading of the song that is born out of my personal apprehension of, and interaction with Lisa Frank 420.

Expanding on the subject of audience engagement with the song, its phenomenological effects are an area of interest. Neely (2016) considers this vastly more important than analysing the song through applying functional theories, stating that “music is so much more than the sum of total of all the chords, notes, and rhythms” being played. To echo what Fantano said, performing a harmonic-melodic analysis of Lisa Frank 420 would yield the same conclusions as a technical investigation of It’s Your Move. The particularity of Macintosh Plus’ remix lies in the listeners’ affective relationship to the track. Stylistically, the song doesn’t diverge much from other forms of plunderphonics. What makes Lisa Frank 420, and in turn the vaporwave genre, distinctive is the kind of music used in sampling and the resultant experience listeners gain out of it (Fantano, 2012). Vaporwave’s primary database of samples revolves around the noises and tunes of 1980s to 1990s consumer culture, which presented the beginnings of internet culture. Dial tones, muzak, commercial jingles. Such sounds have been compositionally “repackaged in the language of contemporary electronic music” (Neely, 2016) with the aim of evoking nostalgia. Approaching Lisa Frank 420 with this consideration in mind, the song works to bring the listener back to early 1980s America, a period embracing the “ostentatious celebration of wealth, the political ascendancy of the rich and a glorification of capitalism, free markets and finance” (Phillips, 1990). Under closer analysis, the song presents a satirical exploration of the cycles governing popularized mainstream culture. In summoning the 1980s, it exhibits the deconstruction of a zeitgeist characterized as a society concerned with unprecedented growth, progress, and the perpetuation of consumerism. Lisa Frank 420 portrays a dissonant portrait of the past in its semi-mournful eulogizing of abandoned eighties tropes, using decayed remnants and aesthetics that were popular erewhile, filtered through a captious portrayal.

Lyrics that originally called out to a hot-and-cold lover have been shuffled, repeated, and reworked to instead conjure up the familiar cries of television infomercials warning the audience of time sensitive promotional offers. In my listening experience, a feigned narrative of Ross directly addressing them to secure a sale, has been constructed. The first line immediately places a call to action: “It’s your move”. From the get go, I am being placed in the role of a customer, told to act upon my carnal whim to consume. The impression of having control over my actions is set up in the following line of “I’ve made up my mind”. Deepening the lyric “Time is running out”, which at first glance serves to reinforce the urgency of the potential sale taking place, also contextually refers to the placement of the listener within the “presently esoteric era of the eighties, which held many styles and products now considered absolutely obsolete” (sailorfiji, 2015). The repetitive line of “Don’t say no’’ that follows shows Ross almost grovelling, wistfully pleading with me not to move on. In the following verse beginning with: “Say you know we shouldn’t, you keep holding out”, the song could perhaps point to a self referential jab at Macintosh Plus’ attempts to replicate the aura of the eighties so as to revive an already rotted cultural period, joined by the line “But you don’t let go”, which uses direct address to include us all as listeners in its quest to elongate the lifespan of the era in question. Once again, the concept of a collective imagined nostalgia reemerges. In the shared quest to restore a genre beyond its best by date — or at least past its state of burgeoning — a compensatory perception of the past is born (Glitsos, 2017). With the majority of vaporwave fans originating from the demographic of digital natives, we have no working memory of actually living in the 1980s and can only rely on media from the era to approximate an assumption. Lisa Frank 420 hereby acts as a portal for crowdsourced nostalgic affect. Visceral yet inauthentic “memory can be produced by, and through, the media system, particularly in ways that feel personal and individualised but which are in fact amalgamated through collective production and media saturation” (Ibid.). Musical elements that have been dismissed by society in the present have been recontextualized to fit current sentiments. As Ross continues to croon, I was faced with the yearning for something I had never experienced, and a sensation that seems recognizable but can’t be placed.

Suddenly, a new harmony enters the soundscape. Ross warns “I’m giving up on trying / To sell you things that you ain’t buying”, perhaps indicating that it is futile to resist the cultural extinction of popular products in the mainstream. Rereading the line, it could also be interpreted as a mocking reference to the inability of Lisa Frank 420 to ever be released as a mass product. In the track’s irony of a tongue in cheek allusion to the popular music product life cycle, without entering the mainstream timeline itself, the track could be seen as providing commentary on the pervasiveness of consumerism entering and shaping our lives. The chorus from the beginning reappears, but this time it seems forlorn and devoid of the same sense of urgency. It merely drones on incessantly, reflecting the continued movement of popular media, looking for the new style or trend that it will later render obsolete. The section that follows pushes the listener into a new sensory and emotional territory. Feelings of eeriness are manifested in the repetition of the riff “It’s all in your hand”. Infamously misheard as “It’s all in your [head]”, the line a chilling existential layer to the aural diegesis being constructed. Coupled with the introduction of aural aesthetics that shifts the timbre into the realm of distortion and discordance, the piece gives way to sounding as if it is falling apart. Slapback echo grows louder whilst the instrumentals slows and continue haltingly, the sonic plane of reality that has been built is about to die. Posing a more comforting implication, “It’s all in your head” could also be interpreted as reaffirming the notion of Lisa Frank 420’s operation as a site that houses the shared cultural nostalgia previously outlined. It poses a meta commentary, indicating to the listener that the elusiveness in situating the song into their memory reserve is due to the falsified origins of its nostalgic appeal. Individuals’ connection to the song is “all in [their] head”.

Following the viral eruption of Lisa Frank 420, the genre of vaporwave continued to grow, fragmenting into many subcategories and spin offs. Perhaps its most widely embraced version, future funk is a genre that originated in 2012 with similar online roots as its precedent. Its works draw upon catchy city pop, soul, and funk samples, with additional emphasis on bass drums, enhancing its danceability with punchy kicks. Future funk poses as a manifestation of vaporwave that is more palatable to a mainstream audience. Modern electronic editing techniques are employed to update old favourites. Selecting the most prominent, crowd-pleasing grooves from its samples to aggrandize, future funk appeals to listeners by bringing forth the more favourable parts of a song and saving the listener from the chore of building up to that auditory climax. In a way, this might reflect the idea of today’s society as always seeking to condense heightened experiences into ready made or ready to use forms. In comparison to vaporwave, future funk is vendible, yet this marketability could be seen as putting forward a similar commentary on consumerism as the one highlighted in Lisa Frank 420 by reflecting back to listeners an image of their habits of consumption.

With the future of music looking towards greater democratization of music production, more generative music, and the attention economy taking hold of artist longevity, revisiting Lisa Frank 420 takes us back to earlier foundations that enabled internet based cultural production to foster. Current trends point towards a climate of one hit wonders that earn their place via sharp spikes in short-lived virality, akin to the lifetime of a meme. With the added restrictions of coronavirus, virtual spaces have become an even more vital aspect of developments in music. Like how vaporwave takes from a bygone era, in our looking to the past, we can find glimpses of the future. And the future sounds pretty exciting.

This article was modified from a class assignment titled “Popular music for the postmodernist age: Why was online technology necessary and influential in the creation of “Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing”?” first written in Dec, 2018.

Musical Works Cited

1. Death Grips (2011). Lord of the Game from ‘Exmillitary’. [Online, iTunes].
2. Ferraro, J. (2011). Far Side Virtual. [Online] Hippos in Tanks.
3. Macintosh Plus (2011). MACINTOSH PLUS — リサフランク420現代のコンピュー (Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing). [Cassette, Bandcamp (online)] BEER ON THE RUG. Available at: https://beerontherug.bandcamp.com/album/floral-shoppe [Accessed Nov. 2018].
4. Oneothrix Point Never (2010). Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1. [Casette, Online] The Curatorial Club.

References

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2. Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Fantano, A. (2012). Macintosh Plus- Floral Shoppe ALBUM REVIEW. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0D9IyyeEEU&ab_channel=theneedledrop [Accessed Dec. 2018].
4. Glitsos, L. (2016). Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls. Popular Music, 37(1), pp.100–118.
5. Kirby, A. (2009). Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern And Reconfigure our Culture. New York: Continuum, p.88.
6. Neely, A. (2016). The music theory of V A P O R W A V E. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s&ab_channel=AdamNeely [Accessed Dec. 2018].
7. Oswald, J. (1985). Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. Musicworks #34. [online] Toronto: Recommended Quarterly. Available at: http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html [Accessed Dec. 2018].
8. Phillips, K. (1990). A Capital Offense; Reagan’s America. The New York Times Magazine. [online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/17/magazine/a-capital-offense-reagan-s-america.html [Accessed Dec. 2018].
9. sailorfiji (n.d.). About: リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー (Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing) lyrics. [online] Genius. Available at: https://genius.com/8495839 [Accessed Dec. 2018].
10. Schrembi, S. and Tichbon, J. (2017). Digital consumers as cultural curators: the irony of Vaporwave. Arts Marketing; Bingley, 7(2), pp.191–212.
11. wosX- (2015). Vaporwave: A Brief History. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdpP0mXOlWM&ab_channel=wosX- [Accessed Dec. 2018].