Our meme could be your life
If someone says “music scene” what comes to mind? Detroit teenagers dancing to 4am techno at juice bars? Plaid clad hipsters sipping PBR to Brooklyn indie? To really experience the shows, and zines, and drama you had to be in the right city in the right decade. Not anymore! Now Ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ anons shitpost vaporwave on /mu/. For the first time ever, a musical culture grew from the internet. At Bottom of the Hill this Wednesday you can see oceangrunge IRL.
Wait, vapor-what?
It might just be the punk of the internet age. If punk was rebelling against Rolling Stone excess, vaporwave’s beef is with pretentious Pitchfork bloggers. They took the chillwave genre coined by ironically ironic Hipster Runoff and created a plunderphonic parody.
On Vektroid’s (mostly) troll album Floral Shoppe, the kind of dreamy vintage synth sound you’d hear on the opening credits of Portlandia was recreated by slowing down a Dianna Ross song and throwing on reverb.
The album cover’s retrofuturist color pallets, greek busts, and katakana became the digital Vivienne Westwood jackets of the movement.
Just as amateur high schoolers of the past pounded out some simple beats and chords, teenage memers dragged 80s elevator muzak samples into Audacity to chop and screw them. And just as for every hundred Black Pukes there’d be a Black Flag, sincere music did emerge from artists like hyphskazerbox.
K, but ocean… grunge?
This is still vaporwave, so there still has to be some meme magic. Wednesday’s opener got his initial traction thanks to an attempt to guess what the next year’s meme genre would be. People were posting joke names, and when he saw “oceangrunge” as a twist on Seapunk he came back three hours later as Sea of Dogs with droney pitch shifted samples of Jeremy and a new meme was born.
Fast forwarding to Wednesday
Weak Waves and his follow up oceangrunge releases were chances to change things up and have fun working with metal samples. With influences ranging from jazz to hip hop, his two most recent releases explore new territory and don’t sound that much like the ocean or 80s nostalgia but maybe that’s because like punk, vaporwave is more a culture and idea than a literal sonic blueprint.
Playlist
I Think It Is Beautiful That You Are 256 Colors Too