vaporwave’s sad because you’re sad.
The second vaporwave track to be uploaded to youtube is entitled ‘nobody here’ by the artist sunsetcorp. It features a twisting rainbow road swaying in and out of a city scape, while a mournfully sampled version of ‘Lady in Red’ by Chris De Burgh plays. This video was uploaded in 2009, almost 10 years ago.
With nobody here vaporwave appears to have sprung from the mind of sunsetcorp fully formed. nobody here isn’t so much a demo for the genre as a thumping great totem, easy to enjoy, and ripe for copying. Unsurprisingly sunsetcorp isn’t actually a no-name loft producer, but a moniker for the extremely prolific Oneohtrix Point Never aka Daniel Lopatin. sunsetcorpp is his second, oddity, Youtube channel. With this context the entire creation myth of vaporwave becomes something of a weird accident, spawning down the back of a mixtape channel.
The dominant feeling of nobody here is longing and sadness. The title is a grim statement of loneliness, with De Burgh’s voice warbling in synch to the landscape. The colourful rainbow sweeps and swaps, resembling a road the viewer is travelling down. As the song plays we sweep to and fro, with the rainbow always spawning ahead of us. At the 0:30 second mark the video wipes and resets with the rainbow spread out in front of us, only to immediately begin to morph horizontally once more. The static city in the background, with a night/day cycle playing over it means we are stuck while the world moves on around us.
The nature of vaporwave as a genre that prizes ‘aesthetics’ as highly as the music itself is an honest one. Music has always been about image. It’s a basic truism that if the Beatles weren’t cute and Mick Jagger wasn’t sexy they wouldn’t be here. By overtly prizing the aesthetic experience alongside the music vaporware is simply admitting this. It’s a youtube genre, it’s a bandcamp genre. These platforms have massive blocks of colour and image placed right next to their musical players. People listen to vaporware on machines that can access any music video, movie, image or .gif imaginable. Image was always going to be a part of this.
Lopatin’s depressing mario kart stage isn’t an accident, it’s good vibes and seemingly, legacy building imagery. One can’t help but wonder if Lopatin’s discography wont be defined by the accidentally beauty of nobody here.
Along with nobody here’s birth 2009 also marks the centre of the Financial Crisis. In 2008 the collapse of the US economy downturned the entire global financial system. A decades long cocktail of debt, greed and over-optimism had to be paid back. 2008 makes the fall of jubilant ‘End of History’, replaced by a surly, unhappy, pessimism. A period which stretches from the booming mid-80s, across the roaring 90s and into the techie 2000s came slamming to a halt in 2008.
In the vein of nobody here, vaporwave’s imagescapes are fundamentally sad places. Even the nice looking ones. The genre is awash with nostalgia, a passionate feeling, but also a poisonous one. If the dominant emotion you get when reliving the past is intense, unrepeatable pleasure, than perhaps the future isn’t looking so good for you. Gloopy yearning for the 80s and 90s is the bread and butter of the vaporwave ‘aesthetic’, both periods of intense wealth, success and flare. 80s Reaganism, all those happy fruit juice commercials, the big cars, beautiful women. Saint Pepsi seems to have made an entire career out of selling the dream of the loadsamoney 80s in cassette form. Likewise the 90s, we are the world, life is good, you’ve got mail.
In a weird vaporwave irony, second in frequency to images of 1980s American excess is ’80s Japanese excess. Anyone familiar with the history of modern Japan can immediately link the decline of Japan’s economy from the booming 80s, to the stagnant 90s, with the entropy of vaporwave. The imposingly named ‘Lost Decade’ has proved to be a cavern rather than a ditch. The economy still sluggish, conservative and slow. But images of the booming good times, most visibly the man-made pleasure-island of Odaiba, never really left. The country still maintains a lack of irony or snark which has long left the west, leaving its adverts to have the same garish optimism of a vaporwave .gif. Made bittersweet by the reality of the country around it.
So why are we turning to this now? It’s hard to shake the feeling that the appeal of vaporwave is escapism from a not-fun world. That there’s something strange about an entire generation of sensitive teenagers retreating to their bedrooms to listen to fake muzak. The Millennial generation simply don’t have much optimism of its own to enjoy. In place of telling their own stories about the world they’re supposed to be building they can only look back and borrow the optimism the past. Through a computer monitor it all looks like a clean break from the hollowed-out job market and political turmoil of 2017.When all you have to look forward to is renting a flat into your 40s, or living with your parents while you scrape by on $25,000 a year, it starts to make more sense.
The Millennial generation isn’t going to be a home owning generation, all the houses are bought- and they’re rising in price all the time. Millennials aren’t going to be retiring on comfy pensions and 401Ks. Not after the Baby Boomers have had their way with the pension pot. The level of wealth enjoyed in the post-war West is really that- a generational blip. This subconscious desire for the same swagger, wealth and optimism of past generations is a big part of the appeal of vaporwave. To vicariously live a life you never lead, and now cannot lead. It’s this folk memory aspect, that the twentysomethings now listening to vaporwave probably did see a lot of these commercials and images growing up, half remembered, and when rediscovering these artefacts today the saudade seeps in. Feelsbadman.
That’s not to say that vaporwave is uncritical of capitalism or excess, there’s occasionally a clear statement about the soulless nature of 80s or 90s materialism. Yet despite this fairly well intentioned reading there’s an underside. The vaporwave imagery might be soulless, but it looks gooood. In many ways this is quite a mature critique of capitalism- accepting that despite its broken nature it does provide pleasure. We enjoy going to the mall, watching movies, eating burgers, listening to pop music. In fact I’d trade all the medium.com think pieces for a chance to just go back and live that life. We’re jealous. And this conflict between wanting to wallow in the pleasure of nostalgia, while rejecting it as dorky and naive, is a key conflict within vaporwave. It isn’t dissimilar to that other throw-the-toys-out-the-pram youth movement, Punk. Annoying your parents and smashing the old order- only to rebuild the new world out of very similar 3-chords.
This is part of the reason vapowave remains consigned to the Internet. You can’t have these bizarre, sad discussions with people in real life: about an imagined past which was probably never that good, but you’d like to visit anyway. The emotions vaporwave conjures up are lonely, atomised ones, hard to share with other people- hard to express exactly where it’s hitting you. Such is the fate of what might be the internet’s first real music genre. Born from a youtube video, sustained by youtube videos and a generational slump. No one’s going to be shuffling around in front of a stage at Coachella to Luxury Elite. Better to let it remain as it is, a timely reaction from a jilted generation, to a difficult age, clacking away in their bedrooms on 5 year old MacBooks.
