ISP Blogpost Journal #5 — Commercial Connotations
In this journal I will be looking to narrow my research scope towards my final research, informed by my literature review. One of the biggest changes that has affected my understanding is of the depth of political makeup embedded into the internet. Much of the time I have felt I have been taking what I view as ‘meaning’ on the internet at face value. However, since expanding my sources I have realised that we cannot discuss how people use the Web without discussing the very infrastructures of the Web itself. One of the key concepts that shape internet usage is an obvious one — capitalism. However I felt that I have undervalued the effect of capitalism itself. In 2015 Eun-Young Jung published a paper discussing how the Korean Pop (K-Pop) industry pushed commercial backing into the dissemination of K-Pop into global popular music industry. This was in an attempt to break into “American pop culture dominance”. Hallyu K-Pop was ultimately successful, and through their engagement with “actively utilize[d] user-generated international social networking sites and video sharing sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube” they have managed to create a unique place for themselves in pop culture. Yet this was only attainable through extensive commercial backing. The idea of a technoculture itself implies that as users adapt to the internet, they will exercise their ability of “avoidance, subversion, or resistance”. As much as I am interested in commercial movements of music, it is the communities whom attempt to operate outside of commercial interest that I am becoming more interested in. Capitalism dominates much of the Web’s technological landscape, and brings with it many political issues of potentially essentializing musicians for their marketability. Yet in my own use of the internet, I have stumbled across scenes whose whole makeup is an attempt to acknowledge, disregard, and reappropriate capitalism’s dominance in the form of a new musical community — one that could only exist within an internet driven by capitalistic enterprise. This scene is called ‘Vapourwave’. Vapourwave recontextualizes well known brands, symbols and advertising from consumer culture adopting a new aesthetic. However the difficulty arises in attempting to describe what vapourwave is trying to evoke. The heavy use of nostalgic and consumer imagery and sound is an important contribution to the aesthetic, which has often resulted in the scene being interpreted as an ironic or satirical depiction of the capitalist world. This shows one of the ways that internet users can show ‘resistance’ to the very makeup of the internet. Musically, vapourwave is known for taking songs and slowing them down, into a dreamlike sound and incorporates the use of samples to evoke connotations with the listener (such as an iPhone message noise or the ‘dial-up internet connection’ sound). The splitting of the sound with it’s original source is discussed in my Literature Review as the process of schizophonia from R. Murray Schafer. However in my review it was discussed more-so as appropriation of sounds. Vapourwave’s use of schizophonia is one that is self-aware. The connotations of the sound used in the music can only affect the listener if the listener is aware from where the sound came from. But then I am left with the question, what is the music itself? Is the music merely a pleasant backdrop in which the artist can employ schizophonia to evoke feeling and meaning only through sampled sounds? This semiotic style of music is something that I will be looking more into, and is likely to be used as a case study in my final research.
