ISP Blogpost — Journal 7&8 — Entering Vaporwave
In this week’s journal I will be discussing the different areas online that the Vaporwave community congregate in. This will be in an effort to be well acquainted to discuss the community as part of my upcoming research project. The community in the vaporwave genre plays an integral role, especially when we treat the genre as virtually based. In his chapter ‘Genre Rules’ from his book Performing Rites, Simon Frith makes it clear the role that the community has in the formation of a genre. “Genre is not determined by the form or style of a text itself but by the audience’s perception of its style and meaning”. For this reason, I find it important not just to work with musicians who craft vaporwave music, but also the community whom receive it. This relates to ideas I have been looking into of ‘reception theory’. This is a method employed by musicologists to analyse how a piece of music has been interpreted through audience reactions. Reception theory is relatively disputed, especially from a traditional musicological standpoint, however I would argue is fundamental in understanding how a genre or piece of music is formulated and understood in public discourse. Nicholas Cook states that from the multifarious conceptions of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in various cultures, that the piece has been “swallowed up by ideology. It has been consumed by social usage”. I would argue that music is directly connected to it’s social usage. Cook has apprehensions of how we would discuss a piece understood in so many ways, but I would argue it rather allows us to achieve one of the very important cores of ethnomusicological research. How does music function in its social context? For my research I will be looking specifically into how the genre of vaporwave is able to function in a virtual social context.
A distinct challenge that arises with undertaking this sort of research is the difficulty of how to position resources and critical reception in my work. As vaporwave is a relatively new genre that lacks tangibility in geographic situations, little academic work has been released discussing it. Without peer-reviewed sources, I need to be very particular about the work that I do engage with. For this reason, I will use Deborah Wong’s usage of ‘public intellectuals’ when dealing with people close to the scene but whom may be difficult to define in as someone to talk on behalf of the genre. One of these people will be Wolfenstein OSX, an established vaporwave producer who uploaded the video Vaporwave: A Brief History to Youtube. Importantly in this video, Wolfenstein outlays how the conception of this genre was formed through internet forums, such as Tumblr and Reddit. In previous journals I have discussed that when undertaking virtual ethnography it is integral to be aware of the political infrastructure of the websites that may control how information is disseminated. This is especially true of the websites Tumblr and Reddit, in which all of the information on the site has been linked or produced by the users.
“Registering an account with Reddit is free and does not require an email address to complete. As of June 2015, there were 36 million user accounts. When logged in, redditors have the ability to vote on submissions and comments to increase or decrease their visibility and submit links and comments. Users can also create their own subreddit on a topic of their choosing, and interested users can add it to their frontpage by subscribing to it.”
This excerpt from the Wikipedia page discusses how easy it is to join Reddit while also showing how users are able to personalize what they view on reddit by ‘subscribing’ to different sub-reddits. These sub-reddits can also go hand-in-hand with sub-genres, such as vaporwave.
Tumblr has the same sort of open community but is generally geared towards user-run blogs. Users can follow other members blogs. On their homepage, or ‘Dashboard’ all of the latest posts from blogs they follow appear. The Tumblr community deal with a lot more visual posts, more-so than reddit, with a strong push on user-edited images.
It seems as though Reddit and Tumblr, in terms of users, do not differ to highly when it comes to Vaporwave. In the research I have done so far, users of one community will often be the same users for another, yet rely on the different websites as a different expression of style. This is something that is important in virtual ethnography, in looking at how infrastructure of websites controls what is ‘acceptable’ posting.
So far I have attempted to reach out to the vaporwave community online, particularly through the vaporwave sub-Reddit. I chose Reddit as I did not need a blog to sign up, I could directly post into the community so they could see it, even without members directly following me. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Not once did someone say my research was a stretch, or should not be attempted. Rather, people were excited by the prospect of having the genre ‘legitimised’. In fact, a few days after my initial post someone else uploaded their Honours dissertation from the ACM in England to the same sub-reddit.
I structured my question reaching out for contributors to my research in way that was colloquial enough to not appear far-removed from the genre, but tried to make it evident that I knew what I was talking about.
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what’s up /r/vaporwave. i’m looking for someone to talk to me about their experiences of vaporwave and their interaction with the community online. it’s part of an ~ a e s t h e t i c ~ ethnomusicology honours research project for university (self.Vaporwave)
submitted 5 days ago
i’m doing a case study on virtual communities and non-geographic forms of music. vaporwave is interesting from an ethno/musicological perspective b/c it challenges traditional ideas that music arises from a geographic (to an extent) community. anyone that’s been around for a while and engages with the genre in various ways on the net would be great. lemme know. thanks guys
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Responses to my question led to over 30+ replies. This has given me a great starting point to connect to many within this community. Interestingly, I had various people state where they are based geographically (assumingly in response to my statement about vaporwave challenging traditional geographic ideas). I am left now to get in contact with these individuals, to see how vaporwave plays out in each of their musical understanding.
