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Vaporwave
A vaporwave-style image with Wikipedia as the main theme
EtymologyVaporware
Stylistic origins
Cultural originsEarly 2010s, Internet[2][12]
Typical instruments
Derivative forms
Subgenres
Fusion genres
Other topics

Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s[30][31] and became well-known in 2015.[32] It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, 1970s elevator music,[32] R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s; similar to synthwave. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism[33] and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, stylized Ancient Greek or Roman sculptures, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.

Vaporwave originated as an ironic variant of chillwave, evolving from hypnagogic pop as well as similar retro-revivalist and post-Internet motifs that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the era, such as Tumblr's seapunk. The style was pioneered by producers such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Ramona Langley,[34] who each used various pseudonyms.[35] After Langley's album Floral Shoppe (2011) established a blueprint for the genre, the movement built an audience on sites Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan while a flood of new acts, also operating under online pseudonyms, turned to Bandcamp for distribution.

Following the wider exposure of vaporwave in 2012, a wealth of subgenres and offshoots emerged, such as future funk, mallsoft and hardvapour, although most have waned in popularity.[36] The genre also intersected with fashion trends such as streetwear and various political movements. Since the mid-2010s, vaporwave has been frequently described as a "dead" genre.[37] The general public came to view vaporwave as a facetious Internet meme, a notion that frustrated some producers who wished to be recognized as serious artists. Many of the most influential artists and record labels associated with vaporwave have since drifted into other musical styles.[36] Later in the 2010s, the genre spurred a revival of interest in Japanese ambient music and city pop[38] and in the 2020s with the spread of its latest subgenre, Frutiger Aero, sharing its name with the graphical style.

Characteristics

[edit]

Vaporwave is a hyper-specific subgenre, or "microgenre",[39] that is both a form of electronic music and an art style; however, it is sometimes suggested to be primarily a visual medium.[40] The genre is defined largely by its surrounding subculture,[41] with its music inextricable from its visual accoutrements.[40] Academic Laura Glitsos writes, "In this way, vaporwave defies traditional music conventions that typically privilege the music over the visual form."[40] Musically, vaporwave reconfigures dance music from the 1980s and early 1990s[4] through the use of chopped and screwed techniques, repetition, and heavy reverb.[40] It is composed almost entirely from slowed-down samples[1] and its creation requires only the knowledge of rudimentary production techniques.[42] However, some artists like Dan Mason create vaporwave music from scratch.[43]

The name derives from "vaporware", a term for commercial software that is announced but never released.[41] It builds upon the satirical tendencies of chillwave and hypnagogic pop, while also being associated with an ambiguous or ironic take on consumer capitalism and technoculture.[1] Critic Adam Trainer writes of the style's predilection for "music made less for enjoyment than for the regulation of mood", such as corporate stock music for infomercials and product demonstrations.[44] Academic Adam Harper described the typical vaporwave track as "a wholly synthesised or heavily processed chunk of corporate mood music, bright and earnest or slow and sultry, often beautiful, either looped out of sync and beyond the point of functionality."[1]

Vaporwave artwork

Adding to its dual engagement with musical and visual art forms, vaporwave embraces the Internet as a cultural, social, and aesthetic medium.[41] The visual aesthetic (often stylized as "ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ", with fullwidth characters)[20] incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes,[12] as well as anime, Greco-Roman statues, and 3D-rendered objects.[45] VHS degradation is another common effect seen in vaporwave art. Generally, artists limit the chronology of their source material between Japan's economic flourishing in the 1980s and the September 11 attacks or dot-com bubble burst of 2001 (some albums, including Floral Shoppe, depict the intact Twin Towers on their covers).[46][nb 1]

History and legacy

[edit]

Origins and precursors

[edit]
See also: Hauntology (music)

Vaporwave originated on the Internet in the early 2010s as an ironic variant of chillwave[48] and as a derivation of the work of hypnagogic pop artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, who were also characterized by the invocation of retro popular culture.[49] It was one of many Internet microgenres to emerge in this era, alongside witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, cloud rap, and others. Vaporwave coincided with a broader trend involving young artists whose works drew from their childhoods in the 1980s.[50][nb 2]

"Chillwave" and "hypnagogic pop" were coined at virtually the same time, in mid-2009, and were considered interchangeable terms. Like vaporwave, they engaged with notions of nostalgia and cultural memory.[51] Among the earliest hypnagogic acts to anticipate vaporwave was Matrix Metals and his album Flamingo Breeze (2009), which was built on synthesizer loops.[52] Around the same time, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) uploaded a collection of plunderphonics loops to YouTube surreptitiously under the alias sunsetcorp.[36] These clips were taken from his audio-visual album Memory Vague (June 2009).[42][nb 3] Washed Out's "Feel It All Around" (June 2009), which slowed down the 1983 Italian dance song "I Want You" by Gary Low, exemplified the "analog nostalgia" of chillwave that vaporwave artists sought to reconfigure.[4]

"A1" from Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010)
A track from Daniel Lopatin's Eccojams, an album which pitch-shifts and distorts 1980s pop music. The sample in this excerpt is "Africa" by Toto.[53]
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Vaporwave was subsumed under a larger "Tumblr aesthetic" that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the 2010s.[54] In 2010, Lopatin included several of the tracks from Memory Vague, as well as a few new ones, on his album Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, released in August under the alias "Chuck Person".[55] With packaging that resembled the 1993 video game Ecco the Dolphin, the album inspired a host of suburban teens and young adults to formulate what would become vaporwave.[3] Seapunk followed in mid-2011 as an aquatic-themed Tumblr subculture and Internet meme[56] that presaged vaporwave in its concern for "spacey" electronic music and Geocities web graphics.[12] Like vaporwave, it was defined by its engagement with the Internet, an approach that is sometimes described as post-Internet.[17]

The musical template for vaporwave came from Eccojams and Ferraro's Far Side Virtual (October 2011).[46][16][57] Eccojams featured chopped and screwed variations on popular 1980s pop songs,[3] while Far Side Virtual drew primarily on "the grainy and bombastic beeps" of past media such as Skype and the Nintendo Wii.[46] According to Stereogum's Miles Bowe, vaporwave was a fusion between Lopatin's "chopped and screwed plunderphonics" and the "nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro's Muzak-hellscapes".[10] A 2013 post on a music blog presented those albums, along with Skeleton's Holograms (November 2010), as "proto vaporwave".[55]

Early scene

[edit]

Vaporwave artists were originally "mysterious and often nameless entities that lurk the internet," Adam Harper noted, "often behind a pseudo-corporate name or web façade, and whose music is typically free to download through MediaFire, Last FM, Soundcloud or Bandcamp."[1] According to Metallic Ghosts (Chaz Allen), the original vaporwave scene came out of an online circle formulated on the site Turntable.fm. This circle included individuals known as Internet Club (Robin Burnett), Veracom, Luxury Elite, Infinity Frequencies, Transmuteo (Jonathan Dean), Coolmemoryz, and Prismcorp.[58]

Numerous producers of this online milieu took inspiration from Ramona Langley's New Dreams Ltd. (credited to "Laserdisc Visions", July 2011).[58] The first reported use of the term "vaporwave" was on an October 2011 blogpost by an anonymous user reviewing the album Surf's Pure Hearts by Girlhood;[41] however, Burnett has been credited with coining the term as a way to tie the circle together.[58] Langley's Floral Shoppe (credited to "Macintosh Plus", December 2011) was the first album to be properly considered of the genre, containing all of the style's core elements.[24]

Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan.[58] On Tumblr, it became common for users to decorate their pages with vaporwave imagery.[54] In September, Blank Banshee released his debut album, Blank Banshee 0, which reflected a trend of vaporwave producers who were more influenced by trap music and less concerned with conveying political undertones.[24] Bandwagon called it a "progressive record" that, along with Floral Shoppe, "signaled the end of the first wave of sample-heavy music, and ... reconfigured what it means to make vaporwave music.[3]

After a flood of new vaporwave acts turned to Bandcamp for distribution, various online music publications such as Tiny Mix Tapes, Dummy Mag and Sputnikmusic began covering the movement.[16] However, writers, fans, and artists struggled to differentiate between vaporwave, chillwave, and hypnagogic pop,[59] while Ash Becks of The Essential noted that larger sites like Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound "seemingly refused to touch vaporwave throughout the genre's two-year 'peak'."[16] Common criticisms were that the genre was either "too dumb" or "too intellectual".[60][nb 4]

Wider popularity

[edit]

In November 2012, seapunk aesthetics were appropriated in music videos by the pop singers Rihanna and Azealia Banks. The exposure catapulted the subculture to the mainstream, and with it, vaporwave.[61] That same month, a video review of Floral Shoppe, published by the YouTuber Anthony Fantano, helped solidify the album as the representative work of vaporwave,[62] but was also credited as a pivotal moment in the decline of the genre.[63] Soon after vaporwave was spotlighted in the mainstream, it was frequently described as a "dead" genre.[37] Such pronouncements came from the fans themselves.[24]

Following the initial wave, new terms were invented by users on 4chan and Reddit who sought to separate vaporwave into multiple subgenres.[36] Some were created in jest, such as "vaportrap", "vapornoise" and "vaporgoth".[22] Further subgenres included "eccojams", "utopian virtual", "mallsoft", "future funk", "post-Internet", "late-nite lo-fi", "broken transmission" (or "signalwave"), and "hardvapour".[64] Joe Price of Complex reported that "most [of the subgenres] faded away, and many didn't make sense to begin with. ... The visual aspect formed faster than the sound, resulting in releases that look the same but fail to form a sonically cohesive whole."[36] Cloud rap artists like Bones, Black Kray, Xavier Wulf and GothBoiClique drew influence from vaporwave and witch house, with genre boundaries not becoming distinctly defined until later.[65][66]

Yung Lean (pictured 2013) popularized fusions of vaporwave with rap music.[67][68]

In 2013, YouTube began allowing its users to host live streams, which resulted in a host of 24-hour "radio stations" dedicated to microgenres such as vaporwave and lo-fi hip hop.[69] The Swedish rapper Yung Lean and his Sad Boys collective inspired a wave of anonymous DJs to create vaporwave mixes, uploaded to YouTube and SoundCloud, that appropriated the music and imagery of Nintendo 64 video games. Titles included "Mariowave", "Nostalgia 64", and "ＺＥＬＤＡＷＡＶＥ"[70] Dazed Digital's Evelyn Wang credited Lean with "allowing vaporwave to leak IRL [and] encouraging its unholy coupling with streetwear". She cited their associated fashion staples as "frowny faces, Japanese and Arabic as accessories, sportswear brands, Arizona iced tea, and the uncanny ability to simultaneously communicate in and be a meme."[71][nb 5]

At the end of 2013, Thump published an essay headlined "Is Vaporwave the Next Seapunk?".[36] Although the author prophesied that vaporwave would not end "as a joke" the way seapunk did, the genre came to be largely viewed as a facetious Internet meme based predominately on a retro visual style or "vibe", a notion that frustrated some producers who wished to be recognized as serious artists. Many of the most influential artists and record labels associated with the genre later drifted into other musical styles.[36]

In 2015, Rolling Stone published a list that included vaporwave act 2814 as one of "10 artists you need to know", citing their album Birth of a New Day (新しい日の誕生) as "an unparalleled success within a small, passionate pocket of the internet."[73] The album I'll Try Living Like This by Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv was featured at number fifteen on the Fact list "The 50 Best Albums of 2015",[74] and on the same day MTV International introduced a rebrand heavily inspired by vaporwave and seapunk,[75] Tumblr launched a GIF viewer named Tumblr TV, with an explicitly MTV-styled visual spin.[76] Hip-hop artist Drake's single "Hotline Bling", released on July 31, also became popular with vaporwave producers, inspiring both humorous and serious remixes of the tune.[3]

As of 2016, vaporwave albums, including Floral Shoppe, continued to rank among the best-selling experimental albums on Bandcamp.[19] The scene also maintained a dedicated following on communities such as Reddit.[36] Price reported that, for those outside of these arenas, the genre was generally considered to be "a big joke". He added that "Users of the various vaporwave sub-Reddits will always take it very seriously for the most part, but even there people are discussing whether or not vaporwave is still going strong."[36][nb 6] Despite their objections to the label, serious artists of the movement continued to be tagged as vaporwave.[77]

In 2019, user comments that state "ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ" remained ubiquitous on YouTube videos concerning the Internet.[78] George Clanton, a prominent figure in the genre, commented that the "vaporwave" banner still functioned well as a marketing tag for music that is not necessarily considered of the genre.[77][79] In September, he organized the first-ever vaporwave festival, 100% ElectroniCON, in New York City, where various artists associated with the genre such as Saint Pepsi, Vaperror, Nmesh, 18 Carat Affair, and Clanton himself performed live, most of them for the first time in their careers.[60][79]

Political appropriations

[edit]

In December 2012, Dummy published what was considered the "definitive" article on vaporwave, authored by Adam Harper, in which he equated the genre to accelerationist political theory. The article inspired "a wave of content ambiguously celebrating a dystopian capitalism".[80] In early 2016, the satirical publication Rave News reported that prominent vaporwave producers had scheduled an emergency summit in Montreal to discuss "creeping fascism" in the scene. Although the article was facetious, its comment section attracted many vaporwave fans who defended such political beliefs.[29] In August, Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin recommended that alt-right members embrace synthwave instead of the rock genres traditionally associated with far-right movements, as he felt that synthwave represented the "Whitest music ever". His remarks popularized the musical and visual aesthetic dubbed "fashwave", an updating of fascist tropes inspired by vaporwave that was celebrated by many members of the alt-right.[81] (see also Vaporwave § Fashwave)

In 2017, Vice's Penn Bullock and Eli Penn reported on the phenomenon of self-identified fascists and alt-right members appropriating vaporwave music and aesthetics, describing the fashwave movement as "the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal" and reflective of "a global cybernetic subculture geared towards millennials, propagated by memes like Pepe the Frog, and centered on sites like 4chan".[29][nb 7] The Guardian's Michael Hann noted that the movement is not unprecedented; similar offshoots occurred in punk rock in the 1980s and black metal in the 1990s. Hann believed that, like those genres, there was little chance fashwave would ever "impinge on the mainstream".[82]

By 2019, pink vaporwave-inspired hats that promoted 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang became popular among his supporters. National Review commentator Theodore Kopfre reported that it was part of a trend indicating that Yang had "replaced Donald Trump as the meme candidate."[83]

Critical interpretations

[edit]

Parody, subversion, and genre

[edit]
Vaporwave-style image using elements of Windows 95

Vaporwave was one of several microgenres spawned in the early 2010s that were the brief focus of media attention.[66] Users on various music forums, as quoted by Vice, variously characterized the genre as "chillwave for Marxists", "post-elevator music", and "corporate smooth jazz Windows 95 pop".[12] Its circulation was more akin to an Internet meme than typical music genres of the past, as authors Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth wrote in 2017,

Vaporwave's cultural practices knowingly replicate and parody the addictive, almost compulsory participation that feeds social networks, where the voluntary labor of the user community drives the system and generates value. Anyone with an Internet connection can produce vaporwave ... The uniformity of these memes is encouraged by their rapid imitation among the genre's hyperactive online subculture, fueled by affective contagion.[84]

Pitchfork contributor Jonny Coleman defined vaporwave as residing in "the uncanny genre valley" that lies "between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that could be real."[48] Also from Pitchfork, Patrick St. Michel calls vaporwave a "niche corner of Internet music populated by Westerners goofing around with Japanese music, samples, and language".[85] Vice writer Rob Arcand commented that the "rapid proliferation of subgenres has itself become part of the "vaporwave" punchline, gesturing at the absurdity of the genre itself even as it sees artists using it as a springboard for innovation."[22]

Speaking about the "supposedly subversive or parodic elements" of vaporwave in 2018, cultural critic Simon Reynolds said that the genre had been made redundant, in some respects, by modern trap music and mainstream hip hop. He opined: "What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Their role is redundant. Rap and R&B ... is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence."[86]

In a 2018 Rolling Stone article that reported the Monkees' Mike Nesmith's enthusiasm for the genre, author Andy Greene described vaporwave as a "fringe electronic subgenre that few outside irony-soaked meme enthusiasts have even heard of, let alone developed an opinion on."[87] Nesmith praised the genre and attributed its sound to be highly reminiscent of psychedelic trips.[87]

Music critic Scott Beauchamp wrote that vaporwave's stance is more focused on loss, the notion of lassitude, and passive acquiescence, and that "vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online".[88] He suggested that expressions of hypermodulation – precisely tuned "micro-experiences" resulting from social media algorithms funneling different people with similar interests into obscure topics – inspired both the development and downfall of vaporwave.[88]

Capitalism and technology

[edit]

It initiates a lot of important conversations about power and money in the industry. Or ... everything just sounds good slowed down with reverb?

—Aaran David Ross of Gatekeeper, speaking about vaporwave[89]

Vaporwave is cited for espousing an ambiguous or accelerationist relationship to consumer capitalism.[90][1] A popular trend within its audience from 2015 to 2019 was to use vaporwave songs and music videos to escape reality by observing and remixing commercial products and popular trends of the past.[32] Numerous academic books have been published on this subject, a trend that was provoked by Adam Harper's 2012 Dummy article and its attempt to link the genre to punk rock and anti-capitalist gestures.[19] In the article, he wrote that vaporwave producers "can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound."[1][nb 8] He noted that the name itself was both a nod to vaporware and the idea of libidinal energy being subjected to relentless sublimation under capitalism.[1]

Philosopher Grafton Tanner wrote, "vaporwave is one artistic style that seeks to rearrange our relationship with electronic media by forcing us to recognize the unfamiliarity of ubiquitous technology ... vaporwave is the music of 'non-times' and 'non-places' because it is skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space".[93] Commenting on the adoption of a vaporwave- and seapunk-inspired rebrand by MTV International, Jordan Pearson of Motherboard, Vice's technology website, noted how "the cynical impulse that animated vaporwave and its associated Tumblr-based aesthetics is co-opted and erased on both sides—where its source material originates and where it lives".[76] Beauchamp proposed a parallel between punk's "No Future" stance and its active "raw energy of dissatisfaction" deriving from the historical lineage of Dada dystopia, and vaporwave's preoccupation with "political failure and social anomie".[88]

Michelle Lhooq of Vice argued that "parodying commercial taste isn't exactly the goal. Vaporwave doesn't just recreate corporate lounge music – it plumps it up into something sexier and more synthetic."[12] In his 2019 book Hearing the Cloud: Can Music Help Reimagine The Future?, academic Emile Frankel wrote that vaporwave was reduced to "a commercial shell of itself" by those who fetishized the 1980s and "retro synth-pop". He likened the scene to PC Music, a label that "was seen to warp from an ironic affirmation of commercialism, to become just regular pop. ... Anything that uses irony as a method of critique runs the risk of misrecognition."[78]

Offshoots and subgenres

[edit]

Future funk

[edit]

Future funk is a French house-inspired offshoot[94] that expands upon the disco and house elements of vaporwave.[22] It involves much of the same visual imagery drawn from 1980s and 1990s anime,[95] with reference points including Urusei Yatsura, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Kimagure Orange Road, and Sailor Moon.[96] Musically, future funk is produced in the same sample-based manner as vaporwave, albeit with a more upbeat approach.[97][98] Most of the music samples are drawn from Japanese city pop records from the 1980s and 1990s, and the genre has led to an increased exposure of city pop music to western audiences.[5][6]

Some of the most popular future funk artists include Macross 82-99, who pioneered the genre with his Sailorwave album series in 2013,[96] Other artists described as being the most popular in future funk include Skylar Spence (aka Saint Pepsi), Tsundere Alley, Ducat,[99] Yung Bae,[100] and Night Tempo.[101]

Hardvapour

[edit]
Main article: Hardvapour

Hardvapour emerged in late 2015[102] as a reimagination of vaporwave with darker themes, faster tempos, and heavier sounds.[22] It is influenced by speedcore and gabber, and defines itself against the utopian moods sometimes attributed to vaporwave. Hardvapour artists include wosX and Subhumanizer.[102]

Mallsoft

[edit]
Main article: Mallsoft

Mallsoft amplifies vaporwave's lounge influences.[22] It may be viewed in connection to "the concept of malls as large, soulless spaces of consumerism ... exploring the social ramifications of capitalism and globalization".[103] Popular mallsoft artists include Disconscious, Groceries, Hantasi, and Cat System Corp.[64]

Fashwave

[edit]

Fashwave (from "fascist")[82][104] is a largely instrumental fusion of synthwave and vaporwave that originated on YouTube circa 2015.[105][106] Artists include Cybernazi, Xurious, Andrew Anglin, and Elessar.[107][106] It is also been described as an extremist subset of the non-extremist latter promoted by neo-Nazis.[108][106] With political track titles and occasional soundbites,[29] the genre combines Nazi symbolism with the visuals associated with vaporwave and synthwave.[88] According to Hann, it is musically derived from synthwave,[82] while Heavy contributor Paul Farrell writes that it is "considered to be an offshoot from the harmless vaporwave movement."[104] The visual aesthetic of fashwave, consisting of typical vaporwave elements mixed with fascist symbols like the black sun, odal rune, or crusader imagery,[109] has been associated with the "Dark MAGA" imagery surrounding Trump and Ron DeSantis.[110][111] It has been parodied by anti-fascists, such as with the Dark Brandon meme, a mocking imitation of the "Dark MAGA" imagery surrounding Trump.[112][113][114] In 2023, the DeSantis campaign let go of their campaign director, after it was publicized that a campaign aide had created a DeSantis "fan edit" featuring the black sun symbol.[110][115]

Others

[edit]
  • Eccojams: an early subgenre that, according to Lopatin, started out as a simple exercise looping up a slowed-down segment of a certain song while adding vibrating echoes.[64]
  • Simpsonwave: a YouTube phenomenon popularized by the user Lucien Hughes.[20][19] It mainly consists of videos with scenes from the American animated television series The Simpsons set to various vaporwave tracks. Clips are often put together out of context and edited with VHS-esque distortion effects and surreal visuals, giving them a "hallucinatory and transportive" feel.[21]
  • Late night lo-fi (or late-nite lo-fi): slowed down 1980s pop and jazz that mimics recorded programs on old 4:3 televisions.[23] The main progenitor of this subgenre is Luxury Elite, who is known for her music's high-class feel.[116]
  • VHS pop: a more positive variant of late night lo-fi with richer sound and vibrant aesthetics.[23]
  • Utopian virtual: using Ferraro's concept of a virtual life soundtrack, with crisp and unreal early 3D computer graphics.[23] Its off-shoot is Frutiger Aero music, mixing the usual bubbly and utopistic cues of utopian virtual with samples or sound cues of the 2000s instead. Its album covers heavily feature the visuals of the graphical style of the same name.
  • Signalwave (or broken transmission): sampling and distorting radio broadcasts, television programs, and stations, especially The Weather Channel. Representative artists include 猫 シ Corp and CT57.[25]
  • Slushwave: the ambient side of vaporwave, creating a musical environment to "get lost in" with tracks longer than 10 minutes. Prominent artists include t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者, SOARER, and desert sand feels warm at night.[25][117]
  • Barber beats: popularized by artists such as Haircuts for Men and Macroblank, the subgenre heavily samples and slows down a wide variety of smooth jazz, lounge music, and R&B from the 1980s to the early 2000s.[118][119][28][26]

See also

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Notes

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References

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Bibliography

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[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Vaporwave

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia
Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music and a corresponding visual art style that originated in online communities during the early 2010s, characterized by heavy sampling and manipulation of source material from 1980s and 1990s pop culture, including lounge, smooth jazz, and advertising jingles, often slowed down with added reverb and echo to create a sense of detached nostalgia. The genre's foundational techniques were introduced in Daniel Lopatin's 2010 cassette release Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, which looped and pitch-shifted excerpts from popular songs to evoke haunting, memory-like fragments. It achieved wider recognition through Ramona Xavier's Floral Shoppe (2011), released under the alias Macintosh Plus, an album that crystallized vaporwave's signature sound and imagery, including Japanese city pop samples and consumerist visuals. Vaporwave aesthetics extend beyond music to encompass digital collages featuring classical busts, pastel gradients, Windows 95 interfaces, and luxury branding, fostering an internet meme culture that romanticizes the perceived excesses of late-20th-century capitalism. While frequently framed in academic analyses as a postmodern critique of consumerism and neoliberalism, this interpretation is disputed, with participants emphasizing aesthetic play and ironic detachment over explicit political intent.

Musical and Aesthetic Characteristics

Sonic Features

Vaporwave tracks predominantly feature samples drawn from and commercial music, including easy-listening genres, , R&B, lounge, , and Japanese records. These sources are selected for their associations with and corporate environments, such as mall soundtracks and jingles. Core production techniques involve slowing the samples to tempos of 60–90 beats per minute, often with downward pitch-shifting to produce a languid, "melted" or stretched temporal quality that evokes and disconnection. Chopping and splicing methods—reordering audio fragments, repeating short loops, or creating stuttered syllables—further fragment the material, drawing from hip-hop's chopped-and-screwed style but applied to non-rap contexts. Effects processing emphasizes spatial and degradative alterations: heavy reverb and echo simulate expansive, empty halls, while bitcrushing, reduced sampling rates, and artificial instrumentation introduce lo-fi artifacts reminiscent of outdated like scratched CDs or early computer sounds. For instance, Vektroid's album Floral Shoppe employs downpitched loops from sources like Diana Ross's "," layered with reverb to yield a surreal, pulsating warmth. The overall sonic texture is cyclical and minimalist, with sparse synth pads or basslines supporting the processed samples to foster a dreamy, ethereal stasis rather than progression, often resulting in tracks that loop indefinitely without traditional verse-chorus structures. This combination yields a bittersweet, hauntological quality—familiar yet alienating—optimized for passive listening in digital or abandoned virtual spaces.

Visual and Thematic Elements

Vaporwave's visual style prominently features Greco-Roman busts and statues juxtaposed with elements of 1980s and 1990s consumer culture, such as pastel color palettes dominated by pinks, teals, and mint greens, often rendered with glitch effects and vapor trails. Online tools for creating vaporwave-style glitch GIFs include 3D GIF Maker's Glitch GIF tool, a free generator supporting vaporwave and retro styles, and ImageOnline's GIF Glitch Maker, which applies VCR and digital distortion effects ideal for vaporwave aesthetics. Tutorials on YouTube demonstrate methods using After Effects and Photoshop or GIMP for vaporwave GIFs, while JavaScript examples on CodePen and GitHub libraries offer code for glitch effects in retro text and visuals. This aesthetic emerged alongside the genre in early 2010s online communities, drawing from early internet graphics, including 1990s web design motifs like tiled backgrounds, pixelated fonts, and low-resolution CGI. Common imagery includes infinite checkerboard grids, sunset palm trees, and fragmented consumer product logos, evoking a sense of detached futurism. Thematically, vaporwave visuals convey reconstructed for a bygone of unbridled , repurposing symbols of luxury and muzak-laden malls to highlight the obsolescence of late 20th-century . This approach often employs irony and , aggregating disparate cultural artifacts—such as Japanese text overlays on Western classical sculptures—to critique or luxuriate in the emptiness of commodity culture, though interpretations vary between escapist fantasy and subtle accelerationist commentary. artworks, like Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams Volume 1 (2010) with its warped VHS-style visuals, exemplify this blend, influencing broader trends by 2015.

Historical Origins

Precursors and Influences

Chillwave and , both emerging in 2009, served as primary musical precursors to vaporwave by pioneering nostalgic, lo-fi engagements with synth-pop, , and consumer media sounds. Chillwave, a term coined on July 27, 2009, by the satirical blog Hipster Runoff, encompassed hazy, reverb-drenched tracks from artists like and , emphasizing dreamy escapism and retro-futurist vibes derived from influences such as and early aesthetics. Hypnagogic pop, introduced by in the August 2009 issue of , described "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory," featuring degraded, cassette-tape simulations of chart music by artists including Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti and , who evoked warped childhood recollections of commercial jingles and video game soundtracks. These genres provided vaporwave's foundational irony and sonic palette, transforming earnest into detached critique through slowed tempos, echo effects, and sample loops. , a sampling-based technique coined by John Oswald in his 1985 essay ", or Audio Piracy as a Compositional ," further influenced vaporwave's method of repurposing existing recordings—often from 1970s-1990s , , and advertising jingles—into abstracted, non-linear compositions that highlighted consumer capitalism's obsolescence. Direct precursors crystallized in experimental releases like Daniel Lopatin's (2010), which isolated hypnotic refrains from hits (e.g., loops from Diana Ross's "" and Mike Oldfield's "") amid vapor trails of delay and reverb, bridging hypnagogic experimentation with vaporwave's signature plunder. James Ferraro's early works, such as Reduct (2010), similarly prefigured the genre by layering synthetic over simulations, drawing from the same era's technological optimism. These innovations, disseminated via and , shifted from hypnagogic pop's personal reverie toward vaporwave's postmodern , emphasizing cultural detritus over organic creation.

Birth of the Genre (2009-2011)

The origins of vaporwave as a distinct genre trace to experimental electronic works shared online in 2010, particularly Daniel Lopatin's album Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, released that year under the pseudonym Chuck Person. This cassette-only release featured looped, slowed-down samples from 1980s pop and R&B tracks—such as excerpts from Diana Ross's "It's Your Move" and Toto's "Africa"—pitched down and drenched in reverb to evoke a nostalgic, dissociated haze, techniques that became hallmarks of vaporwave's sonic manipulation of consumer culture artifacts. Lopatin, already active as Oneohtrix Point Never in ambient and noise scenes, distributed the album via limited physical copies and digital sharing platforms, influencing early adopters through its plunderphonic approach to evoking memory and obsolescence. By 2011, the genre coalesced further with Ramona Xavier's (under the alias or Vektroid) Floral Shoppe, self-released digitally on December 9 via the Beer on the Rug label. This album refined Eccojams' methods, prominently sampling 1980s and early 1990s Japanese and —such as pagoda-inspired loops from composers like Hiroshi Sato—while incorporating vaporwave's emerging visual aesthetic of glitchy, pastel-hued 1990s web graphics and consumer product imagery on its cover. Uploaded to and promoted on , Floral Shoppe garnered underground traction, with tracks like "リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー" exemplifying the slowed, chopped-and-screwed style that critiqued late through ironic detachment from its source materials. These releases, circulated in nascent online communities on platforms like and , marked vaporwave's departure from broader precursors by emphasizing deliberate of commercial media from the 1980s-1990s, often without explicit irony in production but yielding a sense of eerie unreality. Limited to DIY digital and cassette formats, the period's output remained niche, with fewer than a dozen notable vaporwave-tagged releases by late 2011, including Internet Club's Beyond the Zone, which echoed similar sampling tactics. This foundational phase relied on anonymous or pseudonymous creators experimenting in isolation, predating formalized discourse.

Early Artists and Releases

Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, released in 2010 by electronic musician Daniel Lopatin under the alias , stands as a foundational proto-vaporwave work. The album consists of short, looped excerpts from 1980s pop and tracks—such as cuts from Toto and —slowed to a dreamy pace and layered with echo effects, evoking a sense of detached reverie. This approach of "eccojamming," as Lopatin termed it, prioritized mood over melody, influencing subsequent artists by demonstrating how consumer media could be repurposed into ethereal collages. In 2011, Vektroid (Ramona Xavier) advanced these techniques with , issued as on December 9 via the independent label Beer on the Rug. Featuring pitched-down samples from and sources like and 80s pop ballads, the record's 11 tracks blend elements with vaporous production, clocking in at approximately 47 minutes digitally. Its accompanying artwork—featuring a bust of amid grids—crystallized the genre's visual lexicon of Greco-Roman motifs and commodified , positioning vaporwave as a critique of consumer culture. Concurrent releases, such as James Ferraro's in June 2011, further shaped the scene with simulated evoking obsolete virtual realities, drawing from similar sampling . Beer on the Rug emerged as a hub for these experiments, distributing digital and cassette editions that amplified underground dissemination through platforms like . These works collectively defined vaporwave's core by 2011-2012, emphasizing ironic detachment from past media saturation.

Expansion and Peak

Growth in Online Communities (2012-2013)

During 2012, vaporwave transitioned from niche experimentation to a burgeoning online phenomenon, with audiences coalescing on platforms including 4chan's /mu/ music board, , and , where users shared slowed-down samples and discussed ironic appropriations of 1980s-1990s consumer media. This period marked the genre's initial expansion beyond isolated producers, as forum threads and playlists amplified tracks like those from early adopters, fostering a self-reinforcing cycle of discovery and imitation among anonymous participants. By mid-2012, the influx of on these sites had elevated vaporwave's visibility, distinguishing it from precursors like through its explicit of corporate and vaporized nostalgia. Bandcamp emerged as a pivotal hub for distribution, enabling direct-to-fan releases that democratized access and encouraged label formation, such as and Miami Nights 1990 imprints, which proliferated amid the genre's digital-first ethos. A flood of new acts and albums followed in late 2012, including 's Blank Banshee 0 on September 1, 2012, which blended vaporwave with trap elements and garnered thousands of streams via embedded players on community sites. Tumblr complemented this by disseminating vaporwave's pastel-hued visuals and GIFs, intertwining sonic experimentation with meme-like imagery that appealed to a visually oriented user base. Into 2013, online engagement intensified, with dedicated spaces like emerging communities curating mixtapes and debates on authenticity, as evidenced by contemporaneous coverage noting the genre's maturation from infancy in January 2012 to a defined by February 2013. This growth reflected vaporwave's adaptation to internet-mediated dissemination, where low-barrier uploading on and supplemented , resulting in hundreds of releases cataloged that year and solidifying peer-to-peer validation over traditional gatekeepers. The decentralized nature of these platforms allowed for rapid iteration, though it also sowed seeds for oversaturation as copycat productions diluted core ironic intent.

Broader Recognition (2014-2015)

During 2014, vaporwave garnered increased attention from outlets beyond niche online forums. On September 5, profiled Saint Pepsi (Ryan ) as one of the most promising young electronic producers working in hypnagogic funk, , , and vaporwave-adjacent styles, highlighting his mixtapes Hit Vibes (2013) and Welcome to Breezy Creek (2014). Later that month, on September 8, Music Academy interviewed Hong Kong Express of Dream Catalogue, a label that had released over 50 vaporwave projects in nine months, underscoring its role in curating and promoting the genre's experimental output. Billboard followed on September 29 with an interview framing Saint Pepsi as a vaporwave "ambassador" and star, discussing his influences from 1980s and 1990s pop alongside updates on his forthcoming album Ratchet. These features marked a shift toward validation from legacy media, though the genre remained rooted in DIY and ecosystems. Key releases amplified this visibility. In 2014, artists like Vaperror issued Mana Pool, blending vaporwave with breakcore elements, while George Clanton debuted virtua92 under his Mirror Kisses alias, incorporating future funk sub-elements that appealed to broader electronic audiences. Home's Odyssey, released that year, exemplified the genre's growing production polish and thematic focus on retro-futurism, contributing to its appeal in online synth and chillwave circles. Labels such as Carpark Records began scouting vaporwave-adjacent acts, with Saint Pepsi's trajectory—culminating in his rebranding to Skylar Spence amid legal pressures from PepsiCo in early 2015—illustrating commercial interest tempered by branding conflicts. Pitchfork's retrospective acknowledgment of vaporwave's cultural footprint, though not via contemporaneous reviews, aligned with this period's momentum. By 2015, coverage extended to regional and academic-adjacent outlets, signaling wider cultural seepage. On October 26, the Music and Movie Collective detailed Luxury Elite's ascent since 2012, citing his 2015 release as emblematic of vaporwave's nostalgic synth-driven sound gaining traction among listeners beyond core enthusiasts. Saint Pepsi's transition to Skylar Spence yielded Prom King in September, reviewed by for its dance-oriented evolution from vaporwave roots, reflecting how prominent figures parlayed fame into adjacent electronic ventures. This era's recognition, while not translating to chart dominance, established vaporwave as a reference point in discussions of internet-born aesthetics, with over 200 documented releases that year alone per genre archives.

Post-Peak Evolution

Saturation and Shift (2016-2018)

By 2016, vaporwave reached a state of saturation characterized by an explosion of releases across online platforms such as and , where countless artists replicated the genre's signature slowed samples, pastel aesthetics, and consumer motifs, often prioritizing quantity over innovation. This proliferation stemmed from the accessibility of , enabling anonymous producers to flood markets with derivative content, which diluted the scene's underground and led to perceptions of stylistic exhaustion. The sheer volume—hundreds of albums annually by mid-decade—mirrored broader trends in subcultures, where viral memes and amplification accelerated imitation but eroded originality. In tandem with saturation, a perceptible shift emerged as creators sought to reinvigorate the form through experimentation, marking 2016 as a pivotal year of evolution comparable to the genre's 2011 origins. Hardvapour gained traction as a harsher variant, blending vaporwave's glitchy loops with noise, hardcore, and industrial aggression to counter the prevailing smoothness. Concurrently, albums like 2814's Rain Temple (released in 2016 via Dream Catalogue) exemplified a pivot toward hypnotic, futuristic ambient soundscapes, emphasizing introspective and cosmic themes over ironic pastiche. Blank Banshee's MEGA (October 2016) fused vaportrap elements, incorporating trap beats and soulful samples to hybridize the aesthetic with contemporary electronic styles. This transitional phase extended into 2017-2018, with further fragmentation into subgenres like future funk, which accelerated samples into upbeat, dance-oriented tracks, and mallsoft, refining retail simulations for heightened immersion. The shift reflected causal pressures from —labels ramped up merchandise and themed compilations—pushing away from vaporwave's initial toward spectacle-driven variants, though core irony persisted in select works. By 2018, these developments signaled a adapting to post-peak dynamics, prioritizing niche differentiation amid online oversupply rather than uniform replication.

Contemporary Developments (2019-2025)

In the years following its saturation phase, vaporwave persisted as a niche electronic , with artists releasing steady streams of material through independent platforms like and labels such as . By 2020, user-voted rankings on aggregation sites highlighted albums like desert sand feels warm at night by 新世界の弟子たち as exemplars of evolving vaporwave production, emphasizing atmospheric synthscapes over early ironic sampling. This period saw no broad commercial revival, but sustained output in subgenres including slushwave and vaporbreaks, as evidenced by dedicated trackers logging over 14,000 releases by tracking 758 artists. Genre evolution post-2018 incorporated broader "post-vaporwave" aesthetics, such as liminalcore—evoking disorienting, empty transitional spaces—and frutiger aero, which channeled glossy, optimistic early-2000s digital interfaces like those in or ads. These shifts marked a transition from hauntological pastiche to more immersive, utopian virtual simulations, often blending with ambient and IDM influences. Community discussions framed this as "Vaporwave ," encompassing experimental hybrids that prioritized affective immersion over explicit critique. By 2025, vaporwave's ecosystem remained vibrant in underground circles, with monthly roundups documenting diverse releases in barber beats, future funk, and variants; for instance, May's output included remixes and side projects from established acts. Events like panels continued educating newcomers on the genre's foundations, while Spotify-curated playlists aggregated fresh tracks from artists like Auragraph and Windows96. Aesthetics extended beyond into trends, influencing graphic tools and marketing for superfans amid fragmented listener bases.

Subgenres and Derivatives

Core Subgenres

Eccojams represent the foundational style within vaporwave, originating from Daniel Lopatin's (as ) 2010 release Eccojams Vol. 1, which looped short excerpts from and pop, lounge, and media sources, applying pitch-shifting, reverb, and echo effects to evoke a sense of cultural detachment and hypnosis. This approach established the genre's template of , transforming familiar commercial audio into ethereal, slowed fragments that critique consumer media overload. Mallsoft extends vaporwave's ambient tendencies toward evocations of abandoned suburban shopping centers, featuring muzak-derived samples, elements, and minimal field recordings of retail environments to simulate the quiet emptiness of 1970s–1990s malls. Releases like 猫 シ Corp's Palm Mall (2014) exemplify this subgenre's focus on nostalgic, lounge-like atmospheres devoid of overt irony, emphasizing spatial reverb and sparse synth pads over rhythmic drive. Utopian virtual, highlighted by James Ferraro's 2011 album Far Side Virtual, adopts a brighter, less distorted production style, sampling early digital interfaces, Windows-era computer sounds, and corporate to parody the optimistic futurism of 1990s tech-commercial culture. Unlike the of eccojams, it prioritizes clarity in synthesis and voice synthesis to themes of virtual and post-Cold War economic promises. Future funk diverges into a more energetic vein, sampling 1970s–1980s funk, disco, and Japanese city pop tracks at or near original speeds, with groovy basslines and chopped vocals creating danceable, hedonistic tracks often visualized through looping anime GIFs. Pioneered in works like Saint Pepsi's Hit Vibes (2012–2013), it shifts vaporwave's irony toward retromaniac celebration, influencing broader lo-fi electronic scenes by 2015.

Politically Aligned Variants

Fashwave, a variant blending vaporwave and elements with far-right imagery and themes, gained prominence in online alt-right communities during the mid-2010s. It typically features aesthetics, Greco-Roman motifs, and slowed samples overlaid with fascist or nationalist symbolism, such as or , to evoke a nostalgic, authoritarian . The genre emerged around 2015, coinciding with the rise of identitarian movements, and was used to normalize extremist views through ironic detachment, distinguishing it from vaporwave's apolitical critique. Laborwave represents a left-wing counterpart, incorporating vaporwave's retro sampling to glorify Soviet-era and communist regimes, particularly the USSR, with tracks evoking proletarian through slowed folk or industrial sounds paired with visuals. First documented in niche online discussions around 2017, it remains marginal compared to fashwave, often critiqued for romanticizing without vaporwave's ironic edge. Libertywave, aligned with libertarian ideologies, adapts vaporwave motifs to promote , free-market , and critiques of , using imagery like Gadsden flags or liberty themes. It surfaced in the late among right-libertarian online spaces, emphasizing synth-driven tracks that contrast collectivism with personal , though it lacks the widespread adoption of fashwave.

Cultural Interpretations

Nostalgia for Late 20th-Century Consumerism

Vaporwave evokes for the of the and , eras defined by neoliberal expansion, proliferation, and widespread access to consumer goods in Western economies. This manifests through audio samples of , lounge , and pop tracks from that period, often pitch-shifted downward and looped to produce a detached, dreamlike quality that recalls the ambient soundscapes of shopping malls and elevators. Visual elements reinforce this by incorporating imagery of obsolete , such as cathode-ray tube televisions and early personal computers, alongside symbols of luxury like marble busts and tropical vistas, mimicking the glossy promises of catalogs and infomercials. Scholars interpret this aesthetic as a hauntological engagement with late 20th-century capitalism's excesses, where the genre resurrects the era's unfulfilled utopian visions of endless prosperity and technological progress, declared as the "end of history" by in 1992 amid post-Cold War optimism. The focus on —evident in motifs of abandoned malls and vaporized corporate logos—highlights a longing for the perceived simplicity and abundance before the eroded such illusions. Unlike mere irony, this nostalgia often conveys genuine wistfulness for the material culture of and similar policies, which boosted to record levels, with U.S. household debt rising 150% from 1980 to 1990. Subgenres like mallsoft amplify this by simulating the echoey acoustics of empty retail spaces, drawing from real 1980s-1990s systems designed to encourage prolonged shopping, as pioneered by companies like Inc., which piped functional music into over 4,500 U.S. locations by 1990. Critics note that while some readings frame this as subversive , the persistent revival of these elements suggests an aspirational re-enchantment with the era's ethos, detached from contemporary economic . This temporal dislocation underscores vaporwave's role in processing the spectral remnants of a that promised fulfillment through acquisition but delivered commodified .

Irony, Pastiche, and Hauntology

Vaporwave's aesthetic frequently relies on irony to subvert or expose the superficiality of 1980s and 1990s consumer culture, employing slowed-down samples of pop songs, advertisements, and muzak to underscore the commodification of leisure and aspiration. This ironic detachment, evident in early tracks like Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010), transforms upbeat source material into eerie, looping fragments that mock the era's promises of endless prosperity without offering alternatives. Analysts note that this approach draws from postmodern skepticism, yet debates persist on its depth, with some viewing it as performative critique diluted by the genre's rapid commercialization on platforms like Bandcamp by 2012. Central to vaporwave's method is , a technique identifies as characteristic of , involving the neutral imitation of past styles without satirical edge or historical depth. In vaporwave, this manifests as collage-like assemblages of disparate elements—Greek busts juxtaposed with interfaces and vocals—evoking a flattened, ahistorical pastiche that mirrors the "depthlessness" of late capitalist media. Unlike , which targets specific flaws, vaporwave's pastiche often appears blank, amplifying Jameson's observation of cultural recycling under global , as seen in visual artworks featuring distorted from the . This stylistic mimicry peaked around 2011–2013 in online forums like Reddit's r/vaporwave, where users shared edits blending lounge jazz with retail jingles. Hauntology, as theorized by and adapted by to critique the "slow cancellation of the future" in neoliberal culture, permeates vaporwave through its resurrection of unrealized utopian visions from the post-Cold War era. Fisher argued that contemporary media recycles "dead" styles from the 1980s–1990s, haunted by futures foreclosed by financial crises like , a dynamic vaporwave captures via glitchy evocations of abandoned malls and obsolete tech promising transcendence. Tracks such as Saint Pepsi's Winner's Circle (2013) exemplify this by reanimating and infomercial optimism as spectral remnants, fostering a melancholy for stalled progress rather than mere . Scholarly interpretations position vaporwave as a hauntological symptom of , where irony yields to an uncanny longing for alternatives that never materialized, influencing subgenres into the late . These elements intertwine, with irony often serving as entry to pastiche's and hauntology's spectral undertones, though critics like those in Capacious journal contend the genre risks aestheticizing critique without causal disruption to consumerism. By 2015, as vaporwave saturated , some producers shifted toward sincerity, diluting initial irony in favor of earnest hauntological immersion, per analyses of post-peak works.

Political Dimensions and Controversies

Debates on Capitalism: Subversion or Affirmation?

Scholars and cultural critics have debated whether vaporwave functions as a subversive critique of or instead affirms its structures through ironic detachment and commodified . Proponents of the subversive interpretation argue that the genre's deliberate repurposing of and consumer artifacts—such as slowed samples of , advertisements, and corporate logos—exposes the alienating logic of late by rendering its excesses and obsolete. This view draws on the genre's origins in anonymous online releases like Vektroid's (2011), which juxtaposed Japanese with interfaces and classical busts to highlight the spectral remnants of unchecked , evoking Mark Fisher's concept of where past futures haunt the present without resolution. Early manifestos, such as those circulated on platforms like in 2011-2012, explicitly framed vaporwave as an "accelerationist" , accelerating capitalist aesthetics to reveal their inherent contradictions rather than endorsing them. Opposing perspectives contend that vaporwave's irony remains superficial and non-committal, failing to generate actionable resistance and instead enabling passive aesthetic consumption that sustains capitalist cycles. Rob Whelan and Raphael Nowak, in their analysis of online genre discourse, note that while the "critique of capitalism" narrative is foundational to vaporwave's identity—repeated in artist interviews and forum discussions—it is frequently disputed by participants who view the genre as apolitical or nostalgic , diluting any potential subversiveness into postmodern . This ambiguity allows vaporwave to be co-opted; by the mid-2010s, its motifs appeared in commercial fashion lines from brands like Supreme and in campaigns evoking retro , transforming into marketable irony without challenging underlying economic relations. Empirical evidence from genre evolution supports the affirmation argument: vaporwave's shift toward subgenres like by 2015-2016 emphasized affirmative over irony, with artists like producing tracks compatible with corporate licensing for media soundtracks. Moreover, the proliferation of vaporwave merchandise on and from 2013 onward—peaking with thousands of listings by 2017—demonstrates how the aesthetic became a vector for personal commodification, where fans reproduced capitalist for profit, mirroring the very consumer logic ostensibly critiqued. Critics like those in hauntology-focused studies argue this reinforces "," recycling obsolete signifiers without disrupting systemic incentives, as the genre's digital accessibility lowers barriers to entry but aligns with platform economies like and algorithms that prioritize viral aesthetics over ideology. The debate persists due to vaporwave's inherent ambivalence, where empirical intent from pioneers like Daniel Lopatin (interviewed in 2013 as viewing sampling as "ruining" source material to critique ) contrasts with broader reception, including right-leaning appropriations that celebrate unironically the era's economic optimism. Academic sources in , often rooted in , tend to overemphasize subversive potential amid institutional skepticism toward market integration, yet data reveals a spectrum where affirmation dominates post-2015 evolutions. Ultimately, suggests vaporwave's impact aligns more with affirmation, as its ironic frame has been absorbed into cultural production without measurable anti-capitalist outcomes, such as shifts in consumer behavior or policy discourse.

Left-Wing Readings and Critiques

Left-wing interpretations of vaporwave frequently frame the genre as an aesthetic indictment of late capitalism, emphasizing its use of slowed-down samples from and advertisements, , and corporate imagery to evoke the spectral remnants of unfulfilled consumer promises. Proponents such as music theorist Adam Harper have described early vaporwave tracks, like Daniel Lopatin's (2010), as "sarcastic anti-capitalists" that reveal "the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture" through deliberate disruption of smooth capitalist flows. This reading aligns with Marxist-inflected analyses viewing vaporwave's as a punk-like defiance of commodified authenticity, repurposing obsolete media to highlight capitalism's cyclical obsolescence and the alienation inherent in perpetual consumption. Critiques from socialist and Marxist perspectives, however, contend that vaporwave's irony often devolves into passive rather than active , aestheticizing capitalist excess without articulating pathways to systemic change. Scholars like those in Culture journal argue that the genre's purported anti-capitalist stance is a constructed , actively disputed within online communities where producers and fans reject overt political intent, leading to its rapid by labels and platforms that neutralize any radical potential. For instance, by , mainstream adoption of vaporwave motifs in —such as Pepsi's use of pastel aesthetics—illustrated how capital absorbs and repackages , transforming it into marketable rather than opposition. Left-leaning observers further note that vaporwave's focus on individual lassitude mirrors broader neoliberal resignation, echoing Mark Fisher's but failing to revive lost futures through praxis, instead reinforcing depoliticized consumption. These reservations highlight a tension: while early works like Vektroid's (2011) invited readings of hauntological mourning for evaporated utopian horizons, the genre's evolution into apolitical subvariants underscores its limited efficacy as .

Right-Wing Appropriations

In the mid-2010s, elements of the vaporwave aesthetic were appropriated by individuals and groups aligned with the alt-right to create "fashwave," a subgenre blending vaporwave's nostalgic synth samples and retro imagery with fascist , such as swastikas overlaid on 1980s consumerist visuals or slogans promoting . This adaptation repurposed vaporwave's irony and hauntological references to late capitalism into expressions of cultural grievance, evoking a romanticized past before perceived declines in Western society, often distributed via platforms like and . The term "fashwave" emerged around 2016, coined in online far-right communities as a portmanteau of "fascist" and "vaporwave" or "synthwave," with early promotion by figures like Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer, who highlighted tracks to appeal to younger audiences through ironic, meme-friendly formats. Examples include anonymous producers releasing albums like Fashwave Sampler on Bandcamp, featuring slowed-down 1980s pop remixes paired with lyrics or samples endorsing authoritarian or ethnonationalist themes, amassing thousands of streams before platform removals. Fashwave visuals often mimic vaporwave's pastel grids and Greek busts but incorporate runes, eagles, or Pepe the Frog variants to signal in-group ideology. European identitarian groups, such as Denmark's Generation Identitær, integrated fashwave into videos starting in 2017, using its electronic beats and nostalgic filters to soundtrack montages decrying and , thereby framing anti-globalist sentiments as a reclamation of . This usage drew from vaporwave's critique of but redirected it toward preservationist narratives, with tracks like those by pseudonymous artists promoting "tradition" over progress. Original vaporwave pioneers, including Daniel Lopatin (), distanced themselves, viewing the co-option as a distortion of the genre's apolitical or left-leaning ironic detachment. Such appropriations persisted into the early 2020s on fringe platforms, though efforts by and reduced visibility; for instance, by 2022, at least 40 white supremacist-associated artists, some producing fashwave, maintained presences on major streaming services despite content violations. Critics from within electronic music scenes argued that fashwave's appeal lay in its subversive veneer, masking explicit under vaporwave's detached coolness, but empirical spread remained limited to niche online subcultures rather than mainstream adoption.

Reception, Impact, and Criticisms

Critical and Commercial Reception

Vaporwave received acclaim from influential music critics for its subversive sampling techniques and of nostalgic unease, particularly in retrospective assessments of foundational works. Pitchfork's 2019 review of Macintosh Plus's 2011 album assigned it an 8.8 out of 10, praising the record's pioneering portrayal of existential anxiety via slowed, recontextualized corporate samples that induce a "trancelike state" reflective of modern disconnection. The publication framed vaporwave as inherently anti-commercial, a "rebellious" response to industry corporatization, with crafted to blend into the background like tunes yet linger disruptively. Academic and analytical discourse has similarly engaged vaporwave's conceptual layers, often interpreting it as a stylistic protest against 1980s-1990s consumerism, though debates persist over the depth of its anti-capitalist intent versus mere aesthetic pastiche. One study describes the genre as functioning through irony to critique socio-economic structures while enabling identity expression in digital spaces. Counterarguments contend that claims of systemic subversion exaggerate the scene's online genre dynamics, where ironic detachment prevails over explicit activism. In commercial terms, vaporwave has sustained a modest, niche viability primarily via releases, cassette runs from boutique labels, and free digital sharing, aligning with its mockery of mass-market consumerism rather than pursuing chart dominance. No vaporwave albums have achieved significant placements or major-label breakthroughs, with the genre's estimated listener base confined to online subcultures and aesthetic enthusiasts, yielding limited revenue but enduring cult appeal. Recent hybrid projects, like Discovery Zone's album Quantum Web, echo this trajectory, earning Guardian praise for vaporwave-infused synth and strong songcraft amid some ambient filler, yet without propelling broader sales.

Cultural and Commercial Influence

Vaporwave's aesthetic, characterized by pastel hues, effects, and retro consumer imagery, has exerted influence across , , and , often manifesting as ironic nods to and . This style permeates album artwork, , and online visuals, with elements like classical busts overlaid on grid patterns appearing in independent art projects and memes since the mid-2010s. In gaming culture, vaporwave draws from and influences retro soundtracks and visuals, with artists sampling elements and developers incorporating similar nostalgic synths in titles like Nintendo's (released September 9, 2022), which features vaporwave-adjacent music and aesthetics. Commercially, vaporwave has spawned niche apparel brands capitalizing on its motifs, such as Vapor95, founded in 2015, which sells limited-edition clothing like windbreakers and T-shirts emblazoned with vaporwave graphics, achieving cult status within online subcultures. Other labels, including Dream Catalogue and Vaporwave Boutique, produce retro-futuristic garments evoking 1990s mall culture, with sales driven by platforms like and , though the market remains confined to enthusiasts rather than mass retail. By 2023, design analysts forecasted expanded adoption in branding and advertising, citing vaporwave's appeal for evoking "dream-like " in sectors like and digital interfaces, yet its commercial footprint stays subcultural, with annual revenues for dedicated labels estimated in the low six figures based on and models. This influence underscores vaporwave's ironic , where critiques of fuel actual merchandise sales.

Criticisms and Limitations

Critics have argued that vaporwave's heavy reliance on irony and often results in superficial engagement with the consumerist themes it evokes, failing to offer substantive or emotional depth. Adam Trainer, in his analysis of the , described its music as prioritizing "mood regulation" akin to corporate stock tracks over genuine artistic expression or enjoyment. This perspective posits that the aesthetic's ironic detachment can trap creators and audiences in an "infinite loop of irony," where becomes self-referential and detached from meaningful commentary, leading to what some observers term "irony fatigue." The narrative of vaporwave as an anti-capitalist critique has been widely disputed, with scholars noting that its genre work often aestheticizes rather than subverts late capitalism, allowing for easy commodification without challenging systemic structures. Research by Ryan M. Reilly examines how online communities articulate and contest this claim, revealing tensions where the genre's ironic embrace of consumerism is reinterpreted as affirmation rather than protest, undermining its purported radical intent. Similarly, while early vaporwave drew from punk-like DIY ethos, its rapid mainstream absorption—evident in branding and fashion trends by 2015—diluted claims of subversion, as capitalist mechanisms co-opted the aesthetic for profit, per critiques in music scene analyses. Limitations in originality and innovation further constrain vaporwave's longevity, as its formulaic use of slowed samples from 1980s-1990s pop, elevator music, and corporate muzak often yields derivative works lacking novel composition. Critics highlight this sampladelia approach as fostering homogeneity, where visual and sonic elements like pastel glitches and marble busts repeat without advancing beyond nostalgic evocation. By the late 2010s, the scene's internal debates over authenticity—pitting anonymous origins against personality-driven acts—exacerbated perceptions of stagnation, contributing to a perceived "fall" despite niche persistence. These factors, combined with associations to edgier online subcultures, have led some to view vaporwave as inadvertently enabling escapist or reactionary nostalgia rather than progressive discourse.

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  28. https://botr-archive.neocities.org/
  29. https://sites.google.com/cua.edu/inventio/read/volume-7/physical-obsession-in-a-virtual-plaza-the-digital-community-of-vaporwave
  30. https://blankbanshee.bandcamp.com/album/blank-banshee-0
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  33. https://vaporwave.wiki/wiki/Category:Released_in_2013
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  38. https://nemmc.org/2015/10/26/the-good-the-bad-the-nostalgic-exploring-the-world-of-a-vaporwave-artist/
  39. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20977-prom-king/
  40. https://vanpaugam.com/blog/2021/3/25/the-story-of-vaporwave
  41. https://daily.bandcamp.com/best-of-2016/back-to-the-future-the-top-ten-vaporwave-albums-of-2016
  42. https://blankbanshee.bandcamp.com/album/mega
  43. https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/user-highest-rated/2020s/vaporwave/
  44. https://recentmusic.com/genre/vaporwave/artists/
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  46. https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/comments/1hg9myd/vaporwave_is_not_deadit_has_evolved/
  47. https://www.vaporwavenewsnetwork.com/new-releases-may-2025/
  48. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtXqCBsFQjc
  49. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6bulmsYHDuSLtM9ECW1Fvx
  50. https://www.music-tomorrow.com/blog/music-marketing-in-2025-from-swifties-to-vaporwave-and-biophilic-beats-the-diversity-of-superfans
  51. https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/vaporwave-genres-list
  52. https://screenshot-media.com/culture/internet-culture/what-is-vaporwave/
  53. https://gnet-research.org/2023/06/28/understanding-fashwave-the-alt-rights-ever-evolving-media-strategy/
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  86. https://vaporwaveboutique.com/the-best-vaporwave-inspired-clothing-brands-you-need-to-know-about/
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