Vaporwave — Down the Rabbit Hole

[Burkutace]

"Were you going to listen to レ丹尸回尺山丹レヨ in Sunday school?"

"Maybe"

[roserocksrapidly]

Vaporwave kind of feels like music that would be playing in the background of some fever dream

[TABBYMUSIC]

What’s up with people saying “I unironically enjoy vaporwave”?
There’s nothing wrong with the genre, embrace it.

[ikadar]

These comments are gold. I've never seen the words "ironically" and " unironically" so much in one place.

[oreofudgeman]

to me personally, theres something oddly comforting about the whole 90's aesthetic of fuzzy vhs and cheesy computer graphic visuals paired with songs akin to elevator music.

[xFirebirdx]

Vaporwave is never dead. The Baroque period ended hundreds of years ago, and yet people still listen to Bach's music. As long as Vaporwave still has an audience, it is alive.

[boogiemanspud]

2019 and I'm still listening to vaporwave. The best way I can describe it: a fever dream of nostalgia for a time that never existed. It's like when you stayed home sick from grade school and accidentally got too much cough syrup as a kid. Mix this feverish disconnected feel in with playing NES (or whatever system) and watching cartoons (and the ads) on over the air television while you were at home.

[greyfoxninja]

This might be off topic but when I was younger my parents would never let me watch RoboCop II. One day they went out and of course I ran and popped it into the VHS, it didn't start from the beginning because it wasn't rewinded. It started at that one particular uncanny "Sunblock 5000" commercial where the woman smears the blue and green sunblock on herself and goes into detail about how Earth lost its ozone layer and you can become sunburned in 20 seconds. I didnt know what the hell was going on as a kid when I saw that but SOMETHING about it made me want to watch it OVER and OVER again. Eventually I forgot about it but fast forward almost 15 years later and I stumble across vaporwave for the first time and INSTANTLY my mind remembers the sunblock commercial. I got waves of nostalgia and even got a bit depressed because I forgot all about my innocence as a child and my parents and their old VHS and how I would sneak in movies I wasn't supposed to watch when they went out. I was very fond of these memories and I forgot all about them. Vaporwave brought them back and that's all I needed to like the genre.

[BathroomTile]

What I like about the Vaporwave sound is that it treats those old 80's tracks as obsolete sounds of a distant era, much like all the sounds of the now irrelevant and obsolete tv ads and old operating systems they also use. Except those tracks are not really technically obsolete. You can hear them at any time on iTunes or wherever else you want, and it is as legitimate to like them now as it was then, unlike those very specific OS and tv ad sounds, which had a specific purpose for a brief time. The thing is, by slowing them down, and adding reverb/lowering the quality to muffled tv speakers standards, they re-contextualize the tracks enough to the point of making them sound like distant, nostalgic echoes of the past. It just gains a completely different mood, even if you're familiar with the original track. It makes me feel all warm and cozy.

[crashbandicoot]

Vaporwave is such a niche thing because it's best listened to at night, preferably looking up at the stars or down at the city lights. It is a calming throwback to a time that has passed, a specific A e s t h e t i c if you will.

[master_noot]

For me, vaporwave and lofi make me feel nostalgic for a time that I never lived in

[nisyturtle]

It numbs the front part of my brain where all the bad thoughts live.

[SpookyDeerArt]

what got me into vaporwave was honestly the visual art as opposed to the audio. i finally had found something to label my favorite style- thrifted looking clothes mixed with soft neon and dumb graphic designs. honestly i had known vaguely about vaporwave well before finding out about the graphics of it and didn't quite understand it (im not the best at music tbh, i'm pretty damn tone deaf and its hard for me to click with a song unless its connected to something else i enjoy), but after i had the visual style of it to connect to i could understand it better?

also it helps that i adore dumb phrases like "BONELESS WATER" mashed with crystal pepsi

[FredrikKnudsen]

I freely admit that I'm an outsider looking in on this subject, and I tried to remain at least mostly objective about this topic and refrain from making too many qualitative statements. I also admit that this was a very shallow look into a very deep topic. If you're interested in really understanding it as an art form and not just a phenomenon, please please please watch Wolfenstein OS X's documentary on it, link's in the description.

On a side note: I love Vaporwave, and I think it's one of the few true art movements that has come out of postmodernism.

[sparrowthesissy]

Any anti-genre has this kind of problem. Punk rock is a big one that comes to mind: it was supposed to be a parody of serious, macho rock; then it became the new serious macho rock; then it became a parody of what the parody had become; then people forked off taking the parodies seriously or the seriousness seriously, and generally everyone criticized everyone else for liking the right things for the wrong reasons or vice versa.

[Molly-mlwn]

What interests me about Vapor Wave is how it interacts with the concept of Hauntology, a nostalgia for visions of the future that never came to pass.

(Sometimes vaporwave is mischaracterized as Anemoia, a nostalgia for non-existent time periods.)

By taking 80s and 90s sounding music, (specifically 80s and 90s music that centered computer technology as a new frontier with utopian potential) and stretching it out, making it seem old and distorted, attention is brought to the contrast between the future that was imagined and the reality of the modern era.

Hauntology is a frequent topic of discussion by writer Mark Fisher, author of *Capitalist Realism.* And I feel that through that lens, the otherwise mysterious and esoteric genre becomes fairly easy to understand.

A sense of alienation in the present, and a nostalgia for the last time you felt optimism for the future.

[palchristianandersen]

As an old millennial, I feel the need to mention that Gen X went through a similar phenomenon but with recontextualizing '60s and '70s public access type music. The most famous example is probably Boards of Canada, but there's a whole slew of artists on a UK label called Ghost Box Records that sampled and tried to emulate that specific sound.

[FrogBlastTheVentCore]

5:40 On that note, have you ever thought about doing a Down the Rabbit Hole video about Second Life? The game's extensive and bizarre history seems like it would be right up your alley as far as research topics go. Plus, it definitely has become more relevant nowadays with several Second Life troll channels gaining mainstream popularity.

[dsnodgrass]

Having lived in the time when the repurposed media of vaporwave was "new"; hearing it now is always a reminder of the faux-naive 'future" we thought we were gonna have, just about now. The way vaporwave subtly mocks that future is a reminder of how we in the 80s and 90s mocked previous visions through our ironic embrace of "kitsch" culture of the 50s and 60s back then. Only it's us on the business end of the joke, now.

[mcnugget]

It’s 2022 and I’m only now realising how much I love this style, where before I just passed it off as another internet aesthetic as many others did. I don’t care if the internet is saying it’s dead, I can still relax in my 80s utopia that I never got to live in :’)