[Esc] Reality: The anti-capitalists making floppy disk jazz for the internet generation

Most people haven’t heard of it, it’s own fans say it died years ago, so here we are writing about it in Two Thousand and Nineteen!

There’s an image circulated online across faux-deep and pseudo-intellectual discourse that asks it’s onlookers to reflect on the obscenities of the 20th century. Creator and location unknown, it depicts a bare concrete wall with “HiROSHiMA ’45 CHERNOBYL ’86 WiNDOWS ‘95” hastily sprayed onto it in black paint. It’s kind of a black humour attempt at commentary on the technology-saturated, postmodernist consumer world we live in. Something about the internet creating a lens through which those three events can be deemed comparable in terms of their contribution to global suffering, you’d imagine.

Image of unknown origin. We don't even know where this wall is

The former two events evoke feelings of inconceivable destruction and catastrophe, brought to live through monochromatic images of rubble and ruin – but nonetheless obscured by history. Distant, and disregarded. The latter, however, brings to light a horror more known to the digital native: A throbbing, persistent, and undying sense of chronic normality that ripples through late capitalist society. The kind that makes you want to ctrl-alt-del your life.

This is the bleak cyberspace of Vaporwave, an internet aesthetic and musical style founded in the early 2010s on a sentiment of wistful nostalgia, a longing for eras gone. A fascination with 80s and 90s cultural aesthetics, manipulated into melancholia.

Here is a post-internet subculture waxing nostalgic for the time before. Most people haven’t heard of it – according to its own fans, it doesn’t even exist.

Adopting its name from ‘Vaporware’, a term for computer software announced and hyped by tech companies but never actually released, and closely tied to Marxist critique of capitalism – “all that is solid melts into air”, also referred to as Marx’s “waves of vapour” – Vaporwave employs a mawkish depiction of the retro to comment on the sleaze of capitalism and expose the emptiness of consumerism.

Speaking to AD HOC, Vaporwave producer Alcool 68 explains: “Vaporwave has its roots in a philosophy, not trends or fashions. Vaporwave is an unapologetic critique, at its core, of the symbology and language it also lovingly embraces. It's a paradoxical and ironic love/hate relationship of commercialism, base-level entertainment, capitalism and consumerism, with a wonderful tendency to mix and match bits of all of these as parts of the other.”

Vaporwave art depicts a sensationalist take on late consumer capitalism, employing pastel colours, old corporate logos, and melancholic glitch-art of beaches, desert roads, and other utopic locales aiming to create a hauntingly pensive feeling in the viewer. Musically, Vaporwave is something akin to a post-elevator music, like chillwave for Marxists. Heavily manipulated samples of everything from 80s pop ballads to Muzak – music designed to stimulate corporate workers into productivity – are reverse engineered to the opposite effect: unsettling loops and stutters combined with alienating reinterpretations of familiar sounds give the music a sense of placelessness, as if it’s the soundtrack to the very concept of nothing.

Conceptually, Vaporwave seeks to emulate the mundane atmosphere of the temples of capitalist society: the office lobby, the shopping mall, the corporate plaza. Vaporwave’s brief, screwed sketches are designed to just as often jolt you out of a trance as cause one.

Twisting utopia into dystopia, and vice versa, has always been Vaporwave’s modus operandi, but its roots were much less contemplative. Recorded by American producer Daniel Lopatin under the pseudonym Chuck Person, Eccojams Vol. 1 is credited with pioneering the genre. Primarily sample-based, looped audio pieces of chopped and slowed 80s pop songs and other popular music from the time are slowed, pitch-shifted, and echoed to create something uncanny. It was described by Lopatin as something he made as a joke while experimenting with sampling. It spawned a movement, with artists such as James Ferraro, INTERNET CLUB, and Macintosh Plus (a one-time alias of producer Vektroid) all producing Vaporwave albums that comment on globalism, consumerism, and the bleak normality of neoliberal capitalism.

Album art for Floral Shoppe, the seminal Vaporwave album.

Macintosh Plus, in particular, is credited with the seminal early Vaporwave album Floral Shoppe, considered the defining Vaporwave work. The second track, ‘リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー’ translated as ‘Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing’ has become synonymous with Vaporwave within popular discourse. Largely sampled from Diana Ross’ 1984 cover of ‘It’s Your Move’, the lyric “Do you understand? It’s all in your hands” twisted to “it’s all in your head”, repeated infinitely, the psychedelic riffs growing and pulsing to give the sense that your conscience is riding an escalator upwards through pristine but collapsing artificial environments.

But more than just the sound of Vaporwave, Floral Shoppe embodies the

‘A E S T H E T I C’ that has permeated work in the genre ever since. The album art consists of a neon pink background with a black checked dancefloor stretching endlessly into the nether, evoking a Lynchian, Twin Peaks-esque quality. At the forefront, a bust of the Roman god of the Sun, Helios, as something of a satirical reminder of what aesthetics used to refer to.

The art itself is, at first glance, a mess. Like the meaningless product of a teenager with too much time on their hands, but that’s the point: Vaporwave’s nihilism stems from its cacophony of influences from all strata of pop culture, smashing them together and probing at the emptiness of this assault of information. It’s made on the internet, about the internet, because the internet.

Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, which accidentally spawned a movement.

It’s paradoxical to its core. Vaporwave artists can be viewed through two lenses: as critics of capitalism, or as capitulants to it. A philosophy that has been applied by some has been accelerationism: that of forcing capitalism onward to its inevitably violent and chaotic conclusion - either because this will bring about social change, or because it’s the natural progression, the logical answer.

Accelerationism was pioneered at around the time Vaporwave gets most nostalgic for: the late 80s and early 90s. In a 1992 essay, prominent accelerationist Nick Land wrote: “Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem.”

Already in the relative infancy of the genre, Vaporwave has splintered, fractured, and disjointed into a number of offshoots: Mallsoft, Future Funk, and Vaportrap being among these. Mallsoft in particular takes the Vaporwave concept of a virtual plaza and brings it to life, creating a somewhat Debordian take on the music associated with 80s shopping malls and hotel lobbies. An escalator ride through liquid advertisements and gaseous desire.

An obsession with nostalgia, Japanese anime, and corporate branding combine to create Vaporwave art.

These microgenres all seek to distil and purify the initial audio-visual and philosophical offerings of Vaporwave and dispel any potential mainstream . As with all counter-culture, mass acceptance weakens any claim of authenticity. As Vaporwave verged on popularity with acclaimed releases Floral Shoppe, James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual, and Saint Pepsi’s Hit Vibes, microgenres emerged to preserve the niche, resulting in the pioneers of the genre to now believe “Vaporwave proper” to be dead, while also not being able to agree on its new direction.

Alcool 68 has been producing electronic music in some form since 1978, previously under the name DAC Crowell. He compares this fracturing of Vaporwave into numerous subgenres to the progression from rock and roll to punk rock, prog rock, hard rock and more, or the similar variations that stemmed from jazz and hip-hop: “[Vaporwave] has every earmark of a totally new musical form, especially the fact that it continues to grow, develop, and expand.” Far from being dead, Vaporwave was always a planned obsolescence, to prevent the genre from “selling-out” and thus protecting its integrity. Vaporwave was never for sale, so in a sense, it was never alive.

So Vaporwave is dead. Long live Vaporwave.