So I only very recently listened to V A P O R W A V E for the first time, it's fun and sometimes it's fucking amazing like here:
youtube.com
But can someone explain the origin of it? When did Sup Forums start talking about it? How did it become such a big meme on here? What's with the japanese characters in everything, and the spaces between letters? I missed out on all that for basically no reason.
Look up Vapourwave: A Brief History.
>the origin of it
in the late 2000s there was a website called Everything is Terrible that uploaded videos of weird TV programs from the early 90s. Then they released two movie made out of them, which contained a lot of editing tricks (not unlike the Youtube Poop videos that became popular around the same time) in order to make them seem eerier and more surreal.
Similarly, Tim & Eric's awesome show, around the same time, revolved around recreating the style of 90s TV programs with a creepier and goofier approach.
Vaporwave is the translation of Everything is Terrible and Tm & Eric's Awesome Show into a musical format.
what about the Sup Forums angle? i tried to search for it on the archives but apparently Sup Forums is unsearchable
and the names of stuff with spaces/japanese?
oh and im watching this now, thanks
>japanese
Something related to capitalism? Japan was on a roll during the 80s/90s and it influenced everything.
Maybe if you see it in this video you'll get what they are going for with this shit.
youtube.com
At least that's how I see I could be wrong.
>What's with the japanese characters in everything, and the spaces between letters?
japanese computers normally use a unicode format for the roman alphabet called fullwidth text, that happens to produce bigger letters with more space between them.
And as for why everything is in Japanese: it's because in the early 90s Japan was cool as fuck, and because giving your projects and songs an unintelligible title gives it an esoteric, mysterious flavor. It's like with Black Metal and its shrieked vocals and scribbled band logos you can't understand unless someone tells you what it means. It makes you feel like you're in contact with a lost civilization.
Hence the roman statues. The idea is that the early 90s are a lost civilization and that we can only access it through its ruins. That's what vaporwave is, musically. Eroded fragments of the early 90s.
It's very similar to martial industrial in that regard, except that martial industrial tries to re-create the atmosphere of pre-WW2 Europe instead of the atmosphere of late 80s USA.
don't take that video too seriously though, it's heavily designed to shill Dream Catalogue.
So basically it's screw music that already existed for well over a decade but with 80s music instead of hiphop and more chopping.
Doesn't seem like vaporware is something new.
Screw music is basically martial industrial but with reggae and jazz instead of military music.
Doesn't seem like chopped and screwed is something new.
>Screw music is basically martial industrial but with reggae and jazz instead of military music.
This has to be the strongest bait I've seen all year, jesus fuck.
I know it's apparently a movement involving a message against or not really pro-capitalism, and the spacing is because when you use Japanese as your language on PC, when you type in the Roman Alphabet, it creates a weird spacing, because the spacing is designed to accommodate hiragana and kanji, which are larger.
It's not even bait, it's simply a reductio ad absurdum of , which was either very poor bait or a very stupid criticism.
Or in this case an extreme case of both.
>apparently a movement
no
That shit about being pro or anti capitalism is just how a handful of tumblrite bloggers tried to describe it in order to be taken seriously by their pseudo-intellectual readers.
Could you back that up? Because I've read that in more reputable places and articles describing vaporwave.
this is getting pretty meta
pretty [spoiler]A E S T H E T I C[/spoiler] if you know what i'm sayin
i've read it in reputable places but that still doesn't really make sense to me
its fucking rehashing to the point of unrecognizability old shit, and turning it into new shit, with cool music videos, names, etc
i dont see where marx enters into the discussion
>pretty meta
No shit
It just means that vaporwave, chopped n screwed and martial industrial are all genres that belong to a category called sample-based music.
Which is fucking obvious.
A statement on capitalism doesn't default to Marxism. Come on user, I thought you were smarter than that.
But I wouldn't say it's too off mark, a lot of the imagery is consumerist staples from the 90's and 80's.
>reputable places
like what? Pitchfork?
It's precisely because "journalists" have a reputation to uphold that they will bullshit you into thinking that vaporwave is some super serious politically engaged shit.
There's certainly a bittersweet tone to vaporwave, but very little of it is actually supposed to be satirical. Let alone an "anti-capitalist movement".
Personally, I've always thought of Vaporwave as more nostalgic for the 80s/90s as opposed to criticising the capitalistic/consumerist ways. Positive, not negative.
First there isn't a genre of music called "sample-based music", it's called sampling, and it's a musical process not a genre.
Stop being retarded.
I'm not trying to argue the correctness of it, I'm more curious than anything, but I'll believe you, because I never see any vaporwave artist make a statement on anything at all.
depends on the artists.
Futurefunk is undoubtedly positive, but some of the gloomier minimal stuff is meant to creep you out a little.
To go back to Everything is Terrible: On one hand you've got those silly and fun "how to seduce women" videos, and on the other hand you've got the Réjuvénique infomercial which is the spookiest shit ever.
The real question is why hasn't anything in the genre come close to Macintosh Plus?
Which is why I said "category" instead of "genre".
learn to fucking read.
Don't listen to this, the creator of the video is a smug leddit faggot that deliberately omitted Sup Forums's contributions to vaporwave.
The first relatively mainstream vaporwave album was Daniel Lopatin's
Eccojams, although James Ferraro had bee screwing around with this stuff as well.
There's a big anti-capitalist trend in Vaporwave but it has been overblown. The best known artist I can think of who explicitly makes vaporwave as a critique of capitalism is INTERNET CLUB, most don’t especially the bigger artists.
That said capitalism and the bitter sweet nature of consumerism has always been a big part of the aesthetics of all vaporwave, even if people like Vektroid didn't intend for it to be taken seriously.
this senpai
Plunderphonics you asshat
Genuine question by the way.
I know I'm serious too. When you think of vaporwave you think macintosh plus.
Well I think Mac+ sucks.
Ursula's Cartridges is but one of the multiple vaporwave projects I enjoy more.
Yeah, but they're head and shoulders the first that almost everyone thinks of when thinking about Vaporwave
Are you just talking about Floral Shoppe?
Because most of Vektroid's discography is much better than that album.
Floral Shoppe is a meme. It's famous because it sucks
people who want to make fun of vaporwave bring it up as an example of vaporwave that sucks
that's why it's famous
>It's famous because it sucks
O-oh
It was a meme in 2011, died in 2013, was ressurected by memers in mid 2014 and become mainstream in 2015.
Tl;dr it was a trollbait that got taken seriously by Valley pseudo hipsters.
Underated
japan manfactured a lot of tech back in the 80/90's
vaporwave a history is one of the worst descriptions of vaporwave of all time. the only thing thats good about it is that it gives you a chronology and sets the scene, names all the big players in the genre.
all the talk about vaporwave's focus on consumerism is total BS. Everyone involved in the vaporwave scene knows its about a e s t h e t i c and not some overwrought political statement about consumerism.
There used to be a sincere hyper-optimism about technology back in the 90s and early 2000s where products try to make you feel excited about using them. The problem is, the technology wasn't genuinely able to deliver on its promises, and these motives come off as alien, creepy and inhuman especially by today's standards.
trying to consume these at present day is a kind of nauseating fever dream that is difficult to put into words.
Imagine you're a third grader. Home life is great for you as a kid. Dad and mom love each other very much and you especially. They get into fights sometimes because it's hard for dad to pay the bills, and mom has to wear old clothes. Every day after you get home from school mom and dad will set time aside to take turns reading a book out loud to you before bedtime. They let you read some paragraphs so that you get practice. Right now you're all working through Little House on the Prairie.
One morning after you get to school, your teacher has some exciting news: while you were on your way here, your parents have converted to digital form, and now exist on the World Wide Web! Their physical bodies have been transformed into a digital file which you may access through your home PC!
The teacher gathers the whole class downstairs, to basement where the school library room is. You all sit down criss-cross on speckled purple-and-teal commercial carpet as the fluorescent lights dim. The walls are wrought with construction paper hand turkeys and 'favorite books' lists from the fourth graders, but right now it's too dark to work out what they say. The librarian rolls in a television rack and fiddles with some cables.
> Class, we are going to introduce you to user's new parents!
> Except you user, they asked in advance for you to wait until you get home.
The school counselor takes you to do activities with her for the rest of the day.
You finally get home but nobody's there. Everything is clean, all the clothes are folded, the carpets freshly vacuumed, the linoleum swept and mopped. You suddenly hear something beeping in the kitchen. You rush in, but it's just the diswhasher. It's cycle ended, and it's full of clean dishes. Mom and dad's room is completely empty except for the desk that has a giant beige CRT hooked up to a Windows 95 emachine.
> user, welcome to your modern digital experience. Enjoy your parents in their all-new form.
This video starts playing through a 320x240 RealPlayer window: youtube.com
You never see your parents again. The video is them. You look out the window and see pic related.
check out worlds.com
>it's all in your head
What did he mean by this?
Fuck off reddit
Don't listen to them, Floral Shoppe is beautiful.
It really isn't.
Even Vektroid hates it.
She hates what it's become, which anyone would if their art was treated like that, can't blame her.
The music in itself is really creative and fun.
>even [Artist who created the work in question] hates it
one of the worst arguments
She never 'intended' for it to become anything. It was a mockery of seapunk and nothing more.
Why?
>She never 'intended' for it to become anything. It was a mockery of seapunk and nothing more
That doesn't stop it from being a beautiful, fun, creative work of art though, right?
this 100%
give replies
>martial industrial
Thanks for letting me onto this
no it's racist m8
ravenews.ca
nice to see a fellow 9gagger :o)
Whenever I see a reference to vaporwave, I end up going back and listening to eccojams because it's the only vaporwave I actually like
It doesn't matter
thus desu
I mean I know there's gotta be more good shit out there, but eccojams did it fucking perfectly at points. even floral shoppe doesn't quite touch it, by far the closest it gets is the first two tracks and while they're pretty good they're poorly executed in comparison imo.
I dunno how slowed down reverb'd samples are "beautiful" but it is a fun genre.
No, however, the missed beats, monstrous vocals and farty sax sounds prevent it from being all that.
Listen to vaporwave that doesn't sound ugly, m8
>But can someone explain the origin of it? When did Sup Forums start talking about it? How did it become such a big meme on here? What's with the japanese characters in everything, and the spaces between letters? I missed out on all that for basically no reason.
1- The reason behind the japanese letters and space between letters is witch house, witch house had ascii symbols and the lack of creativty made people use it on vaporwave too.
Like that Sup Forums user that on every "lets create a microgenre" say some *wave name, like he doenst even have creativity to come with a name.
Or like oceangrunge creator that didnt had creativity to come with a microgenre and just changed sea from seapunk to ocean and punk from seapunk to grunge. To make matters worse the punk is not related to the punk on punk rock but related to the word punk on steampunk, dieselpunk.....
2-It became famous with some guys posting threads about this new genre here, asking what people think about it or etc..
3- Sup Forums started to talk about it at 2012, with seapunk being talked at 2011 and witch house at 2010. At this time, we had one microgenre per year that became trendy during the year and etc.. Think kind of thing faded out, people here tried to make the microgenre of the year thing (metro-ko, mallsoft, tonefield, exotransmission and other ideas) but we failed
much like half these vapourwave threads
Literally everything you "experience" is the result of electrical signals going into your brain
It's a simulation
Top kek it's just a slowed down pop song
Calm your tits