Vaporwave was the first legitimate genre created by the internet for the internet. It is in part a synthesis of previous niche creations such as witch house
BY THE INTERNET: it is created by anonymous people on the web. Personality, the figure of the Artist is irrelevant. Has to do with the nature of the music, it's so easy to make it gives you the sense it is made by computers. It seems as if all music was made by the same person, variations in songs are all due to micro genres (mall, future funk, etc...), not artists themselves
FOR THE INTERNET: mainly consumed through youtube playlists. No live concerts.
What's next for internet music? Do you think the internet is killing the figure of the artist?
i agree with most of what you said. especially >it gives you the sense it is made by computers marshall mcluhan, a philosopher and media-theorist once said "the medium is the message" as in whatever technology you're using to create and transmit media has an enormous effect on the media itself "retro" vaporwave is corny garbage. good vaporwave is based on futurist ideas
Michael Walker
I wanna propose an idea about >killing the figure of the artist like an anthill, built by many individuals who are part of a hive, Internet genres like "Vaporwave" and "Lo-Fi Chill Beats to Study to 24/7" are built by hive-like communities. You can say "i like the writing on Sup Forums better than on reddit", even though each entry is written by different individuals. The same thinking is applied when listening to anonymous internet music
Josiah Campbell
Vaporwave is noise but with an 80's/90's aesthetic that simultaneously makes you nostalgic and unsettled
Owen Thompson
thats exactly what I thought when writing that. Vaporwave is the first genre that couldn't have existed without the the medium that is the internet.
Eli Wright
new age for millenials
Kayden Williams
from what ive been told, it was combination of both. later on when software and hardware got cheaper in the mid 2000s, the beat scene started to take off with flylo, rustie, kode9. dubstep started getting big around then too.
Juan Flores
Daily reminder that shit like Home and Surf aren't vaporwave and that future funk is barely a sub genre
Justin Cook
like Mcluhan said, Vaporwave is the first genre created by the "Global Village" (virtual hive mind), powered by the internet
Dylan Long
what does breakcore even have to do with the internet??
Ryan Wood
i wrote an article about it for a senior project if you're interested. mostly explores a lot of the ideas you talked about in the op waxcylinder.weebly.com/
Josiah Barnes
doesn't trap technically predate it though? i'm referring to the instrumental genre with hudmo and lunice, etc.
Levi Moore
No, not really. Vaporwave and other microtrends are MICRO TRENDS Its very easy to get a fan following online through social media. You basically have to have a gimmick like pro wrestler
OMG LIL B IS LIKE SO LE WACKY BASED LOL XDDD *follows on twittergram
Oliver Davis
a huge chunk of vaporwave is just new age or 80's stock music except with that hollow 80's factor amplified to appease people who never got to experience the actual 80's
kinda like electro-swing which amplifies the zany swing factor for people who never got to experience the actual swing era
see where I'm getting at?
Cameron Morgan
all of it just sounds like washed out instrumentals to me. just makes me nostalgic for hipster runoff.
Kayden Parker
seeit's not a succinct description but that's because it's not a succinct concept. it's a broad cultural phenomenon
Xavier Ross
Bandcamp motherfucker
Logan Adams
i'm talking about what the music sounds like.
Henry Jackson
>Its very easy to get a fan following online through social media
thats a really dumb thing to say
Of course, the 80's (or 90's) nostalgia portrayed in the music is very different from the 80's themselves. Vaporwave isn't 80's nostalgia, it's nostalgia for something else the genre itself created.That's what makes it so interesting.
Caleb Reed
that's bullshit. before vaporwave there were genres like rapegaze, witch house, oceangunge, sesnpunk and a plethora of other such minor [adjective][name] genres being born and dying each new week
as said in the thing about vaporwave is that it's gotten so big it's basically escaped the internet realm. moreover it consumed all the other minor meme genres of the past: if you see a seapunk album cover in this day and age your first association will be "this shit's vaporwave"
Nicholas Carter
Just listen to eccojams, that's as close to pure vaporwave as you can get. If you want a more in depth description of the vaporwave sound and actual albums for examples then check through this
someone a long time ago said in relation to industrial music, that the moment an underground scene gets a definition and turned into a genre tag it's the moment when that scene dies
that person was 1000% correct
Easton Nguyen
it may have originated there and still have a strong presence there, but I think most people consume it through youtube
wrong, wrong wrong
Vaporwave is the genre that links them all together. At the beginning all those minor genres died very quickly because there was no general definition or common characteristics that connected them all together through the same name.
All those micro genres (witch house, sea punk, etc) shared the same defining characteristics that I talked about in the OP: created by the internet for the internet. That's why they don't die anymore (future funk, for example, is still alive under the name of vaporwave), but would have died before Vaporwave as a name was created.
Oceangrunge and Seapunk are Vaporwave, you need to start seeing microgenres as artists
Ryder Peterson
1 >From a musical perspective, Vaporwave is a sample-heavy genre of electronic music that began as a half-assed way of remixing 80’s and 90’s pop music. The most popular Vaporwave song by a large margin is a track called, “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” off of the 2011 album, “Floral Shoppe” by Macintosh Plus (one of Ramona Andra Xavier’s many pseudonyms). This song is essentially just a Diana Ross song that has been slowed down and chopped up a bit. While this sounds ridiculous, and there is still disagreement as to whether or not it was intended as a joke, the song has nearly 25 million views on Youtube
Lincoln Gray
2 >Most early Vaporwave followed a similar formula of taking hits from the past couple of decades, chopping them up, and then stitching them back together in order to give them new cultural context. HKE, a popular Vaporwave artist, and founder of the iconic Vaporwave record label, “Dream Catalogue,” once described Vaporwave in an interview, as a way of “recontextualizing music from the past to display it in a new light.”
James Gray
not really, trap doesn't fill the criteria I talked about in the OP.
Connor Wilson
3 >While the Idea of Vaporwave is broad and abstract, the original sound of the music can be loosely described as dreamy, ethereal samples of slowed down pop music that have been chopped up and rearranged in a disorienting manner. These samples are often supplemented by synthesizers and echo effects that to add to the spacey ambience of the music.
Dylan Miller
4 >As Vaporwave continued to branch out into numerous different forms and iterations, the definition of Vaporwave was stretched so thin, that it was reduced to the loose concept of experimental electronic music that fits into a certain aesthetic. Because of this, I think it’s important to make the distinction between what was originally considered Vaporwave, and what is now a much more ambiguous idea. For the sake of this paper, I’ve chosen to call this ambiguous idea “Post-Internet.” Others have coined the term “Vapour” which essentially refers to the same thing.
>As the idea of Vaporwave dissolved into something much bigger, many different forms of Post-Internet art grew from the seeds that Vaporwave had sewn.
Colton Cox
post-internet is the best name for this stuff since it encapsulates genres predating amd vaporwave and things like pc music which are not vaporwave by any stretch of the word
Nolan Davis
disregard that amd fhehvjdjeuchcjeurjx
Mason Parker
agreed 100%
Adrian Jackson
terrible name but i agree
Connor Kelly
Pc music is just another music label with various distinct artists and such. While it may share some aspects with Vaporwave (specially irony and nostalgia, in this case for early 2000s stuff), it doesn't have the same relationship to the internet as Vaporwave. Vaporwave is created BY the internet, not just created in a time period the internet had an important role.
Landon Hill
Vaporwave types >Ambient Not new >That shit James Ferraro does Not new >Vaportrap New, but not what we really think about when it comes to vaporwave >Chopped and Screwed music for white hipsters aka what most people know vaporwave as. The only thing that's kind of new is vaportrap and that's really just an extension of 80s electronic/pop with more advanced 808 drum programming, aka not really new.
It's laughable that this is even considered a genre t b h.
Nolan Garcia
change pc music to bubblegum bass then
Jonathan Roberts
i guess my view is that there are multiple hiveminds in the global village and that they actually exist independently from their constituent parts. and also they existed before the internet. for instance, it's the same impetus that possessed nujabes as it is that drives a lot of lofi chillhop kiddos to do their thing, it's basically just grown many new neurons. the impetus (for lack of a better word) is analogous to a soul. the concept is similar to a pantheon of gods. the soul can change over time and it can reproduce
Joshua Bell
These are the post internet micro genres
1. Vaporwave 2. chill wave 3. witch house 4. sea punk 5. ocean grunge 6. retrowave 7. night core 8. sound cloud rap
All of these genres were born on the internet, it was only possible because of the mass proliferation of DAW technology, streaming websites, and the creation of a specific astethiec.
The only people who know about them are people who are basically freebasing obscurity and nostalgia 24/7
I think its wrong to say that there are no stars or that it is completely faceless.
For instance there were people like saint pepsi, Vektroid, Blank Banshee, and MACROSS 82-99 who were well known at the peak of the online vaporwave scene.
But at the same time, yes there are thousands of faceless home producers.
Most of these microgenres didnt have a long shelf life. Vaporwave is actually an outlier for lasting that long.
What was vaporwave?
I read a tweet once from oneohtrix point never describing it perfectly. Basically he said "good vaporwave sounds like you fell face down in a water fountain at the mall in the 80's and you can hear the music playing over the intercom"
Aesthetically it combines corporate art, western sculpture, eastern fonts, Japanese in particular, anime, bright pinks and purples, 90's internet design.
I think in the end the only novelty here is the idea that a music scene was created online instead of a regional area in real life
Cooper Perry
Pc music is closer to EDM and electronic music in general than to vaporwave.
Hudson Thompson
peak vaporwave was from around 2011-2015. By the end it had been completely degraded by rap faggots and normies trying to steal the aesthetic and wanting to think they were in on the whole thing and therefore cool
David Cox
uuuuhhhh yeah no shit lol
Luis Bennett
the point is that it uses the same postmodern, futurist, techniques and it also has a distinct visual aesthetic that accompanies it
Evan Green
Pls don't connect James Ferraro with vaporwave
He's not a vaporwave artist and never was.
Lucas Parker
>For instance there were people like saint pepsi, Vektroid, Blank Banshee, and MACROSS 82-99 who were well known at the peak of the online vaporwave scene.
Yeah but theres no interviews and no faces or personalities attached to those names
>I think in the end the only novelty here is the idea that a music scene was created online instead of a regional area in real life
Why aren't more people interested in this! The impact the internet will have on music could be enormous and I feel nobody is really paying attention to it, they just dismiss it as a "meme" or something superficial.
Also, like the other guy said about Mcluhan, the fact that it was created online makes it so this type of music itself will be different that the rest. Vaporwave is radically different than genres created in the past, so I guess the fact that it was created online is a pretty big deal.
Brody Rodriguez
the techniques used to created pc music are VERY different than the copy and past techniques of Vaporwave.
Daniel Ramirez
it's kinda funny how the simply of vaporwave basically follows the uber-complexity of breakcore from the past decade
do you think underground trends will turn to complexity in the next decade again? or is circular history no longer valid in the age of the internet
Grayson Russell
This pretty much embodies everything I hate about millennials
Matthew Baker
>freebasing obscurity and nostalgia 24/7
i love that
Caleb Martinez
nice post awaiting the next microgenre
Kayden Flores
this is really good, thanks
Austin Jackson
Most of these genres don't require the existence of the internet though and have little to do with it. synthwave is just a combination 80's influence with current electronic sounds, sound cloud rap is literally just regular rap but on a specific platform, and sea punk and chill wave could have happened at any given period of time since its just an off shoot of regular electronic music. Some of these also have nothing to do with nostalgia whatsoever, like nightcore and sound cloud. Have you actually tried listening to any of this stuff user or are you just repeating what other people online have been telling you?
Aaron Fisher
this is interesting. I always thought there had to be a connection between the way William Gibson created a world of virtual experiences and morally dubious corporations in 1982, while in 2012 we have a lot of these ideals being reproduced in vaporwave. Maybe these it is true the internet was able to "connect" and make these "hive minds" meet.
Matthew Evans
cheers man. i'm glad you could take something from it
Grayson Bennett
the internet had a big role in the creation of these genres I think, it has to do with the way the medium affects the content of the music, read the article this guy posted
Logan Moore
thanks i find this idea useful, even if it's only true as a metaphor. i think it's somewhat related to pic related but his is the old version
Carson Garcia
>William Gibson my nigga
Julian Morgan
OP, as someone who bought macintosh plus on cassette from the owner of the label and still hangs out with him, you are an idiot. vaporwave was created by hipsters for hipsters and all the normies on Sup Forums ruined it by making it a meme, actually they didnt ruin it because it was never that good. but they did make my 10$ cassette worth 450$
Lucas Lopez
I hate millennials so damn much
Adam Adams
its a "meme" because the music itself its supposed to be a "meme"/ a kind of joke on music itself, its a postmodern take on internet culture, very meta
Parker Gutierrez
>t someone who has never thought about what it is beyond the most basic surface level.
you don't have to like it, but it's not just some meaningless meme
Benjamin Price
>creates seminal works of a music genre reliant on sampling and recontextualizing other people's work and ideas >wahhhh they don't know the real creaatorrrrrs!!! they're ruining the muuuusiiiiccc very very hip, my bro
Zachary Green
Somebody please post their fav vaporwave song. I want to hear
Hunter Phillips
>millennial are the only ones that made ironic music
seapunk aesthetic was always cooler than vaporwave in my opinion.
witchhouse was cringe af. basically gave wannabe goths an excuse to listen to trap music except most of it was terribly produced
Dominic Rivera
music in the 2010's i would say this music was well known to people who liked music a lot, but it peaked eventually, Macintosh plus has like kabllion views. so i would say it did become well known but not mainstream. hard to explain. when vaporwave and those microgenres were being made no one thought of it as "we are going to get famous" or "lets make a music scene", people were just having fun making stuff the uploading it online
it was well known on the internet in hipster circles, then by the end well known by most everyone. but it never left the internet and when it did people would cringe or declare it dead.
its weird, this post internet genre. you were connected with people, more people than ever. all over the world through the internet, but you never met them. you collaborated with them, at best you go to concerts. but you only know of them through twitter or youtube. and this wasnt a local scene, this was an internet scene
this first started in the 2010's
there are still musical scenes, they are online, they are electronic, and they arent dictated by mtv, corporate america, or the radio
well just like in the pre internet world, anytime normies and the mainstream get hold of the art it dies. and it did. reddit spamming the word "aesthetic" under everything. young lean degrading the aesthetic with his shitty arizona tea garbage, mtv trying to be hip and cool with the kids and trying to copy the style.
its the mid 2010's a terrorist attack or mass shooting had just occurred, you are listening to vaporwave, you watch some youtube videos from tinfoilers claiming it was a false flag or the lizard jews did it. on the side of the video is a recommended video from a guy claiming to be gangstalked. The syrian war is raging.
Jace Rodriguez
it's safe to say that vaporware and related stuff are pretty much popular internet culture. never heard about any of this IRL.
new genres will be created on the internet following the same trend for sure.
sigh.... just because Ferraro made FSV doesnt mean he's a vaporwave artist... This ep is in no way related to vaporwave in my opinion. Though, yes i agree. It's a very solid release that is getting slept on
Brandon Carter
too lazy to link to individual songs so i'll just rank some albums >2814 - birth of a new day (a lot of debate over if this is considered vaporwave but it at the very least spun out of the genre) >saint pepsi - hit vibes >death's dynamic shroud.wmv - i'll try living like this
