Vaporwave is an internet music microgenre, aesthetic, and meme that emerged in the early 2010s.For early 2010s microgenre of electronic music, see . For definition as both music and visual, see and . For definition as both a genre and an Internet meme, see: : "Indeed, vaporwave circulates more like a 'meme' than a music genre.... vaporwave is defined almost entirely by its online subculture.... it is characterized by an intense material and citational reflexivity in relation to the Internet.... Vaporwave's "memetic" subculture... also portrays a profound shift in the material mediation of music online."
It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, digital technology, and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates 1990s web design and imagery, glitch art, anime, stylized Ancient Greek or Roman sculptures, Memphis Design geometric shapes, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.
Vaporwave originated as an ironic variant of chillwave, which was one of the first music genres to develop primarily through the internet. The style also evolved from 2000s post-noise and hypnagogic pop trends 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 genre was pioneered by producers such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin, and Ramona Langley,The universal pleasures of pitch shifting – Door Gallery who each used various pseudonyms. Preceded by Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 and Ferraro's Far Side Virtual, Langley's 2011 album Floral Shoppe established a blueprint for the genre, and the movement subsequently built an audience on sites such as 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, signalwave, vapornoise, utopian virtual, late night lo-fi, vaportrap, slushwave, and hardvapour, although most have waned in popularity. The genre also intersected with fashion trends such as streetwear and various political movements. After the mid-2010s, vaporwave was frequently described as a "dead" genre. The general public came to view it as a facetious internet meme, a notion that frustrated some producers who wished to be recognized as serious artists. While claims that vaporwave is dead have followed the genre since its inception, the musical style continues to evolve and branch and maintains healthy album sales well into the 2020s.
Later in the 2010s, the genre spawned a viral internet trend known as Simpsonwave along with a revival of interest in Japanese ambient music and city pop. Political offshoots of the style, such as fashwave and juchewave emerged, while in the early 2020s, styles such as "barber beats" gained popularity.
Characteristics Vaporwave is a hyper-specific subgenre, or "microgenre", that is both a form of electronic music and an art style; however, it is sometimes suggested to be primarily a visual medium. The genre is defined largely by its surrounding subculture, with its music inextricable from its visual accoutrements. Academic Laura Glitsos writes, "In this way, vaporwave defies traditional music conventions that typically privilege the music over the visual form." Musically, vaporwave reconfigures dance music from the 1980s and early 1990s through the use of chopped and screwed techniques, repetition, and heavy reverb. It is composed almost entirely from slowed-down samples and its creation requires only the knowledge of rudimentary production techniques. However, some artists like Dan Mason create vaporwave music from scratch.Orlando vaporwave maestro Dan Mason releases crystalline new compilation album|Orlando Music News|Orlando|Orlando Weekly
The name derives from "vaporware", a term for commercial software that is announced but never released. 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. 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. 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."
Adding to its dual engagement with musical and visual art forms, vaporwave embraces the Internet as a cultural, social, and aesthetic medium. The visual aesthetic (often stylized as "", with fullwidth characters) incorporates 1990s Web design and imagery, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes, as well as anime, Greco-Roman statues, Memphis Milano geometric shapes,The Deliciously Retro Return of the 80s Aesthetic, A Little Bit Human and 3D-rendered objects. 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). One vaporwave album that directly interrogates 9/11 is News at 11 (2016) by Cat System Corp. However, some vaporwave projects do use more recent samples; one example is John Zobele's 2017 album Social Justice Whatever, which primarily utilizes samples dating to the late 2000s and early 2010s.
History and legacy
Precursors Pitchfork reviewed the album Life's a Gas (1996) by German musician Wolfgang Voigt under the name Love Inc. as evoking "the approach vaporwave producers would take 15 years later, stripping bits of ephemeral radio pop down to ghostly patinas and examining our relationships with the stray songs that rattle around in our memories."
Origins
Vaporwave originated on the Internet in the early 2010s as an ironic variant of chillwave and as a derivation of the work of hypnagogic pop artists like Ariel Pink and the "post-noise psychedelia" of James Ferraro and Spencer Clark's the Skaters, Pocahaunted and Emeralds, who were also characterized by the invocation of retro popular culture. 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.
"Chillwave" and "hypnagogic pop" were coined at virtually the same time, in mid-2009, and were initially considered interchangeable terms, though later differentiated after their styles perceptibly narrowed. Like vaporwave, they engaged with notions of nostalgia and cultural memory. Among the earliest hypnagogic acts to anticipate vaporwave was Matrix Metals and his album Flamingo Breeze (2009), which was built on synthesizer loops. Around the same time, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) uploaded a collection of plunderphonics loops to YouTube surreptitiously under the alias sunsetcorp. These clips were taken from his audio-visual album Memory Vague (June 2009). 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.
Vaporwave was subsumed under a larger "Tumblr aesthetic" that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the 2010s. 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". 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. Seapunk followed in mid-2011 as an aquatic-themed Tumblr subculture and Internet meme that presaged vaporwave in its concern for "spacey" electronic music and GeoCities web graphics. Like vaporwave, it was defined by its engagement with the Internet, an approach that is sometimes described as post-Internet.
The musical template for vaporwave came from Eccojams and Ferraro's Far Side Virtual (October 2011). Eccojams featured chopped and screwed variations on popular 1980s pop songs, while Far Side Virtual drew primarily on "the grainy and bombastic beeps" of then-recent past media, such as Skype, Second Life, Windows XP and the Nintendo Wii. According to Stereogums Miles Bowe, vaporwave was a fusion between Lopatin's "chopped and screwed plunderphonics" and the "nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro's Muzak-hellscapes". A 2013 post on a music blog presented those albums, along with Skeleton's Holograms (November 2010), as "proto vaporwave".
Early scene 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." 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.
Numerous producers of this online milieu took inspiration from Ramona Langley's New Dreams Ltd. (credited to "Laserdisc Visions", July 2011). The first reported use of the term "vaporwave" was in an October 2011 blog post by an anonymous user reviewing the album Surf's Pure Hearts by Girlhood; however, Burnett has been credited with coining the term as a way to tie the circle together. 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.
Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan. On Tumblr, it became common for users to decorate their pages with vaporwave imagery. 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. 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.
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. However, writers, fans, and artists struggled to differentiate between vaporwave, chillwave, and hypnagogic pop, 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'." Common criticisms were that the genre was either "too dumb" or "too intellectual".
Wider popularity