The Starving Aesthete: Vaporwaves

Our current music industry congealed in the swamps of 1950s capitalism, where due to the omnipresence of the vinyl record, music production required enterprise. The resources of record production were necessarily industrial, necessarily corporate and necessarily pop-oriented, creating a system of artists: people who own the music they created. The product of their labor solidified into the album. A Beatles album is the Beatles’ album, and to play Beatles songs is to play songs which the Beatles own, legally and metaphysically. 

However, this state of affairs is more novel than we acknowledge. Until the advent of vinyl and the induction of music into capitalist modes of production, “ownership” of music was loose and circumstantial. Musical canon consisted of “standard" songs, broadly familiar to most people, the origins of which were irrelevant and inaccessible. Music existed as an esoteric fog, a floating collection of tunes which seemed to come from nowhere and spread. A vapor, if you will. 

With the creation of the internet, having crested the wave of capitalism, we came upon vaporwave while tumbling down the other side. Originating in forum posts and spreading through YouTube, vaporwave was not only “not capitalistic,” it was aggressively un-capitalistic. Vaporwave artists released their albums anonymously, though many of these could hardly be called albums — the most significant characteristic of vaporwave was an oftentimes excessive use of plunderphonics, meaning that vaporwave pieces were not composed from the ground up by artists in studios, but instead cobbled together Franken Berry-style from bits and pieces of “other people’s” music. 

The result was songs that mined the depths of our society’s unconscious experience, songs you might have heard rattling through the speakers of abandoned shopping malls. Vaporwave took the detritus of late capitalism and, through surrealism and nostalgia, created an art form which paid reverence to childhood memories and deeply ingrained drives by stripping away all that was debased by industry exploitation. Vaporwave artists outright stole songs, but, like art thieves in the mansions of private collectors, they turned them out for the masses rather than using them for personal gain. Vaporwave could not be exploited for the gain of money or esteem, both because any attempt to do so would quickly bring down the hammer of outraged copyright censors, and because it leaned self-consciously into the contours of nostalgia that no one could make it much better than anyone else. The internet looked at capitalism receding over its shoulder and, shaking its head, rendered what it found into something wholly new. 

Of course, vaporwave, or v a p o r w a v e, has been widely proclaimed dead for two years now. The question now stands: was it just a blip in the countercultural radar, a flash of resistance to the all consuming machinery of the capitalism which still so thoroughly suffuses us, doomed from the start — or was it the first fragile sign of a new, cresting wave? I will leave it to my readers. I’ve got Windows 95 commercials to binge.