A Requiem for Techno-Optimism
Part 2: A E S T H E T I C
To clarify a line from the last post about the end-of-history triumphalism of the 1990s:
It was an ambiance. It was something in the air that even someone of my tender age couldn’t help but inhale. It subtended most of the misgivings about the direction in which America and/or the world might have been headed, and it beguiled a whole hell of a lot of people into assuming that the arc of history tended simply towards the intensification of certain aspects of the democratic capitalist present.
What I mean is that the sense of angst, irony, and apprehension writ large in 1990s pop culture and political discourse ought to be read as an expression of the mood in the Scarface scene in which Tony Montana looks out into the twilight and reads THE WORLD IS YOURS in incandescent capitals. The hegemony over which the United States presided was the undisputed winner of the twentieth century, and we were settling into the reality of absolute victory with some discomfort. Contrary to what Khrushchev promised, it was the West that buried the Eastern Bloc. We had no serious geopolitical foes left. To all appearances our only economic rival was our political ally Japan, but its magnificent boom years came to an end in 1992. The present we criticized was an American present. The future we were anxious about was an American future. A globalized future, perhaps, but one that, as I said, was typically conceived of as an intensification of the current end-of-history situation and its surficial trends.
As a tween and teenager growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, the insular way I thought of this was in terms of mallification. It sounds ridiculous, and it probably was—but do recall that the shopping mall was an emblem of the American system, the cathedral of the advanced democratic capitalist state, and pretty much the only place in the sprawl where a kid old enough to chafe at at parental supervision but too young to drive could spend an unstructured evening or afternoon away from the household. Throughout middle and high school I was a mallrat. I didn’t have money to buy much—usually just enough for food court fare and forty-five minutes of arcade play—but that didn’t make a difference. The mall was a place to go. The place to go. And at the same time, I sometimes had nightmares about a mall that never ended. In these dreams I’d meander through the atrium until I reached the anchor store, walk past a few acres of clothing racks, and come out the other end—into another atrium.
Around 1997–98, my juvenile vision of a dystopic future was that of a mall that took over the world, and from which there was no escape and no outside. And yet—when I hadn’t any homework to slog through, no video games I felt like playing, and no websites that seemed worth browsing (there weren’t that many, and they didn’t update very frequently back then), the first thing I ever thought to do was ask my mother if she could drop me off at the mall for a few hours and then call up Brian D to see if he wanted to come with. I was conscious of something fake and impersonal and bleak about the mall, but the place was nevertheless a pleasure and a social lifeline.
As usual, I’m jumping ahead.
If you read the last post and got to the end—to the line about nostalgia for what the future used to be—and had an inkling that I might be alluding to the mood of vaporwave, congratulations. It was on my mind. (Those saxophone licks Molly Nilsson slips into the end of “1995” were definitely meant as a nod towards the genre.)1
For several years I was antipathetic towards vaporwave. Pretty much as soon as a hip friend pointed me towards it in late 2014, it turned me off for more or less the same reason why Warhol’s work leaves me feeling like I’ve jammed a fistful of chloroform-soaked gauze up into my soul. But I’ve since warmed up to vaporwave, and I can think of two possible reasons why:
1.) Living in a large city for eight years has warped and deadened me.
2.) When I began dating my spouse in 2020, she was on a protracted citypop/night drive/synthwave binge. (All of these genres are related to vaporwave, and often pair well with it.) After she moved in, I’d spend the evening hours after work sitting in bed and reading a book while she puttered around the room, and up on her desktop there’d be some YouTube mix combining inoffensively synthy-funky-chillish tunes with video clips of 1980s Japanese television commercials or looping tableaux from old-school anime OAVs. And that’s how tastes are acquired: do something you enjoy while music is playing in the background, and after a while listening to that kind of music becomes something you enjoy for its own sake.
The fact that my spouse was surprised when I told her that vaporwave was meant to distill the consumer-side sound of late capitalism—to be the audio equivalent of a pleasantly smiling mask with a blank face underneath it—perhaps says something about how diluted “vaporwave” has grown as a cultural signifier in the decade or so since its early progenitors conceived of it as a peculiarly avant-garde form of muzak-funk. I can’t say I’ve ever been part of the scene, and I’m definitely no connoisseur, but when I look up classics of the genre thrown up on YouTube in the early-to-mid 2010s and compare them to the more recent vaporwave mixes the algorithm recommends, it’s clear even to me that a lot of the underlying ambiguity and/or irony has become optional as far as the fans and compilers are concerned. Now the prevailing mood is one of unalloyed nostalgia.
Like any strain of art and/or music, vaporwave and its associated genres had to wait for their hour to arrive.
At the beginning of the epoch of recorded music, the popular song didn’t stray far from the praxis of performance. The piano-playing or guitar-picking performer of yore understood that nobody who pays for a ticket to a show would be satisfied with music that doesn’t grab their attention, and tunes were generally developed under the assumption that paying consumers wanted to listen. So-called elevator jazz was maligned by earlier generations on the basis that it was made to be ignored. It didn’t want to arouse your passions or interest. It skulked in the margins of your awareness; it just drizzled over you and left you dry.2 And it isn’t like classical music: a Bach concerto performed by an orchestra might not get your heart pounding, but it rewards you for slowing down and focusing on it. Canned on-hold music never gets better.
Imagine trying to convince a Boomer who cut his teeth on Jimi Hendrix or a Gen Xer who used to drive around town blasting Public Enemy and Guns N’ Roses to check out a hip new form of inoffensive (if not eerie) easy-listening background music that’s based on the pseudo-jazz and artificially-flavored funk piped into Macy’s from ceiling speakers. For that matter, try persuading them that the anodyne aural goop accompanying those old automated local forecasts on the Weather Channel were actually a lot more hep than was commonly believed during their heyday. If they didn’t spend a whole hell of a lot of time online in the last fifteen years, they probably won’t be convinced.
But they’ve clearly skipped out on a couple of updates.
We’re living at a time when a whole hell of a lot of us…
(1) don’t do much in-person socializing, especially not outside of work
(2) spend most of our worktime sitting in front of a computer for hours on end without really speaking to anyone
(3) spend most of our leisure time sitting in front of a computer or lying around with a smartphone for hours on end without really speaking to anyone
(4) have so deeply interiorized portable music players and headphones that a given situation seems incomplete if tunes aren’t being pumped into our ears.
Suddenly music that’s so reliably and unobtrusively there might not seem so bad. A listener punching out emails perhaps doesn’t want exogenous words being chanted into her ears; minimal lyrical content then becomes an advantage. Someone lounging in bed looking at Instagram on her smartphone or sitting at a desk with her laptop and methodically transferring her attention between Discord, six browser tabs, and Google Docs/Adobe Illustrator/Windows Notepad perhaps doesn’t want to listen to anything too tiringly energic, too variant in terms of tone and tempo, or too distracting; in this case a couple hours of music on an undeviatingly even keel becomes helpful and pleasant rather than obnoxiously dull. And obviously there’s a world of difference between listening to muzak in a ten-minute line at Macy’s or a stuffy doctor’s office when you’re running a fever and listening to the same muzak when you’re working on a project and in the zone, or sharing memes with friends on Discord and guffawing.
And so all of a sudden the kids take up an interest in gratuitously synthetic just-there easy-listening tunes. As someone who in his adolescence judged music strictly in terms of how well it lent itself to dancing and/or moshing, I’ll confess I found this kind of perplexing at first.
It’s at least half a decade too late for me to contribute any insights or observations on the vaporwave A E S T H E T I C, but I can point out that its indispensable role in the genre’s popularity was made possible by a later stage of the process through which music was separated from the performance: the cleavage of music from the performer. While this isn’t the norm for mainstream music—after all, nobody talking on NPR or writing for the Washington Post can shut their fucking yaps about Beyoncé and Taylor Swift lately—electronic composition and digital distribution opened up a space where the musician can become an afterthought.
I remember an incredulous Henry Rollins speaking many years ago about DJs becoming respected figures in the music scene to the point of being regarded as artists in their own right. It’s easy to understand why people who made their bones at a time before the laptop became an all-purpose self-playing musical instrument might grouse about celebrity status being conferred on someone who doesn’t play a “real” instrument onstage or even in the studio, but it was bound to happen after the song congealed into a physical object in the form of wax cylinders and then vinyl discs.
Downstream of this technical development lay the discotheque, which rose to prominence in the 1970s: a club where patrons listened to and danced to music, but where there was nary a live act in sight because musicians could be bypassed. Savvy operators developed a playbook of techniques for manipulating the playback devices and sound systems: extending breaks, deliberately scratching records, adjusting output levels, transitioning between songs without any interstitial silences, and so on. Disco may have died, but the DJ and his position at the center of the modern dance club endured.
What the cover band is to analog music, the DJ is to electronic tunes. It’s not like a four-piece bar band circa 2000 asking for audience requests would have been able to do much for the wag who shouted out “Hyperspeed!” or “Trip Like I Do!” Someone who was lukewarm about going somewhere and paying a cover charge to hear to a local act’s rendition of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden hits, but keen on the idea of drinking a mix of Red Bull and liquor and listening to Chemical Brothers as part of a crowd had other places he could take his business. And as it turned out, there were a lot of him. The scorn of the rock guitarist and jazz pianist meant little when the purveyors of electronic beats composed without specialized musical instruments were taking such a deep bite out of their market share.
At the turn of the century, the DJ was a solid-life phenomenon. A creature of the dance club. He often made a name for himself by being a competent producer and remixer of tunes in addition to having a knack for reading the energy of the room and excellent taste in the genres he’s made into his bailiwick. When I was going to drum n’ bass parties in New York in the mid-2000s, it was usually clear there was a reason why the guy headlining was saved for last. But he was also usually the person attendees were paying the least attention to, even if he was on a stage. (Frequently he was not.)
Until streaming music took off, most electronic music lived and died by the party.3 Before I started going to jungle and drum n’ bass events every chance I got, I went to goth night. Maybe I didn’t have a concrete image of what Funker Vogt, Seabound, Icon of Coil, or the Apoptygma Berzerk guy looked like, but I certainly knew what people who listened to them looked like, because they helpfully adhered to a dress code. At drum n’ bass parties, where tracks blurred together as the night wore on, there was a good chance I couldn’t name more than a few of the artists or songs being played, even if I’d heard them a dozen times before at previous events, on a CD or .mp3 mix, or on an internet “radio” station. Again, I had absolutely no idea what any of the composers looked like, but I knew how junglist types dressed when they went out. With happy hardcore it was much the same: you knew what the scene was about from peering around the room at the all kids with dilated pupils, Pikachu backpacks, body glitter, and candy-bracelet gauntlets. The fans were the basis of these genres’ aesthetics.
None of this coalesced in a vacuum. There are probably old heads out there who can trace the descent of the fashions and tokens of a given electronic music scene during a given time period from the prevailing trends of a prior decade, or even a prior year. Nobody involved in the world of rave ever had a blank slate to work from.
Vaporwave was different. It didn’t owe its emergence to popular live shows or a strain of club parties, wasn’t obligated to fit into the continuity or fashions of any IRL scene, and therefore had both the opportunity and the onus to build up its own visual aesthetic from scratch. In this regard, the decisions of the genre’s founders are possessed of the lucid inspiration of a logical conclusion. It was a creature of the internet, and would behave like one: the musicians who made it would be remote and impersonal presences, anonymous and invisible. Listeners would be hearing it in private, either sitting at their computers or walking around in public with world-cancelling headphones or buds in their ears, so it was only appropriate that developing imagery should evoke solitude, if not desolation. It made liberal use of remixing, sampling, and mashup techniques, so its imagery correspondingly tended towards collage and shopped photographs; most of the sampled or referenced music was from before the turn of the century, so the visuals were correspondingly retro.
Whether we’re talking about vaporwave or of any of its related genres, the brilliance of their audiovisual gestalt (especially when it’s done right, or at least not done poorly) lies in their misty evocation of a world obsolesced by the technological progress that made them possible. They are like the Roman general Scipio who reportedly wept as Carthage burned, though the city was put to the torch under his command. What we’re seeing and hearing are the partisans and inheritors of the digital revolution experiencing some ambivalence about what they were complicit in destroying and the world they contributed to building.4
As I said before, I’m not deep enough into vaporwave to critique or analyze its imagery. I’ll leave that to the paid culture critics—such as one Magdalen Rose, who gives it the ol’ college try in “Beautiful and Haunted - Deconstructing Vaporwave Aesthetics.”5 It’s not the most astute, comprehensive, or even knowledgeable writeup, and rather resembles a New Found Glory or Blink 182 fan’s exposition of the history and spirit of punk—but the lines I’ve boldfaced very succinctly get to the heart of the matter.
Vaporwave has an undeniable visual style but pinning down what exactly that style is can be difficult. From the outside, vaporwave can look like a fever dream of electric colors, Japanese characters, 90’s nostalgia, and sandy beaches. Even those with only tangential knowledge of the genre can feel oddly drawn to the beautiful collage of imagery. Some still insist that vaporwave is entirely ironic. But musicians and artists deeply entrenched in the genre will give a different answer.
The blending of imagery isn’t random, it’s undeniably evocative of the 80s and 90s aesthetics. It embraces a washed-out low fidelity look, retro-style anime, and low poly 3D graphics long since discarded to the recycling bin of history. But underneath the sparkles and irony, much of vaporwave aesthetics feels haunted and sad…
The media of the 80s-90s gave us an image of a future vibrant with color, with problems of the past solved by technology. It promised a gleaming world brimming with possibilities, where capitalism is overwhelming, but in an exciting way, like going to the mall with your birthday money. This is the future, on some level, many expected to enjoy. Vaporwave aficionado Pad Chennington, in his video Vaporwave & 9/11: A Nostalgic Connection, pointed out that the cutoff for vaporwave nostalgia seems to be 2001…
(There’s your connection to end-of-history triumphalism.)
Vaporwave is a fusion of nostalgia and grief. It’s a requiem for a future that never arrived. As the future became the present, we found that consumerism feels hollow, the beaches polluted, and technology we hoped would solve all our problems has only brought about new ones. It’s no surprise that the genre invites escapism.
But this doesn’t entirely answer the questions I’ve been pondering since my wife once again began putting on vaporwave/mallsoft mixes around the start of the month.
Why should consumerism suddenly feel hollow in a way that it evidently didn’t at the end of the century? At what point do wistful listeners/viewers of vaporwave & allies believe The Technology we hoped would solve our problems went astray? After we all agreed that shopping malls are bland and soulless temples to mass-produced mediocrity, why do we seem to yearn for the days when they were the suburbs’ centers of gravity? Why should decades-old ads developed by cynical hucksters and pimps for the sake of ensnaring captive rubes come across to us now as ingenuous and charming?
For that matter: you don’t have to scroll very deeply through the comments sections of popular YouTube mixes before you find someone saying something like: “I’m Gen Z and is it weird that I’m pining for a time I didn’t live in?” What is it they’re seeing in 1980s anime clips, slatted sunsets, Windows 95 graphics, glamour shots of shopping malls, and old television commercials that they can’t find in the world today?
This is fast approaching the email length limit, so let’s call this Part 1 of 2 of Part 2. The second half will be up in a day or so.
If this is the first time you’re hearing of vaporwave (probably unlikely), do go ahead and read Van Paugam’s “The Rise & Fall of Vaporwave” for an insider’s critical perspective. He might be right and vaporwave might be dead—but if so, it’s dead in the way cubism was dead after the 1910s.
Notwithstanding the subliminal effects for which it was developed.
The only exception that immediately comes to mind is ambient stuff—but most of the artists I’m thinking of off the top of my head piggybacked on existing genres with established scenes that often had a live component.
Again, early vaporwave took a much more ambiguous (even critical) position on the consumer confidence and blithe optimism of the 1980s and 1990s.
Note that she’s writing in 2021, well after the genre’s golden years had come and gone (according to Van Paugam).
Great piece, evocative, and got me to dig up some songs I hadn't heard in a while.
I was born in 1982 and played and listened to all the same stuff, but I spent almost no time in malls, so it's really interesting to hear they're a big part of your childhood. (Please don't take offense but) I'm reminded of Kevin the Food Court Gangsta from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/08/04/the-ecology-of-the-suburban-thug
Synthwave and its associated genres were the culmination of how people like *me* (city people, but *not* mall people or party people) treated music. Soundgarden, Orbital, My Bloody Valentine, Four Tet, Amon Tobin and Neutral Milk Hotel were things we found *afterwards*, wandering around the streets of Seattle, of London, of Austin, wandering alone in a light drizzle with some headphones tucked into a hoodie, and we barely noticed when those things became Washed Out and Glasser and Com Truise and Fennec Fox, except, if we noticed the makers at all in our wikipedia dives, we noticed they were a little more like us. But even then, it was always there. Chris Cornell was a solitary basement dweller before he was ever a stage screamer.
Edit: and now, as a married 41 year old with kids and a boring tech job, I mostly listen to Nintendo mix tapes (some original songs, some covers) on youtube, for the exact reasons you described. I work to "two hours of Nintendo autumn music with rain sounds animal crossing stardew valley tears of the kingdom" things.
> A listener punching out emails perhaps doesn’t want exogenous words being chanted into her ears; minimal lyrical content then becomes an advantage. Someone lounging in bed looking at Instagram on her smartphone or sitting at a desk with her laptop and methodically transferring her attention between Discord, six browser tabs, and Google Docs/Adobe Illustrator/Windows Notepad perhaps doesn’t want to listen to anything too tiringly energic, too variant in terms of tone and tempo, or too distracting
Do you think this is happening with film and shows as well? I've wondered if shows like "Emily in Paris" are written to be left on in the background where you don't really need to pay attention to know what's happening.