W O U N D E D M E M O R Y, or a Love Letter to Vaporwave
An Introduction & Celebration of the Iconic Internet-Borne Genre
Often, I find myself pondering the cinematic nature of music; how various songs can transport the listener to a particular time and place. I listen to music nearly constantly - while commuting, while working, while writing, while gaming, while playing guitar - and occasionally a song will appear on shuffle and instantly send me on a daydreaming odyssey. The music, an intangible time machine, will rocket me back into my past, landing me squarely within my hazy memories of the original time and place in which I listened to the song. While a lot of music does this unintentionally, in this essay I would like to exhibit a genre of music that does this very intentionally: the genre of vaporwave.
For those who are unaware, vaporwave is a music genre and art movement that started between 2010 and 2011, synthesized within the chaotic webpages of Internet forums. Stylistically, vaporwave features samples of older jam tracks from the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s that have been slowed down, looped, reverberated, or manipulated in some way. The resulting effect is music that sounds simultaneously hypnotic and nostalgic, with the intent of provoking a sense of “memory-from-a-forgotten-time” within the listener.
Vaporwave music is often accompanied by art that depicts old Roman sculptures juxtaposed with palm trees, corporate advertisements, and the pastel maelstrom of 1980s color palettes. This art is often created as a joke, a memetic reproduction layered in vast interchanging levels of irony, post-irony, post-post-irony, and the rare genuine intention. Whatever the true intention of the Promethean pseudo-anonymous vaporwave artists, the instantly-recognizable style of vaporwave art generated its own artistic movement, one of the few that have been completely borne from the Internet.1
Taken together, the art and music of vaporwave involves themes regarding the utopian nature of nostalgia, as well as a simultaneous critique and celebration of capitalism. Corporate advertisements are layered within vaporwave art and music, often reproduced with distortions invoking old VCR tapes and 1980s televisuals. Often accompanying these elements are the aesthetics of the early Operational Software, such as gray, blocky Windows 95 message boxes, another corporate invasion within vaporwave art. All of these aesthetics and musical stylings invoke these themes, placing the observer within the multiplicities of past worlds the music and art provokes.
A perfect microcosm of the entire vaporwave movement is the “official” music video to Saint Pepsi’s “ENJOY YOURSELF.” The song is a looping, slowed distortion of Michael Jackson’s song “Off The Wall,” with the lyric “Gotta leave that 9 to 5 up on the shelf / and just enjoy yourself” becoming the main chorus of the Saint Pepsi track. While the detuned Jackson distortion plays, the video reproduces its own looped distortion of an old McDonald’s ad campaign entitled “Mac Tonight.” This award-winning campaign featured the eponymous humanoid character with a crescent-moon-shaped head. In the ads, this sunglasses-and-leather clad crooner flew across the night sky, serenading giant burgers and fries, singing the glories of late-night fast food.2
The themes of the vaporwave movement - borrowed nostalgia and celebrated-critiqued capitalism - are on full display within this video. The old advertisement, complete with the video grain of the late 1980s, transports the viewer into the world in which this campaign was created. Saint Pepsi’s track invokes a feeling of familiarity within the viewer, as Michael Jackson’s music is instantly recognizable, but this familiarity is malformed. Listening to the track is experiencing the Mandela effect in real-time; the recognizable nature of Jackson’s music is corrupted by the scrambled lyrics and song structure. This creates the effect that the listener is misremembering something familiar, a memory wounded by the ravages of time and recontextualization.
Combined with the video, the listener-viewer is subjected to this wounded memory in its totality, as an ancient paragon of late 1980s capitalism encourages the listener-viewer to enjoy themselves, leave the troubles of working life behind, and consume the fruits of capitalism’s economic dominion. While it is easy to interpret this as a celebration of participating in wild consumerism, the distorted nature of both the track and the video implicates the listener-viewer to this state of misremembering, informing the listener-viewer that this nostalgic celebration isn’t true, and that the world in which the original track and advertising campaign were created only exists within the distorted recontextualization of unreliable memories. Any fondness that we may feel towards the past worlds is the result of misplaced remembrances, forgetting the travesties and tragedies and venerating the “good times we had.”
For further information on the history of vaporwave, a great video by Wolfenstein OS X goes into more detail about the progression of the genre from its origins to around 2015.
It would not be ethical for me not to mention the Moon Man, an alt-right meme featuring a caricature of Mac Tonight. In these memes, alt-right users would portray “Moon Man” artwork with accompanying raps and copy disseminating hate speech. The Anti-Defamation League has listed Moon Man within their database of hate symbols because of this. While the ENJOY YOURSELF video is a perfect microcosm of vaporwave and its themes, it is just as important to note the legacy of the character beyond its feature within the history of the vaporwave movement.
Not only has vapor wave done everything you mentioned, but it also highlights the importance of relationships with people I've had over the years while listening to it. You may say it reminds me of the friends we've made along the way 😏.
Great work, bro! Looking forward to following you on your writing journey!
very insightful! well done ;) <3