Into the internet…

It’s hard to describe just how monumental the modern digital age is and how it has affected the world of music. In the previous modules, we talked about media sharing in the early 2000s, modern and other moments of notable crossovers between pop music and the internet. However, we have yet to take those moments and analyze them through a stylistic and cultural lens. In this module, we will be taking a look at one of the most niche sub-genres in music and its inextricable link to social media and internet culture.

Defining vaporwave

Broadly defined, vaporwave is the combination of the early 2010s internet space and the memetic culture found there. As a visual style, vaporwave pieces usually feature some sort of collage of digitized assets in a neon-pop color palette which is then iterated on in memetic ways. In non-digital art, color aberration may be intentionally used to simulate these styles and aesthetics. Aside from these purely descriptive elements, vaporwave also seeks to hit on the nostalgia factor across the younger generations - those who grew up alongside the internet. As such, you may see patterns and imagery reminiscent of pre-internet America, including hits like the jazz pattern found on paper Solo cups. An additional but perhaps strange feature of the vaporwave aesthetic is the inclusion of Japanese iconography and language. While I’m not entirely clear on why, there may be a connection between the inherent anti-capitalist slant the genre features, and subsequently Japan’s commercial influence on America and vice versa. More on this in a minute…

In terms of musical style or aesthetic, vaporwave music is best described as an amalgamation of the aforementioned cultural points and electronic music. In its earliest, purest form, vaporwave was an electronic medium that utilized sampled or recreated synthesizer sounds prominent in 80s synth-pop. Some of the progenitors of this kind of music include James Ferraro and Vektroid. James and his album Far Side Virtual was released in 2011 and distills some of the core musical qualities inherent in the early genre. Vektroid created Floral Shoppe under her pseudonym Macintosh Plus, an album that would go on to be iterated on for the next several years. As you’re listening, you may be able to pick out some of these aesthetics, most notably being the electronic beat machines, the use of synthesizers, and sequencers/samplers. Also inherent is a certain rough quality to the track - you can tell there is not a lot of production value put into it. This ins’t bad, but rather a side effect and the nature of the music created by individuals, and actually adds another quality that helps collate the genre! While this is the main bulk of vaporwave, the genre continued to incorporate more modern and historical musical genres, including jazz, hip-hop, and other fusion genres. Though, the genre would seem to have “died” just as fast as it began.

The death of vaporwave only a year or two after its inception was inevitable. The musical aesthetics were inherently restrictive and niche, created for the fleeting culture rather than as a mainstay commercial force. In fact, the attempted commercialization of the genre is what many would consider the cause of such death. A huge part of the cultural aesthetic found in vaporwave was often a satirical criticism and rejection of consumer capitalism and technocracy. In art, the iconography resembled a surrealist display of major American corporations and products. In music (and in art as well), the ripping and sampling of other pieces of music - a direct spurning of modern copyright and the idea of music for money’s sake. In another case altogether, maybe the fad had just moved on, leaving vaporwave with its own, small, dedicated audience for the rest of the decade - circling eternally in the forums of Reddit and Tumblr as the rest of the world moves on.

Beyond vaporwave and the modern social media era

While there is not a true successor to vaporwave in a musical sense, we can continue to look at online media trends that continue to exert influence on the world of music and where those styles exist today. In some ways, the rise of digicore and hyper-pop filled in for the musical elements left by vaporwave. By an even further extension, lo-fi hip-hop and otherwise lo-fi genres take up this mantle as well with the genre’s use of sampling - and obviously the low fidelity part. Aside from styles in music, we continued to see an increase in information and media sharing throughout the decade, notably seen in the rise of social media platforms. This would fundamentally change how listeners would consume their music and how artists would interact with said listeners. More interestingly, this shift included the resurgence of a now-ubiquitous genre of mash-ups and musical collages.

Mash-ups and musical collages are genres of music that take two or more existing musical properties and combine/mix them together. Perhaps genre is an overstatement, maybe a phenomenon? Technique? In any case, the idea of one-off musical mash-ups has been around since the 90s, possibly even earlier. However, A solid example of an artist creating regular mash-ups as a part of their artistic output would be found in “Weird Al” Yankovic, a parody musician who takes tunes and rewrites or recontextualizes the original lyrics to a song.

Now in the later information age, we find some new examples of mash-up culture with artists like Girl Talk and Neil Cicirega. Both artists feature semi-surrealist mash-ups of many popular tunes, often resampling and recontextualizing the meanings of each song or stringing together a greater narrative. Besides the uncannily satisfying results found in these pieces, they foster a certain appreciation for the wide range of music as well as the technical/creative process these artists have to go through. Additionally, both artists draw upon common tropes and memes when producing their work, curating and cultivating this internet culture further. Neil’s “Mouth Saga” alone was founded in 2014 on the basis of a single song, Smash Mouth’s All Star - which is still relevant to this day in modern iterations of social media.

Speaking of which, let’s finally move to the most recent stage of internet music; TikTok. TikTok is a social media and entertainment app that features user-generated, short-form video content. A key feature of TikTok is the ability to create, share, and use specific sounds across different videos and users. This feature was inherited from its predecessor, Musical.ly, and is one of the main methods of iteration across the app. In some cases, these sounds will be iterated on and evolve with new contexts and gags. In most cases though, the visual element is the variable iterated on while the sound is the constant - check out a recent Scott Joplin X Ed Sheeran one to the left here.

Aside from shitposting, the app has also been a useful platform for meaningful audience engagement and advertising for artists. For example, the band Wet Leg we listened to in the previous module utilized the virality of that 2021 hit across YouTube, Spotify, and TikTok to pick up (or what I imagine was) pretty significant traction with a broader base of fans. Personally, I’ve found multiple musicians and groups of artists on the app that I would have never heard of, recently including the brass band, MOS Brass.

All of this brings a new kind of analysis to popular music that is far from what we are historically used to. Are there specific, inherent elements of music that are more memetic than others, and why? Is there a future for music as an established art form along the lines of short-form comedy and production? Let me be clear that I'm not trying to reveal some hidden truth that lies with the answers to these questions. When it comes to social media and the future of online interaction, you all will be the main purveyors of it and understand it far better than your seniors. Instead, I’m suggesting that we can apply a certain amount of critical analysis to these ideas just as we have with more established forms of musical analysis throughout this course, making connections from where we have been to where we are now.