"The concept of vaporwave is a function of franken music. Taking samples of other music, endlessly repeating sounds, words and phrases either spoken or musical, and slapping them all together into an mp3 package, vaporwave can infuriate, bore or be completely ignored. It can have zero musical value, or appear as outright theft. It is a rebellion of sorts against the powerful commercial music establishment that dictates our tastes. To Grafton Tanner, it is the poster child of the decline and fall of western civilization. It is at very least yet another symptom"--David Wineberg, Amazon via NetGalley.
Left me wanting much more about the music. Interesting references to hauntology, post-modernism, the emergence of this kind of music due to late-stage capitalism commodifying everything and the trauma of missing dead futures that never came to be, etc. An expanded version would be great. Feels a bit like a paper for college, with various sources lined up to make a line of argument, but not much depth. A fine intro.
Okay, I read this some time ago, but so far as I remember Tanner show us the basics arguments and interpretations of vaporwave as we understand it and as it became publicised as an artistic/well-thought genre of music, whose makers were over-cryptic bored young adults whose life had been made idle by the huge load of meaninglessness up their asses since birth. So it came to this: the delusional reverie as it loops over and over, the cramped up past vastly standardized, floating memories of artistry backed up by endless digital morbidness, and a constant feeling of not being anywhere to be found. And in fact, that's vaporwave. But to take this as some avant-garde plot bursting out of a young & saturated movement or a spout of capitalistic revolt is but stupidity, and as you can see the snake has bit it's own tail -- and although various records …
Okay, I read this some time ago, but so far as I remember Tanner show us the basics arguments and interpretations of vaporwave as we understand it and as it became publicised as an artistic/well-thought genre of music, whose makers were over-cryptic bored young adults whose life had been made idle by the huge load of meaninglessness up their asses since birth. So it came to this: the delusional reverie as it loops over and over, the cramped up past vastly standardized, floating memories of artistry backed up by endless digital morbidness, and a constant feeling of not being anywhere to be found. And in fact, that's vaporwave. But to take this as some avant-garde plot bursting out of a young & saturated movement or a spout of capitalistic revolt is but stupidity, and as you can see the snake has bit it's own tail -- and although various records have been made afterwards with this intention, I do not thing this is the real meaning of the genre. Vaporwave's full of jokes, and of one them is to make its critics fall spellbound to the same power of nostalgia that inspired the records. So this is how the over-intellectualization, or better, the understanding of vaporwave as this massculture-war train is mocked by its object. And now we have people who despise vaporwave, though not because they particularly don't enjoy the music, but because for them vaporwave has nothing of really critical, something that is innovative or would change something, is just what it is, a piece of well wrought commodity to put us farther and farther away of our true rejoicing of art. The joke's on you too! The core of vaporwave as it try to overcommodify itself, and to present this as pleasing as possibly, indeed is to put us farther and farther away from "enjoying" art, and it does this collapsing its music, so now to be understood as "sound", and drag it to ambience (this do not refer the ambient music, but to a kind of sensibility) and by no means there's no pleasure in this.
That being said, I look forward to find out in wich joke I'm stuck in.
