The Soundtrack to My Hollow Life

[embed]This playlist has been made to accompany the reading of this essay.

Vaporwave is a subgenre of music that functions as a cultural critique of late-stage capitalism. It can go by other names such as chillwave, hypnagogic pop, glo-fi, and more, but the distinctions between those genres are minimal, if they exist at all (Iruka 3). Employing the values and ideas of the situationists and postmodernists, vaporwave calls into question the mass production of art and other cultural phenomenons by expanding and magnifying them. Artists that create vaporwave use practices of pastiche and parody to send their message, such that the popularly known references that they incorporate can further the reach of their critique. Vaporwave intentionally replicates the affect of elevator music or Muzak, the mass-produced and ‘generic-sounding’ music used in many different forms of commercial endeavors. Typically, vaporwave artists utilise songs or cultural elements from the consumer culture of the 1980’s and 1990’s, or attempt to recreate those sound profiles using other found and combined sounds. Analyzing vaporwave through the frameworks of various theorists, we are able to describe how it can act as a comprehensive and far-reaching cultural critique that can work to unify differing intellectual strands that span nearly a century.

In order to understand the ways in which that vaporwave functions as a cultural critique, we must understand what it is responding to. Vaporwave culture embodies “cynicism about capitalism, sarcastic takes on the unachieved utopias of previous decades, consumerism, escapism, globalization, etc.” (How Vaporwave). While consumer culture of the 80’s and 90’s promised a realization of dreams through consumption, vaporwave mirrors the dystopian reality of those lost dreams. The name itself is a derivative of vaporware, which is the term for products that are advertised but “never actually intended to make it to the market,” used only to influence and manipulate the consumer, so the vaporwave artists are directly answering to the way that people’s’ lives are ruled and driven by corporations. While vaporwave is a response to these elements of culture, the things that they critique and the way that they critique them are rooted in decades of criticism of capitalist society.

With recent technological innovations, the potential for the reproduction of art continues to increase at an alarming rate. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin discusses the impact of this effortless and prolific reproduction in terms of what it does to the way that people, both producers and consumers, experience art. He claims that while that works of art were once considered valuable for their unique nature, “by replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence” (Benjamin 1054). Through this “mass existence”, artistic function and value are determined by the “cult value” of a work, such that it is met with positive enthusiasm only if is has a mass appeal, with the aesthetic appeal decided only after the fact (Benjamin 1057). This analysis of mass-reproduced media content can be expanded upon and taken further by introducing the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer from The Dialectic of Enlightenment, where they discuss what they call “The Culture Industry.” Through the work of The Culture Industry, a sense of alienation is formed between the art and the people who create and consume it. Because art, and in the case of vaporwave, music specifically, is produced in such high volumes, “all mass culture is identical” and “the artificial framework [begins] to show through” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1111). The lack of differentiation between mass produced and popular musics, because of the monopolizing power of large music companies, is thus consumed mindlessly as it is disseminated upon the listeners for whom life is “sustained” by the “huge economic machinery” that the Culture Industry represents (1114). Individuals are distanced from the value-determining process, to the point where “the conventional is uncritically enjoyed, while the truly new is criticized with aversion” (Benjamin 1056). They will passively accept whatever is given to them. Vaporwave forms a critique of this mass production by intentionally creating the emptiness that results from this alienation (Cummings). The aforementioned lack of differentiation between popular and successful musics causes an unwavering, uncritical acceptance to music. Adorno and Horkheimer state that “pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association”(1116). Vaporwave artists are able to recreate the mindless emptiness that is associated with this distance and alienation found in the mass-produced music by replicating the styles of typical “elevator music” or Muzak in their adaptations of 80’s and 90’s pop songs (Iruka 19). If the distinguishing qualities of music don’t matter, they will amplify that lack of distinction in order to produce their critique. As the culture industry is unable to “offer a meaningful explanation of life” and disseminates an ‘empty’ ideology, vaporwave artists respond by intentionally producing this emptiness to create entirely new meaning (Adorno and Horkheimer 1121).

Moving forward from Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer, vaporwave and its associated practices can be examined within the framework of the Situationist International and their work during the middle of the 20th century. The spectacle, central to the theories of the situationists, is also a concept confronted by vaporwave artists. According to Guy Debord, one of the most prominent of the situationist thinkers, “the spectacle subjects living human beings to its will to the extent that the economy has brought them under its sway” (Debord 16). Just as the culture industry made people passive consumers of art, the spectacle dictates people’s’ behavior such that they carry out their entire lives with that same alienation. The spectacle is “at once a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers,” in that it is a representation of the “economic sphere” produced by itself, but not one that is able to portray any semblance of reality (Debord 16). Vaporwave, by consisting largely of sounds found on the internet and in other prevalent forms of technology, creates an image of the modern “economic sphere” that is intended to serve as an alternative to the one produced as the spectacle.

In vaporwave, the influence of the situationists is visible in the practices as well as the philosophies of the movement. The situationists are known for their use of détournement, a method employed by vaporwave artists as well. “Demanding a complete reversal of the spectacular perspective, the situationists argued that the critical theory which struggles against alienation must itself ‘be communicated in its own language — the language of contradiction, dialectical in form as well as in content,’” which is exactly what vaporwave artists do (Plant 88). Where the internet is the economic sphere that represents itself, vaporwave, present on the internet, uses the language and content of the internet to form their critique of that representation.

Détournement, as an artistic practice, allows for and encourages the reuse and incorporation of other works. According to Sadie Plant, “The breadth of situationist theory and its magpie tactics of appropriation and détournement find their expression in the deconstructive eclecticism of poststructuralist writing, which similarly has no scruples about taking ideas, examples, and forms of expression from anywhere” (Plant 112). There is a wide variety of this in vaporwave music, but we can see a fairly comprehensive view of its détournement practices by looking at the work of James Ferraro and MACINTOSH PLUS. In 2011, Ferraro released and album called Far Side Virtual which implements détournement practices by creating a collage of internet sounds. He manipulates audio clips of speaking, uses notification sounds as percussives, and replicates sounds from many different parts of the internet, all to form an ambient, fast paced, 80’s esque sound. In one track called “Solar Panel Smile,” he even uses the background music of the Wii gaming system as his own background. He effectively deconstructed the internet’s sounds, reconstructing them into something with his owns sense of meaning. According to Ferraro himself, though, he “actually never uses samples” because he has his “own sources of sounds,” only replicating the sounds of the internet (Snodgrass). MACINTOSH PLUS, another artist, exemplifies an alternative enactment of détournement on the album Floral Shoppe, on which every song is derived from another sampled song. “Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing” (リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー ), the second song on the album, is simply a slowed down version of Diana Ross’ 1984 song, It’s Your Move. This artist, instead of making a collage like Ferraro, chose to take a “great song of the 80’s” and magnify the corporate emptiness present with it, open up the vacuum where the meaning should be. James Ferraro and MACINTOSH PLUS both remove samples from their context and alter them to form new meaning and intention, creating a pastiche much like those created by the situationists practicing détournement.

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Just as they engage with the music of the late 20th century, vaporwave artists also engage with the cultural theory that was becoming prominent at that time. Far Side Virtual is said to “[engage] with concepts of hyperreality, simulacra, disposable consumer culture, 1990’s retro-futurism, advertising and branding, pop-art, and musical kitsch,” all central to the postmodernist intellectual movement (Iruka 19). Jean Baudrillard, one of the key postmodernist thinkers, developed the key concepts of hyperreality and simulacra. Here, hyperreal describes the way in which the world that we experience is formed by “substituting the signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard 4). The “reality” is represented, and that representation is then presented as the real referent. Simulacra, building on the foundational concept of the hyperreal, are the representations of the hyperreal that influence people’s’ experiences of reality (6). In a détournement-esque fashion, “postmodernists quote what’s already around and combine fragments in a pastiche,” parodying “the themes of selfhood, authenticity, originality, and liberation” that were essential to the modernists (and the situationists) before them (Best 8). Calling upon those themes and the desires for their embodiment, postmodernists extend the critique of Walter Benjamin by making their works in a mode that allows them to be infinitely reproduced. There will be no original, no more authentic iteration of the piece. Vaporwave accomplishes this by existing entirely on the internet, where things can be shared and replicated until their origin is veiled beneath a web of connections. In vaporwave, “coolness, blankness, and apathy become new moods for the decelerating, recessionary postmodern condition in an age of downsizing and diminishing expectations” (Best 9). Through Far Side Virtual, Ferraro wanted to make an album where “you hear the gloss, but beyond that is this darker reality of what’s really going on in culture” (Snodgrass). He channels the hyperreality within which he exists to create music that has the same function — shallowly mask a bleak truth. Listening passively, the songs are boring but not offensively bad, a closer listen, with little effort on the part of the consumer, tells more as “Far Side Virtual deliberately evokes the artificial style of corporate “elevator music” and obsolete computer sounds” (Iruka 19). Instead of being the antithesis of emptiness, vaporwave is unbelievably so, calling attention to the emptiness that they believe is at the center of our lives (Cummings). It is conscious of its own existence within a specific cultural atmosphere, and the combination of that self-reflexivity and the techniques the artists employ in carrying that out make vaporwave a critique that models the postmodernist ideals.

Postmodernist theory was developed before the rise of the internet as we (and the vaporwave artists) know it, so it can not provide us with a complete lens for analyzing vaporwave. The concept of the participatory condition, though, can bring us one step closer to understanding how vaporwave came into being. The participatory condition is defined as “the situation in which participation — being involved in doing something and taking part in something with others — has become both environmental … and normative” (Sterne et. al. vii). Along with the rise of the internet, there has been a rise in opportunities for participation which paved the way for vaporwave. Not only has there been an exponential increase in access to different parts of the world from which to find inspiration, but there is an enormous increase in the platforms that people have for participating. There is far less need for the previous top-down approach to the culture industry, and musicians and their listeners were quick to take advantage of the opportunity for another style of cultural organization. Platforms like Youtube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and now Spotify have made it far easier for artists to get their work into places where people can find it, and strengthened the resistance against big corporations choosing what people should consume. This resistance is expressed through participation, through this enactment of agency over what is produced, released, and enjoyed. Theoretically, it should also open up the potential for a reversal of Walter Benjamin’s loss of aesthetic value from mass produced art forms (1057). Thus, “underlying the rise of the participatory condition is the belief that ‘cultural participation’ represents the full expression of the rights and capacities of human beings in democratic societies,” and vaporwave is one example of people carrying out this form of participation (Sterne et. al. xv). Additionally, vaporwave accomplishes the critical potential of participation, because “participatory works operate as platforms through which antagonistic relations ought to unfold. Without antagonism, the participatory aesthetic loses its political potential — its capacity to generate new forms and, in so doing, question the status quo” (xvii). Vaporwave is an example of this generation of new forms precisely because it is so elusive in terms of defined of genre boundaries. For this reason, it is the intersection of many different genres or types and in turn disrupts the delineation of each (Iruka 3). The participatory elements central to vaporwave’s existence make it difficult to define, but that is precisely what makes it an effective medium for critique — it isn’t confined to the labels that are prescribed to it.

These cultural formations and the critiques that respond to them have been building for decades, so we are led to an important question: why now? According to music journalist Simon Reynolds, the timing for this form of critique makes perfect sense considering the constant references to 80’s and 90’s consumer culture. As the the dominant modes of economic production have shifted, so have the primary techniques for music-making as a whole:

These shifts — from musical production/innovation to post- production/recombination — paralleled what was happening to the wider economy: a transition from making money through making stuff to wealth generation achieved through information, services, ‘signification’ (style, entertainment, media, design, etc.) and, most unrooted of all from the real, the finance sector’s manipulations of monetary value. (Reynolds 419)

No longer focused on purely innovating, musical artists (not just in vaporwave) have turned to sampling and referencing other works, using existing music to create more just as the finance sector makes money on their money. Recalling the 80’s and 90’s through their music, vaporwave artist look back to the last period of vast economic — and musical — growth. “Like a boom-time economy, the more fertile and dynamic a genre is, the more it sets itself up for the musical-cultural equivalent of recession: retro” (422). The 80’s and 90’s saw a proliferation in musical styles and consumer capitalism, and the two fell together as well. It is no coincidence that Far Side Virtual was released in 2011, just a few years after the Great Recession hit. After times of great prosperity, music tends to have trouble continuing to move in a forward direction, according to Reynolds. He relates the time of musically “going-in-circles” in the 2000’s to that in the 1970’s after the musical boom of the 1960’s. So, although James Ferraro “speculated that their parents played music in the living room and it came through the bedroom walls muffled and indistinct” is the reason that the 80’s and 90’s sounds are replicated in vaporwave, Reynold’s reasonings seem much more salient (346).

Unfortunately, while vaporwave is an effective form of critique of contemporary consumer culture, it it limited in terms of its possible impact. This is quite a niche genre, and for that reason, there is not as much participation as it seems to encourage. These artists do not call for change, but bring attention to some problems that they see in our culture. The genre and its artists are in somewhat of a tricky situation, though, because, like all forms of critique, more “cult following” increases the risk of recuperation. In recent years artists like James Ferraro have begun having live performances, and while they do need to make a living, creating and releasing this music for revenue plays into the consumer culture that they are trying to combat. How can this critique maintain its salience while becoming impactful? Some say that the genre peaked in 2013 and has “died” now that the vaporwave music and aesthetic have been used in the rebranding strategies of companies like MTV and Tumblr (How Vaporwave). It is even said to have been an influencer of Drake’s Hotline Bling music video made in 2015. The popular acceptance and incorporation of vaporwave, which “never strived for mass appeal,” has killed it, and it became a part of the ideologies they tried to counter.

Despite its limitations, vaporwave is able to form an interesting form of critique of consumer capitalism by synthesizing decades of critical theories and practices into one subgenre of music, and it can provide us with a neat case study for the ways in which critiques of this nature respond to their respective cultural contexts. The ways that they create and conceptualize their music don’t make a pleasant sound or mass appeal a goal of the piece. While vaporwave artists seem to have been somewhat resigned to the state of the world, coopting their methods for an effort with a distinct goal could prove to be more productive. By trying to replicate the empty sensation that is produced by elevator musics and Muzak, they magnify the emptiness that is at the center of life in hyperreality. In “calling out” the lack of meaning in the work disseminated by the culture industry, they have created their own. They make meaning from the lack thereof.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et. al., W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, pp. 1110–1127.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan press, 1994.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et. al., W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, pp. 1051–1071.

Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. “Chapter 4: Postmodernism in the Arts.” The Postmodern Turn. New York, Guilford Press, 1997.

Cummings, Jeremy. “Vaporwave Is More than Just Music. It’s a New Way to Approach New Ideas.” Medium, Medium, 2 May 2017, medium.com/@JeremyCummings3/vaporwave-is-more-than-just-music-its-a-new-way-to-approach-new-ideas-6ede95452108.

Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London, Verso, 1990.

Ferraro, James. Far Side Virtual. Hippos in Tanks. 2011.

“How Vaporwave Was Created Then Destroyed by the Internet.” Esquire, Esquire, 18 Aug. 2016, www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a47793/what-happened-to-vaporwave/.

Iruka, Ekko. Vaporwave : A Dystopian Musical Codex. Raleigh, NC, Lulu.com, 2015.

“MACINTOSH PLUS — リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー.” YouTube, uploaded by ramiendoche, 14 Jan 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture : The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London, Routledge, 1992.

Snodgrass, Catlin. “James Ferraro by Catlin Snodgrass — BOMB Magazine.” BOMB Magazine, 16 Oct. 2013, bombmagazine.org/articles/james-ferraro/.

Sterne, Jonathan, et al., editors. The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2016.