It builds upon the satirical tendencies of chillwave and hypnagogic pop, while also being associated with an ambiguous or ironic take on consumer capitalism and technoculture.
#Just checking meme software#
The name derives from " vaporware", a term for commercial software that is announced but never released. It is composed almost entirely from slowed-down samples and its creation requires only the knowledge of rudimentary production techniques.
Academic Laura Glitsos writes, "In this way, vaporwave defies traditional music conventions that typically privilege the music over the visual form." Musically, vaporwave reconfigures dance music from the 1980s and early 1990s through the use of chopped and screwed techniques, repetition, and heavy reverb. The genre is defined largely by its surrounding subculture, with its music inextricable from its visual accoutrements. Vaporwave is a hyper-specific subgenre, or " microgenre," that is both a form of electronic music and an art style, although it is sometimes suggested to be primarily a visual medium. Later in the 2010s, the genre spurred a revival of interest in Japanese ambient music and city pop. Many of the most influential artists and record labels associated with vaporwave have since drifted into other musical styles. The general public came to view vaporwave as a facetious Internet meme, a notion that frustrated some producers who wished to be recognized as serious artists. Since the mid-2010s, vaporwave has been frequently described as a "dead" genre. The genre also intersected with fashion trends such as streetwear and various political movements. After Xavier's album Floral Shoppe (2011) established a blueprint for the genre, the movement built an audience on sites Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan while a flood of new acts, also operating under online pseudonyms, turned to Bandcamp for distribution.įollowing the wider exposure of vaporwave in 2012, a wealth of subgenres and offshoots emerged, such as future funk, mallsoft and hardvapour, although most have waned in popularity. The style was pioneered by producers such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Ramona Xavier, who each used various pseudonyms.
Vaporwave originated as an ironic variant of chillwave, evolving from hypnagogic pop as well as similar retro-revivalist and post-Internet motifs that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the era, such as Tumblr's seapunk. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades.
It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s. Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, visual art style, and Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s. An example of some graphic design elements typically associated with vaporwave
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