FJ: MACINTOSH PLUS – “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE

I guess I feel obligated to tell you that that isn’t a typo. The name of the song roughly translates to “modern computing / Lisa Frank 420” Macintosh Plus, the Canadian artist more commonly known as Vektroid, released the album “Floral Shop” in 2011, formally kicking off the “vaporwave” genre. Vaporwave is divisive. Usually, people either haven’t heard of it or they’re snobs about it (vaporwave is supposed to be “dead” already). A Portland, Maine-area magazine called Dispatch described vaporwave in a review of Fenimore’s “Somewhere Between Time and Space, We All Fall Down” as:

…new(ish), it’s electronic, it’s made by youths, and it’s equal parts ‘the internet of things,’ smooth hits of the ’70s, Nintendo-era video games, and the Japanese pavilion at Epcot Center circa 1988. If Fenimore (James Paul Cooper of Hi Tiger, Conjjjecture) is to be believed, vaporwave is trippy, bleepity-bloopity fun, unsettling and exotic, but eerily familiar like the Windows 95 dialog box on the album’s cover. There’s an unexpected gentleness and sadness to this album that, despite the bouncy melodies and muffled, chubby beats (so much of the production here reminds me of e*vax’s Parking Lot Music), it leaves me with a low-stakes sense of ennui — a digital Peter Pan’s take on shoegaze for the children of Prozac Nation.

That’s it, pretty much, although I would have said “the younger siblings of Prozac Nation”.

The most interesting aspect of vaporwave to me, far beyond the actual music, is its anti-utopian and anti-consumerist sentiment. Think of it as an entire aesthetic language composed of the bric-a-brac of 80’s and 90’s consumer/mall culture used to articulate criticisms of the most shallow and unhealthy aspects of what Leftists optimistically refer to as “late” capitalism. They’re sonic caricatures meant to emphasize how shallow and materialistic our cultural ambitions actually are. And it’s all homemade, so it’s the closest thing my generation has to punk music.

I just wrote an article for Esquire about the strange, overhyped death of vaporwave which hopefully runs soon, but in the future I’d love to use this blog space as a forum to explore the anti-idolatry aspects of vaporwave.