The name is a combination of terms. One of these terms is known as "vaporware", a corporate advertising term for products that are advertised for release but are never intended to make it to market - an insider term for manipulation of the public's desires. The other half of the name comes from Marx's waves of vapor, it comes from these failed promises, and sort of offers up an alternative history of post cold war America:
"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind".
Debate: Is the genre dead?
- Either the genre has outlived its usefulness as a product on the market (i.e. a change in style) OR
- It no longer has any relevance to our lives.
In a sense it has always been "dead"
- Vaporwave was never a product for sale in the same way as other genres.
- It was never economically "successful".
- An expression of our moment in American history - a take on economic and cultural decline.
- An appropriation of the language of marketing itself, of a planned or synthetic obsolescence, employed before the act of "selling out" in order to protect the integrity of the genre.
Vaporwave arose in relation to huge economic and social forces that are still a part of our lives - globalisation, runaway consumerism and manufactured nostalgia being the main issues.
Definitions:
- A microgenre of electronic music, an art movement and internet meme which emerged in the early 2010s. The music appropriates 1980s and 1990s styles of mood music, such as smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B and lounge music, typically sampling or manipulating tracks via chopped and screwed techniques, and other effects. (From indie dance genres, such as sea-punk, bounce house, witch house or chill wave) - an ironic variant of chillwave.
- It's surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and popular culture, and tends to be characterised by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades.
- Also incorporates early internet imagery, late 1990's web design, Greco-Roman statues, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos (aesthetics).
Design an object that celebrates (or critiques) an aspect of a genre's specific characteristics.
In what sense do these micro-genres help us understand some wider issues about the society that created them?
Think political, aesthetics, production methods, audience demographic, key intentions or its connections to a specific place.
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