The music theory of V A P O R W A V E

M I C R O W A V E

"Anyone could have done it. Yeah, but Macintosh Plus did." These were the words I helped me more in music than you realize.

so, take a tune: Slow it down: vaporwave Speed it up: nightcore got it

Vaporwave is the most meta THING in existence. At this point what is vaporwave? A meme? A genre of music? A movement? An enlightened way of thinking? It’s amazing!!!

Vaporwave strikes me as the musical equivalent of pop art, with a lot of the same arguments coming from both its fans & its critics. In the end, whether it's Warhol painting Campbell's soup cans or Macintosh Plus slowing down a Diana Ross song, it may not connect with you or seem like 'real art', but it certainly leaves an impression and makes some clear statements and IMO that's what art is really about.

Your Arizona green tea turned into a Fiji water at the end...

I don't care if it's a joke, or if it's lazy. I love the way it makes me feel. Not all vaporwave songs are as simple as slowing a song down. The one you mentioned has other things done to it. Various parts that loop, and skip, and all kinds of things to give you that old vhs type feel. Call me ridiculous, but I take vaporwave seriously. joke or not.

What is vaporwave? Vaporwave is s e x t o t h e e a r s

To the people who keep telling me to watching this video. I AM WATCHING!

I love that 'literally anyone could do that' applied as a criticism to music. Literally anyone can learn to play the guitar. I could teach anyone - literally anyone - to play some guitar in a very short space of time. To play it well would be another matter. Same with sample based music. Literally anyone can do it. Doing it well is a totally different matter. (great video by the way)

There's a style of Japanese music called 'City Pop' which has recently had kind of a surge in popularity with western music fans because uh... the youtube algorithm started recommending Mariya Takeuchi's 'Plastic Love' to everybody??? for some reason??? regardless, a lot of vaporwave artists use city pop tracks as the basis for their plunderphonics (I know that Macaross 82-99 used a Takahashi Kadomatsu track just... completely unedited in one of their albums dfgdsf) and I think a lot of people approach it as the kind of corporate pop kinda music that vaporwave tends to make use of, and I thought that for a while when I started listening to it, but I've since come to think that - at least for a period - its project is somewhat similar to what vaporwave would be doing later. Theres this album by an artist called Hiroshi Satoh called 'This Boy' (apparently a compilation album?) and it demonstrates it really well imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFdSQACtewI If you listen to it, its clearly doing western pop stuff, but its making references to all different kinds of western pop. There are bits that are close to doo-wop type stuff, american songbook type stuff, surf rock stuff, and then theres power ballads & whatever, and disco, and its all melted down into this over-the-top early 80s synth pop style. Realizing it had this very 'close reading' of western pop made me think, 'hold on... is this art?' A lot of the songs are in english, and the lyrics are a lot of the time total nonsense - really meaningless! but they lyrics are like, haphazardly assembled western pop cliches, 'c'mon baby', 'for your love', 'make you satisfied', 'the futures in your mind', etc. It's appropriating western pop in that sort of way. I can't imagine how it must have sounded to a japanese listener in the early 80s, and I imagine there was some kind of cultural dialogue that was happening which is inaccessible to me - to some extent I cannot really listen to the music Hiroshi Satoh was making, because what he was making was - as you say re: vaporwave - more than the chords & scales, but that musical meaning is lost in translation. Satoh's first album, btw, was called "Super Market"

4 Years late here but I've come around to thinking of Vaporwave as a modern Gothic aesthetic. Gothic took the iconography of and celebrated the downfall of the Victorian age. Vaporwave is doing the same of ultra consumerist capitalism.

I discovered vaporwave post-meme and love it unironically.

great video

8:09 I could taste that Arizona once you cracked it open

I love how the "great artist's steal" adage is still attributed every famous artist. In Pirates of Silicon Valley it was Picaso, here it's Stavinsky, in other places it's Tennyson or Faulkner. All the above mentioned people have actually used some variation on the quote, so great artists actually have stolen that quote in particular.

I think all the Wikipedia descriptions of vaporwave being a serious critique on consumer culture are more or less post-hoc attributions by people trying to make it into more than it actually is. I think vaporwave is an earnest, salacious expression of the notalgia of a generation raised on TV and dial up Internet.

so basically vaporwave does to music what Andy Warhol did to art?

in the end your music was more like P R O G W A V E

as someone who relishes in vaporwave, retrowave, synthwave and all the waves, for me it's nothing to do with the nostalgia, i was born in the uk in the mid 90s, and half of the references, especially american ones go right over my head. the thing with timbre goes so much deeper. It's almost like lofi hiphop, sure on face value a lot of it sounds so samey, but you know when it's good, you can hear the craftsmanship in sampling, mixing, various effects, all that. and the rest is just a meme. but i wish the 'purists' who love one and hate the other (referring to vapor/synth/retrowave again) would just admit they're all doing the same thing, of invoking an oversaturated impression of "nostalgia" just for different periods of music