I Like Vaporwave but and I Willing to Listen To It?
For reasons mostly unknown, even to me, I am endlessly fascinated by vaporwave.
I totally missed it early on. But there was a documentary that came out about a month ago that explained it all, which I found really interesting, because you finally got to hear and see some of these people. And I think yesterday or the day before, Chad Pennington released a video on Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe album.
This and the Echo Jams records are the two big ones.
People have a lot of trouble describing vaporwave, and I say it is thus: making tiny loops sound shitty. That’s it.
That’s not to say it isn’t entertaining or relaxing. As a DJ, I love making loops. I love slowing things down. I like messing around with music. They’ve just elevated that into a genre.
I say “genre” because it’s all really hard to sell since it’s often just straight loops. To me, that’s fascinating because you immediately get into questions of who owns what.
Short loops in DJing are a different thing entirely. When you’re doing it well, people shouldn’t know what they’re hearing at first, and then you reveal it. The thing with vaporwave is they never reveal what it is, which is also cool.
As its name implies, it’s vapor (named after vaporware-software that was never released). The source material is music, but the end result is something else.
I love the Grateful Dead, but I always feel bad for Jerry Garcia when he said in old interviews that rap music isn’t music. That’s simply not true. Anytime you’re in the business of calling music-like things “not music,” you’re probably on shaky ground. Even AI music is music, broadly defined.
I’ve tried to go deep with a bunch of vaporwave, and I always get distracted and move on to something else. I think the story is much more interesting than the music itself, though I do like the music, mostly.
More than enjoyment, it’s the story for me. I love reading about it. I love hearing the tales. I think it’s fascinating that a genre that arguably couldn’t have existed before the internet feels like the internet’s own creation.
I still don’t know where I stand with it.
It’s almost impossible to put into DJ sets except as transitional material, and then it’s really cool. That makes me wonder if I should still be making my own transitions. Maybe I don’t have time for that. Maybe Vapor Wave is just transitional presets I can use and move on.
I don’t know.
I’ve linked both documentaries here, and if there’s any interest, they’re definitely worth watching—or at least listening to while you’re trying to fall asleep.