I Love Cyberpunk
Vaporwave as Modern Cyberpunk:
Vaporwave is an artistic movement that started in roughly 2011, but really kicked off around 2015. It somehow survived its meme stage and blew up once people rediscovered it. Musically, it’s a form of plunderphonics, a type of music that is sample-heavy and, in this case, extremely distorted. The idea of the music was meant to be a statement on late capitalism and the way it kills any sense of discovery and originality in the world by taking even the slightest advancement and torturing it to death for profit. The music, therefore, isn’t really “good”, but it isn’t supposed to be. It’s supposed to be eerie and uncomfortable, and is often described as the sound of an empty mall.
The art takes on a similar collage type of medium, where bits and pieces of commodified imagery or nostalgic imagery is mashed together in a brutal and uncompromising way. The idea is that we are craving the idealized past, one that was comfortable and also felt like progress, but through the lens of modern life, which has virtually extinguished our future, to the point where even our life expectancy is dropping because capital is not flowing through the economy anymore, but accumulating and concentrating into fewer hands. We have no original ideas anymore because we can’t find the time or energy for it. Everything is just a copy of a copy of a copy.
Vaporwave is to modern aesthetics, therefore, a realization of cyberpunk philosophy. It says “The future is here and it’s killing us.”
Vaporwave is an artistic movement that started in roughly 2011, but really kicked off around 2015. It somehow survived its meme stage and blew up once people rediscovered it. Musically, it’s a form of plunderphonics, a type of music that is sample-heavy and, in this case, extremely distorted. The idea of the music was meant to be a statement on late capitalism and the way it kills any sense of discovery and originality in the world by taking even the slightest advancement and torturing it to death for profit. The music, therefore, isn’t really “good”, but it isn’t supposed to be. It’s supposed to be eerie and uncomfortable, and is often described as the sound of an empty mall.
The art takes on a similar collage type of medium, where bits and pieces of commodified imagery or nostalgic imagery is mashed together in a brutal and uncompromising way. The idea is that we are craving the idealized past, one that was comfortable and also felt like progress, but through the lens of modern life, which has virtually extinguished our future, to the point where even our life expectancy is dropping because capital is not flowing through the economy anymore, but accumulating and concentrating into fewer hands. We have no original ideas anymore because we can’t find the time or energy for it. Everything is just a copy of a copy of a copy.
Vaporwave is to modern aesthetics, therefore, a realization of cyberpunk philosophy. It says “The future is here and it’s killing us.”
31-35, F
