The transition of the vapors into the mainstream

was shopping for pants today and in the shoppe there was of course music.

a song came up which was clearly "inspired" by vaporwave aesthetics but it also was a typical pop/indie song with autotune vocals. dunno what that was but omg, is this crap the next numetal / dubstep / trap....? pls no..... pls!

haven't listened to it, but that new machinedrum thing is crappified vaporwave?

is this browave? post here browave songs. i don't know any.

broporwave

http://www.browave.com/en/

??

nothing...?

don't be in denial!

Been noticing this more and more since at least late 2014/early 2015 but it seems more overt than ever lately. 

  On 9/7/2016 at 2:49 PM, RSP said:

Been noticing this more and more since at least late 2014/early 2015 but it seems more overt than ever lately. 

The success of Tame Impala seems to be steering people in that direction. Kids are also confusing "outrun" style synthpop like Com Truise and Mitch Murder with vaporwave online as well.

On to the next music genre not co-opted and muddled by mainstream reception stupidity. As much as I don't get hung up on this stuff it still irks me from time to time. (the historical revisionism of dubstep as a term was my big realization that you can't fight misinformation and the implosion of underground music scenes post-mainstream crossover)

  On 9/6/2016 at 10:36 PM, phling said:

haven't listened to it, but that new machinedrum thing is crappified vaporwave?

mmm no, not quite.

edit: vaporwave is 90-95% trash

  On 9/6/2016 at 10:47 PM, Ragnar said:

broporwave

  On 9/6/2016 at 10:36 PM, phling said:

 

 

is this browave? post here browave songs. i don't know any.

This was why some early vaporwave fans and producers declared the genre dead back in 2013. People forget Saint Pepsi, who is now considered classic vaporwave by the current scene, and likewise that early key vaporwave producers moved on.

Really good breakdown in 2013 of the genre as it was becoming a solidified term....this would be like reading an article about dubstep in 2007-2008, whereas now vaporwave is essentially in the same era as when post-Skrillex fans and producers flooded the scene and shouted out anyone trying to assert the original genre's scope and sound.

  On 9/7/2016 at 3:04 PM, usagi said:

 

  On 9/6/2016 at 10:36 PM, phling said:

haven't listened to it, but that new machinedrum thing is crappified vaporwave?

 

mmm no, not quite.

 

edit: vaporwave is 90-95% trash

 

No just the same club friendly, safe, trap beat based shit that's infecting every electronic music genre, doesn't really have it's own music genre name. Machinedrum is at least doing it well.

That said Blank Banshee or VAPERROR are probably what your thinking of within vaporwave.

uh ok maybe my view of vaporwave is misguided - to me, e.g. Blank Banshee is vaporwave too, and of course 0PN's last two albums. But probably not.

But the track in the trousers shoppe was something like a mix between Banshee (the colors), 0pn (cheeseball FM sequences) and autotuned [generic indie guy singing]. It was really horrendous but also sounded like something Pitchfork would rate; a masochistic part of me wants to know what this is

  On 9/7/2016 at 3:06 PM, joshuatx said:

 

  On 9/6/2016 at 10:47 PM, Ragnar said:

broporwave

 

 

  On 9/6/2016 at 10:36 PM, phling said:

 

 

is this browave? post here browave songs. i don't know any.

 

 

This was why some early vaporwave fans and producers declared the genre dead back in 2013. People forget Saint Pepsi, who is now considered classic vaporwave by the current scene, and likewise that early key vaporwave producers moved on.

 

Really good breakdown in 2013 of the genre as it was becoming a solidified term....this would be like reading an article about dubstep in 2007-2008, whereas now vaporwave is essentially in the same era as when post-Skrillex fans and producers flooded the scene and shouted out anyone trying to assert the original genre's scope and sound.

 

These are good.  The writing was definitely on the wall in 2013, that's when you started to see early adopters, often people who didn't make music themselves, stepping in and setting up vaporwave-specific netlabels and review blogs and stuff, and that's a pretty standard step on the path from niche/subculture to fully co-opted pop culture fad.  Hipsters/early adopters/trendspotters/whatever you want to call that crowd spot something interesting that's mostly under the radar, step in and set themselves up as gatekeepers/arbiters of taste, and then work on pushing it to a wider audience.  Which is often good for a handful of artists and usually good for the new gatekeepers but it als means that whatever is being pushed has to become a codified genre, because at that point it's essentially a product that is being marketed and you need to have a few easily identifiable traits that people can latch on to and say "that's Vaporwave-or-whatever."

Then if things really take off there's another wave of mainstream artists and marketers completely detached from the original who adopt elements of the codified genre and work it in to their own stuff.  Often these are actually a lot more interesting than the watered down, codified genre stuff (Bowie's a great example of that - every major phase of his career he was borrowing heavily from some burgeoning trend or other but what he did to it almost always transcended the source material and became something uniquely Bowie) but even more often they're something like this:

Anyway, you can see this pattern repeat itself in music (and art in general) over and over since the dawn of modern marketing, from big band jazz to acid rock to disco to punk to synthpop to grunge to house to gansta rap to dubstep to trap etc. etc.

  On 9/7/2016 at 3:04 PM, usagi said:

vaporwave is 90-95% trash

As a child growing up in the late 80s/early 90s I did Dazzle Draw in a Macintosh lab, watched my share of shitty VHS instructional videos, and was subjected to the most garish color combinations imaginable.  These are not things worth revisiting, let alone building a musical aesthetic around, and fuck me if I give two shits about some millenial's lazy pop culture reinterpretation of it.

I also find the fetishization of physical objects and obsolete technology to be absurd, but hey maybe that's just me.

p.s. get off my lawn

  On 9/7/2016 at 3:04 PM, usagi said:

 

edit: vaporwave is 90-95% trash

 

It most definitely is, but there's a handful of artists that do something interesting with the sound... That said, it's not something I'd wanna see slip it's way into a mainstream thing, as I feel the aesthetics of the genre are rather limited and inspirations grow thin pretty quickly.

Proper usage of vapor circa 2009:

[youtubehd]PL_RcV_JLFA[/youtubehd]

washed out and blank banshee are both good imo

  On 9/7/2016 at 6:09 PM, peace 7 said:

Proper usage of vapor circa 2009:

[youtubehd]PL_RcV_JLFA[/youtubehd]

^ ahh, good old chillwave

  On 9/7/2016 at 5:04 PM, Bob Dobalina said:

 

  On 9/7/2016 at 3:04 PM, usagi said:

vaporwave is 90-95% trash

 

As a child growing up in the late 80s/early 90s I did Dazzle Draw in a Macintosh lab, watched my share of shitty VHS instructional videos, and was subjected to the most garish color combinations imaginable.  These are not things worth revisiting, let alone building a musical aesthetic around, and fuck me if I give two shits about some millenial's lazy pop culture reinterpretation of it.

 

I also find the fetishization of physical objects and obsolete technology to be absurd, but hey maybe that's just me.

 

p.s. get off my lawn

 

I love this even though I don't share the sentiment. Surely similar hatred from generation Xers for Board of Canada existed when they released MHTRTC. 

  On 9/7/2016 at 3:15 PM, phling said:

uh ok maybe my view of vaporwave is misguided - to me, e.g. Blank Banshee is vaporwave too, and of course 0PN's last two albums. But probably not.

 

But the track in the trousers shoppe was something like a mix between Banshee (the colors), 0pn (cheeseball FM sequences) and autotuned [generic indie guy singing]. It was really horrendous but also sounded like something Pitchfork would rate; a masochistic part of me wants to know what this is

I'd call them post-vaporwave. The overlap is there for sure.

The song you describe could easily be a pure top 40 aimed shameless single or it could be a some pretentious ironic indie electronic project. It really depends on a couple things:

1. does the artist in question attend art school currently?

2. do they reside in brooklyn, LA, or Berlin?

3. invested career through major indie aligned PR firm or via Major label subsidiary?

  On 9/7/2016 at 5:04 PM, Bob Dobalina said:

 

  On 9/7/2016 at 3:04 PM, usagi said:

vaporwave is 90-95% trash

 

As a child growing up in the late 80s/early 90s I did Dazzle Draw in a Macintosh lab, watched my share of shitty VHS instructional videos, and was subjected to the most garish color combinations imaginable.  These are not things worth revisiting, let alone building a musical aesthetic around, and fuck me if I give two shits about some millenial's lazy pop culture reinterpretation of it.

 

I also find the fetishization of physical objects and obsolete technology to be absurd, but hey maybe that's just me.

 

p.s. get off my lawn

 

I agree with the part about lazy reinterpretations at least

anyway the 90's to me is encapsulated in the what would you do?? theme song/opening, which whatever aesthetic it is isn't represented well in vaporwave

As with all underground movements, only an element of it makes it through to the mainstream, and then that gets exaggerated and morphed into something unrecognisable. I love a lot of the 2011/2012 first-wave vaporwave stuff when it was just a strange off-shoot of the experimental/noise scene, literally just snippets of slightly embarrassing '80s music turned creepy, uploaded for free. Enjoyably off-kilter and lo-fi. And I really like the whole Dream Catalogue thing which grew from vaporwave and has now distanced itself from all the shit in the genre, basically doing cyberpunk ambient techno stuff. 

But a lot of the trap-inspired stuff with really garish imagery that seems to have worked its way through to a larger consciousness I really can't stand. It's kind of overdue, really, these things normally take a few years to really become mainstream, so I wouldn't be surprised if we had more of it.

Although there are a handful of vaporwave artists who are still decent and still around - generally the older ones, it has to be said - it's become an absolute cesspool of a scene, and I've really distanced myself from most of it this year.

  On 9/7/2016 at 5:04 PM, Bob Dobalina said:

 

 

I also find the fetishization of physical objects and obsolete technology to be absurd, but hey maybe that's just me.

It is but denial is a form of fetishism.

Combine Vaporwave and Hauntology = Vaporology.

Stores should just pirate that K-Mart mixtape from teh interwebs and keep the Blue Light Special dream alive.

  On 9/6/2016 at 10:47 PM, Ragnar said:

broporwave

 heh ... kudodos

broperwave exists as a genre : https://bandcamp.com/tag/broporwave

& sum ledge used 'post broperwave' az a tag in 2013 aslo  : https://allcapsandaltkeycodes.bandcamp.com

Jerseywave