An introductory video about vaporwave. I’d love to be fascinated, but all revolutionary vape is basically ambient, or new age, or distorted lounge and downbeat, and you can’t really surprise anyone with lo-fi: it’s been around since the first available tape recorders, i.e. definitely since the 1960s. Vaporwave is aimed at youngsters who think that music was born when they were born. That is, the 2000s are more or less alright, but the nineties, eighties and, even further, the sixties and avant-garde are totally obscure. They learn about this music from modern producers, albeit in a distorted form. But it’s important to realise that vaporwave isn’t music, it’s an a e s t h e t i c.
Vaporwave is shrouded in a fog of anti-capitalism. Articles about it build such theories that the master of techno verbiage, Derrick May, would envy such excuses for slowing down other people’s tracks, especially considering that nothing in the movement has been serious since day one. Simple figures in terms of capitalism: Lopatin’s cassette, which started the genre, was sold on Discogs for 600 euros; Floral Shoppe cassette with a bonus, which can’t be found anywhere else, was sold there for an average of 700 euros; an Atmospheres 1 cassette out of twenty issued was sold for 200 euros; a Hologram Plaza cassette, on one side of which fits the whole half-hour album was 130 euros; a Blank Banshee’s vinyl was at least 200 euros. Rarities out of nothing, out of vape and dust, other people’s records under filters. Do these sums go to vape musicians for their albums? No. They go to greedy capitalists who, riding the wave of hype, resell the records at a 5000% margin.