The thing about Vaporwave

is that it immediately struck severals nerves with me:

1. In my teen years I was crazy for the early 3D computer animations. Fascinated and astounded I watched those perfect shapes move, the checker board, the glass sphere, the ray-traced reflections. I learned that it’s much easier to render the smoothest surface than to depict even the least realistic landscape with all its roughs and sketchiness. (Fractals to the rescue!) – And of course: Kraftwerk’s Musique non stop video.

2. Of course it was the 1980s (and a wee bit of the 1990s due to the time it took for everything to arrive in Central Europe) and everything now Vaporwave just resembles that time: Miami Vice colors, Aerobic commercials for almost any product, terrible font choices, terrible hairstyle choices, terrible clothing choices. I had it all. The future was bleak (if existing at all) but hey, I still wanted to see it. Sure, there was the constant threat of nuclear annihilation but when you noticed there was one “day after” too many you would rather choose a soulless life instead of one of a lifeless soul. The Vaporwave people really picked their material ingeniously: reduced to the max! And who knows, 2016, maybe time’s up again…?

3. The time was full with horrible pop and rock music and I enjoyed it: clean and sterile over-produced bombast presented by superstars (think M. Jackson) or supergroups (think Toto… which actually was most of Jackson’s music if not all of the popular music, anyway). Techno was still underground but it went into the same groove shortly afterwards pretty rapidly. Nevertheless, I also started composing music myself with some electronic instruments, a sequencer, a sampler and a nice analog synth, and at best it actually sounded exactly like four bars of a poppy tune in a never-ending loop. Vaporwave. And I could mesmerize yours truly with it forever and some nightly hours. Nowadays, such tunes help me to concentrate on my work. Or to imagine driving through a megacity.

4. Some say Vaporwave picks up the pieces of all what is wrong about a capitalistic approach to art and music, or even about capitalism itself; some say it is totally not. (Some even say Vaporwave already died in 2011.) That’s all fine with me. But hardly any other music video so simply and elegantly shows the emptiness of consumerism, the stupidity of office life and the glitches of technological progress than this Vaporwave masterpiece: Eco Virtual’s Clear Skies. You be the judge.

5. Whether rumors of Vaporwave’s death are greatly exaggerated or not: I think it already had some obvious impact on mainstream music (e.g. Washed Out). And ignoring the fan boys already claiming several subgenres or dissing you for wrongly labelling a band – here is my current favorite: Home’s Resonance.