Not the nostalgia for what you have never experienced, but the nostalgia for what you have haunted
It's finally happened. Enough time has passed, enough other scenes have come and gone in the meantime, that I can be legitimately nostalgic for vaporwave. Not like, ａｅｓｕｔｈｅｔｉｋｋｕ ironic nostalgic, but just baseline regular nostalgic for the (sunset) golden days of the nostalgia-est of nostalgia genres.
Todo ser aprenderá / a ter as estrelas como guia…
Though I'm sure somewhere out there there's young folk born too late to have caught anything to do with vaporwave, and who now feel nostalgia for the early vapor scene while having never been there. This thought makes me happy.
Music that was too online
This is a good video for Internet history, randy gives an informed account of the music genre behind the memes and just how quietly influential and trend-setting it was. She missed discussing also that it was born streaming-native, and how new that was at the time. During the vaporwave era the concept of “album” had already been fatally wounded by large playlists, shuffle listening, and incipient algorithmic picks based on listening habits—we would religiously endeavour to connect every mp3 player software we had to last.fm, lest our precious play statistics not get logged, “wasting” a listen—but everyone was still downloading MP3s and listening from their on-device collections. Vaporwave seemed born youtubeing the way that horses are born walking. It was tailor-made for “Late Night Tokyo Summer 2h” compilations that you would put randomly and leave playing in the background. This is so normal now that I struggle to convey how much of a new thing it was; vaporwave felt fake and like a meme because it was an online thing. When lofi hip-hop exploded into the world a few years later, right when the world needed it the most, the reason I kept thinking of lo-fi as “vaporwave but she's happy after transition” wasn't anything to do with the musical similarities between the genres, but because of how much both were online-native, streaming-oriented, Internet-scene genres.
One might think it's ironic that two genres obsessed with analog artefacts and physical media distortion were actually such hypermodern digital cloudborn scenes, but of course that was the entire point.
Madeleines at the edge of your vision
Also missing was that for us natives (millenials) how many layers of liminality that nostalgia had. Much of the nostalgia-play in vaporwave was direct, it was lampshading emotional icons of our teens (mario tunes, windows 95 sound effects etc.) by adding a heavy goo of ostranenie on top, the resulting alienation reflecting the social alienation everyone felt after the End of History ended. And much of it was the anemoia, the nostalgia for something you never experienced—I'm far from the only girl who's heavily anemoic for being a plastic-love sparkly dress urban chic easy woman dancing the nightlife in Bubble Era Japan, despite the fact that at the time I was a child in a rural mountain town the exact opposite side of the world wearing the wrong gender.
But most of it was about the tension that was right on the edge between having experienced and not experienced. It was getting little details that were at the fringes of our lived experiences, that we touched upon indirectly, but never gave a thought about, and putting that on a (faux Greek plastic) pedestal for observation. Vaporwave queered the binary between nostalgia and anemoia: cultural spaces briefly brushed by your consumption habits years ago were rewritten as landmarks to your particular life-story, while the most familiar parts of your history were rendered alien and creepy and estranged.
For example: I had never listened to citypop before future funk brought it to everyone's attention, except it was also what I grew up thinking of as “the type of j-pop they use in anime and tokusatsu songs”, which means it had been a seminal part of my childhood all along, but only like, specific versions of it. The “UFO” song that that one pair of aidoru-impersonating sisters would sing every Imin Matsuri, that kind of thing. I still distinctly remember my shock when the wave of what I thought of as “new style” anime came along—that was Naruto, One Piece and Bleach—because suddenly the musical style of anisong had changed overnight, leaving me bereft of that particular high I'd get from the songs in Sekai Ninja Sen Jiraiya, Tenkū Senki Shurato, obviously Sailor Moon etc. I had never experienced citypop; at the same time I was intimately familiar with citypop, I could sing several citypop songs before I even knew Japanese.
Similarly, like most people who live in Most Of The World, I had never been to an USA-style shopping mall. The equivalent in my country and social class hit us as “fancy”—curated, full of cops, above all financially inaccessible—in a way completely alien to the USA teens hanging out at the mall, who would never begin to dream a context where “McDonalds at the mall” was a fancy rich people thing you might experience once on vacations with your rich aunt and you'd talk about to your schoolmates with the reverence one talks about an once-in-a-lifetime trip to Disneyland. So the “empty mall” melancholic ostranenie shouldn't have hit me.
Except of course I knew the USA mall intimately, from dubbed sitcoms playing on the background during lunch, from low-budget Saturday Morning USA cartoons that were a precursor of Tiktok feeds and AI slop with their recycled animation loops and reused plots and unchanging status quo, from the strange funhouse mirror of real-life Brazilian high-school dynamics that was fictional USA high-school dynamics, as filtered with a 10-years delay by theatre kids turned into television writers with a grudge against “jocks” (a category we didn't have).
Most of all I knew the “mall as third-place to hang out” from suggestion, from connecting the dots through its inversions and parodies and distortions: the way it appears in Japanese-produced americana like Earthbound, for example, or in the original zombie movie by Romero, and a thousand other B horrors I watched religiously with my cool madrinha on Coffin Joe's Cine Trash. The USA mall was defined by implication, by its absence.
🏬 👩🚀 🔫 👩🚀 “Wait a minute, the shopping mall is empty?” “Always has been.”
As a genre defined by its interest in cultural artefacts only ever experienced indirectly, vaporwave is weirdly meaningful music for everyone in the Global South; its referents were already estranged for all of us in the periphery of the world, living stuck halfway between the material reality surrounding our bodies and the conceptual reality we got from Imperial media, both of which felt both native and foreign at once. When you exist in two places at the same time you're a kind of ghost, and ghosts are attracted to haunting music.
A soundtrack of personal mythology
Finally, the throw-everything-at-a-wall nature of the overload of samples and reused fetishistic symbols meant that vaporwave often felt targeted for you in particular. It's like cold reading in fortune-telling.
My brief time at the USA was defined much more by the extinct Google Phoenix than Mountain View itself, whatever bond I made to the land was between me and the desert hills of Arizona, surrounded on all sides by sprawl of what is probably the worst city in the world. I was left with an unexplainable affection for Arizona, and the biggest symbol of it for me was the Arizona Green Tea, which was so cheap at the time and fit that era of my life so perfectly. I can't even drink it anymore cos I'm vegan now, and I certainly will never be able to step in the USA safely again, so Arizona Green Tea is the ultimate symbol of unattainable nostalgia. How did vaporwave know?? :surprised_pikachu:
(or was it the idolatry of Arizona Green Tea in vapor aesthetics that rewrote my memories, giving it a larger space in my recollections of the Google Phoenix era than it actually had in reality? It's impossible to know, which means it adds up to the same.)
Nostalgia has since became the normal modus operandi of consumerism, in a kind of desperate, child-like denial of the return of fascism. But back when vaporwave did nostalgia, the subculture had noticed this tendency when it was still an incipient little whisper, and immediately pushed it up to 11, on purpose. Not so much as a political project of “criticism” per se but mostly to see what happened; to see what it would feel like; to indulge. The connection to accelerationism isn't unmotivated: vaporwave criticised consumerism by surrendering to it all the way. Wouldn't it be nice to somehow live in the palm-tree beaches of those old TV commercials? No; upon a moment's reflection, it would be depressing as fuck; but what if we went there anyway. The next 15 years would be defined by entertainment megacorps slowly milking that idea bit by bit, when vapor had already explored every conceptual nook and corner of the nostalgia-space within 6 months of its arrival. Punk has struggled with being dead since at least half of its existence, but vaporwave was born dead; it's an undead genre from the start, zombies drifting blankly at the bankrupt mall they had only ever seen on TV.