Vaporwave: The Aesthetic of a Generation

Everywhere I go on the internet I notice that there is a distinct sense of nostalgia and longing for an age past. Video games are adopting a “retro” look along with making easter-eggs or nods to either the previous titles in the series or another old game in the same genre that’s looked upon favorably by the audience. Movies, especially big franchises like Star Wars are cashing in on nostalgia as well, trying to imitate the style and plot of their previous films. Even music has become infected with nostalgia, with many people starting to listen to older songs and saying that our modern music is bad. Or as the title implied, the creation of vaporwave, a style that’s almost solely based on an exaggerated glorification of 80s or 90s American pop culture, but more on that later.

Obviously, companies have been using nostalgia as a selling point for quite a while now, but the sheer extent to which nostalgia has reached our collective culture hasn’t ever been seen before. You see, the nostalgia-based marketing usually was catered almost exclusively to older people, but today the younger generations are nostalgic (case in point: 90s kid memes). Even people who haven’t experienced the decade in question tend to have a distinct longing for it, with many children today wishing they were around to experience the 80s or 90s. Heck, even I wish I were around to witness the early 2000s and browse the internet in its infancy. Yet at the same time we’re ironic about it, we wish for the age long past while simultaneously satirizing it. We wish for a return to the good ol’ days while also realizing how ridiculous the concept of the good ol’ days actually is and making an ironic parody of it.

So what caused this sudden surge of nostalgia and irony? Well I believe it’s because of several things.

1. We have no core, unifying culture or set of values so we desperately latch on to a time when we did.
2. We have no real goal to fight for in our era.
3. Real-estate prices have become so high, our economy has become so unstable, entry level jobs spread so thinly and the ladder so hard to climb that there is almost no sense of progression or fulfillment in work. Ambition seems like a pointless endeavor, so we latch on to a time when it didn’t, when idealism wasn’t just a waste of energy.
4. Our cities are planned extremely poorly and filled with bland, ugly architecture. There is no beauty in our cities, our infrastructure is crumbling and traffic jams plague every street. Our suburbs all look like the same, ugly pieces of crap. There is no grandeur, magic or cool factor anymore, only bland, inoffensive-yet-oppressive bleakness as far as the eye can see.
5. Hedonism runs rampant, and just like all other things we get used to it so we want more and more, frying our brains in the process. Also at the first sign of trouble we instantly collapse as we never have been exposed to a true threat.We have never faced any struggle in our comforable, sheltered lives yet our biology necessitates that we crave it. We want competition, we want a good fight but we can’t get it.
6. The false god of cultural relativism and equality have been forced down our throats.We are trained from birth to believe that all cultures and peoples are equal and that there is no natural order or objective truth. Our decadent postmodern philosophies are based on the denial of hierarchy and competition yet we are inherently hierarchical and competitive as a species. We see the reality that some groups of people are simply not compatible with each other yet the faux intellectuals and mass media constantly tells us with a condescending smug grin the opposite while also contradicting themselves. A practical example of this is people saying “When Britain drew the borders in the Middle East, they forgot to account for the cultural differences between people, forcing them together and leading to the conflicts of today.” while also saying “Diversity is strength! It’s our vastly different cultures and ideals that make us good!”
7. Political correctness represses our voice in society and creates an environment of faux kindness where nobody is saying what they mean and people are too weak and sensitive to handle dissenting opinions, stifling open discussion and intellect. We are all forced to be nice to each other even when something is an obvious bad. We all have to live in fear that if we say the wrong thing, we will get fired from our job. We all have to live in fear of offending others. It is stifling us, slowly dripping us of the will to live.
8. The family structure has been destroyed, with things like single parenthood becoming more and more common  even though it has been shown across many different studies that single parents are objectively worse than a proper family. To add further insult to injury, due to economic instability, both parents have to work jobs and send their kids to daycare, which has also been shown to be bad for the development of children.
9. Thanks to the internet, people have realized the sheer absurdity of many hopes, dreams and ambitions.We realized how ridiculous so many ideas are so we choose to not be sincere at all. Sincerity and passion are seen as a farce. Picture very much related:

Sorry about it being a bit hard to read, for some reason I can’t resize it to be bigger. The text says: “The new generation floats above pop culture and advertisement in a state of constant irony. With the internet it really is very easy to avoid getting duped or buy into fantasies of wealth equating success or happiness. People just want to be “comfy” now. Music is dreamy and spectral, political engagement or sincerity are seen as embarrassing. They keyword is ‘disengage’. Passion is a farce.”

This leads to a culture of perpetual apathy and sadness masked in layers of well produced irony.Nobody cares about protecting the homeland, nobody cares about saving for the long term future, nobody has the emotional toughness or maturity to deal with crisis. Mankind gets reduced to primitive, amoral slugs crawling through life with no real vision for the future. This is the death of civilizations, the fall of society as we know it.

So how does vaporwave relate to all of this? Well it is the perfect representation of our dissatisfaction with society. It is simultaneously serious and satirical, it both an idealization and parody. It expresses what we are concerned with in our own unique style of doing so. It combines modern musical concepts such remixing and sampling with old jazz music, creating a hybrid of past and present. It is slowed down to give it a dreamy vibe, showing how we view a golden age as a distant fever dream, of how we are simply floating above it all, how we are asleep and in the dark. The aesthetic of vaporwave is based on an exaggerated version of 80s-90s sci-fi filters and cheese, a glorification of what was possibly the last real American golden age so far. It is occasionally distorted and meshed together, to further add to the longing and somewhat regretful atmosphere, a mourning for an age past. Finally, it is a combination of an older genre (jazz, lounge music, and funk) with newer electronic music, a perfect reflection of what society should be if it is to continue, a fusion of old traditions and modern science.

So I shall conclude with a series of vaporwave songs and artwork.