The story of vaporwave

32:56And it makes you think about all the good things that you felt without really asking any questions about that at all. And Vapewave is much more cynical. Not everyone is political. Not everyone is making a really distinct statement. But Vaporwave is much more willing to examine things from a critical perspective and say, no, that was bullshit. Like, you know, that was what we were told at the time. And we now kind of see it for what it is. And you kind of the throwaway nature of the way a major corporation label will just discard music and delete it. Well, we can find it on YouTube and we can chop it up and loop it and make our own version.

33:29And everything is just plastic and throwaway to you. But we can kind of subvert that in an artistic statement. Where you fit on that kind of line of how seriously you take it will depend. But there's the potential and certainly a lot of artists that really do approach it from a more critical perspective. Yeah, that was my question we were going to ask. How much of this is nostalgia and how much of this is irony slash critique? Yeah, I mean, we spoke to 50 plus people and everyone had their own take on it. We spoke to loads of people who told us that they were just messing around with loops and that they were just having fun.

34:04and definitely for people like Christ who runs Business Casual, they came directly from YouTube poops and a lot of people's main interaction with Ape Wave at the time would have been meme culture. So you can't detach entirely irony and kind of jokes and being sarcastic with it. But definitely there were also a lot of people who felt that just the very act of stealing an MP3 and releasing it is a subversive act in and of itself. Yeah, and I'd subscribe to that as well. I think you go back to that 2014-15 period and, you know, Simpsons Wave was born. That, you could argue, is a catalyst of the movement at the time where it became a joke, a parody of itself.

34:45But that had its own value and merit. It was done with love. It was done to entertain. It was done with this. But it was also a parody of a previous time. But definitely, if you look at those forums and you see the sentiment of the time, I think it's just a voice trying to find itself. And, you know, this generation's just grown up on the internet, not knowing what it's like to not have internet, not knowing what it's like to not have information at your fingertips. A lot of it's just playing around, having a laugh with your mates, going a bit too far, making mistakes. And I think out of where the thread I was going there is that's where you saw Dream Catalog, isn't it?

35:21That's where you saw the moment where there was actually people who wanted to put a line in the sand and say, no, we think it should be this. and that of course created a lovely moment where people were able to reflect and go well no actually it's this so i don't think until that time there was so much introspective i think it was more of a going with the flow do you think that's fair to say vinnie and then there became these catalyst moments of actually what are we doing here what is this going to be yeah what was the dream catalog for people who aren't familiar what was the you mean the rolling stone article yeah so dream Dream Catalog maybe and HKE, the artist behind Dream Catalog, had an approach to Vaporwave.

36:00I think that where he thought that it could be more than just a joke or more than just maybe not even a joke, maybe more considered than just looping a track from the 80s. There are other ways to create and evoke these feelings. And we can do this making a bit more effort on a production point of view. And I think they drew the line in the sand or tried to make it something slightly different. and that's where you saw the emergence of dream punk and stuff. And the same with the Adam Harper article, isn't it? It's those couple of catalyst moments where people are questioning or critiquing what it is.

36:32I think the Adam Harper article is really important on this. It is, isn't it? Because a lot of the biggest arguments around what Vaporwave is and what it's trying to do would have come about after Adam Harper wrote that article for Dummy Magazine where he's talking about hyper-capitalism and accelerationism and all these lofty concepts, which he's well placed to do as a critic. And there's certainly a value in viewing it that way, whether your intention as an artist is to make those statements or not. But it would have suddenly introduced hundreds of thousands, maybe more eyes to what Vaporwave was and led people to discover it through that article.

37:11And the first time you were introduced to something, that often becomes quite definitive in establishing your truth. And so I think you started to see a lot more arguments in subreddits and online about, well, no, this can't be fun. St. Pepp's just messing around. He's not taking it seriously. This is supposed to be a statement on this and that. And you had the whole rope-a-wave argument where they were basically saying these are just bros making tunes and trying to be cool. And they're not taking it seriously. And we shouldn't take them seriously. And there were definitely big chasms in the scene as early as that.

37:42I was just going to say, but at the same time, you've got these lovely little friend groups starting on Facebook. I mean, it started as a Ferraro fan club, didn't it? And they're starting to just share music. They're playing with different sounds, being inspired by whoever, whatever, and then they find Turntable FM. And it's like, oh, okay, here's a place where we can listen to music collectively. And, you know, all coming back to that democratization of systems and networks and how we can really easily communicate and share things very quickly. Who weren't thinking about capitalism, who weren't thinking about this or that.

38:13They were just having some fun in Fruity Loops, sampling some old music that their parents would have shown them or an advert that they'd heard. But I think that's kind of the point I was making is that in the early days, almost everyone who was sharing and enjoying and consuming this music would have been another person who was making it. And if Dummy Magazine publishes an article and suddenly you've got tens of thousands of people reading that article, you've suddenly got more fans than you've got practitioners for the first time. And so if they come into it with a view on it and start sort of, I'm not trying to imply that everyone was arguing, but there were certainly debates and discussions about what it was meant to be.

38:49And that nature of what Vaporwave was became less about being a very small community of people who were sharing music on Turntable FM and Tiny Chat and much more of something that's now it's seeped out into kind of wider culture and people are engaging with it for the first time. yeah i i was really surprised watching the film about how upset people were about this adam harper article and upset with like adam harper saying that it was there's something very political to this music yeah i was like isn't that kind of like the pinnacle of success like inspiring like one of the greatest living british music writers to write something like this and why were they so allergic to this like political patina and then I also thought about how if you look forward in music after this to like the mid to late 2010s everything becomes politicized and that just becomes part of how most artists are operating so I don't know if that was just a throwback to like a period in history where artists didn't like being called political or what what do you think was going on I think what George in particular I was gonna say this yeah yeah in And George, because George, you know, that bothers me.

40:01I'm offended. The fact that young people, not the fact that they were young, but the fact that people who weren't even listening to Vaporwave at the time have discovered it through this article that's had such a big reach. And now they're telling him that what he does isn't Vaporwave. But he's like, no, I've been here since the start. I'm kind of well-placed. Like maybe you have a different relationship with it, but don't tell me that I'm not Vaporwave. And don't be judgmental on people who've been here since the start, because we maybe had a slightly different perspective. It's definitely valid to say that Vaporwave is political, purely for the reasons we outlined before, you know, whether it is just taking a sample, chopping it up and not getting permission.

40:38That is a political or subversive statement against mainstream music culture. And you can go much further than it with that if that's your intent. But I think the thing that probably pissed people off the most, especially George, would have been the fact that it suddenly led to people telling him that what he was doing wasn't Vaporwave. And just to clarify for folks who are listening who might not have seen the doc yet, we're talking about George Clanton, the artist and founder of 100 % Electronica, the label. And all these interlopers suddenly coming in and maybe misunderstanding it, which is funny, also kind of quaint when you think about music culture just a few years later leading to the present where you don't find that many scenes that are like, we don't want interlopers.

41:20like everyone seems generally very interested in getting as many people to listen to their music as possible but that again feels almost like out of noise culture to me yeah i know i know what you're saying it's like people didn't like certain sub genres of jungle and like rave when they got too mainstream over here and there's always a touch of that kind of you feel a bit sad when protective as well aren't you protective yeah that's a really that's a much better word but But then I don't, without dwelling on George too much, and I can't really speak for him, but we did speak to him for a while on this subject.

41:53And it felt more like he was just annoyed because people were telling him that what he was doing wasn't real. I don't think he had a problem with more people coming in. I never got that impression. And if you look at the way 100 % electronica approaches things, they've certainly tried to take the music to as many people as possible. So they do want interlopers. They do want more people. it's probably just kind of the direct personal feelings that they had when it was such a controversial subject that article comes out and maybe a few other things where people are ascribing these notions of anti-capitalism if that wasn't your viewpoint that's going to feel a little bit of a challenge i suppose he had an interesting quote in the documentary where he said it's not anti-capitalist it's anti-corporate or that was how he defined his own music yeah and i think that that kind of speaks to all that stuff that we were saying about not getting permission for samples and maybe not making a broader brush political statement with your music, but being quite subversive in the process behind it and being underground.

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44:08old to inhabit rather than just a sound to listen to i'm not sure how helpful it is to stay in the generals i think we need to look at each case from mall soft to dream punk and unpack the intent probably of each art but yes i think instantly recognizable um cool it's appealing i think that what we heard from people about this idea that vaporwave was kind of the return of concept albums and selling something like a broader like idea and a story which the art was essential and integral to more than any other genre that had been around for for quite some time and i think that that is maybe why the art is so important so floral shop conveys a certain feeling like news at 11 the cover art that you see there that's telling a story that is essential to the context of that album which for people who don't know is an idea that 9-11 never happened you know that we could kind of go back to a time before this horrific moment in history occurred and the the towers are still there and every sample cuts off at an exact moment just before you go to the news where this thing this terrible thing that we all experienced all over the world happened i think that the visual and the music and this idea of tying together a broader concept is really important in a way that not a lot of genres are like where the art is is an important way of selling up an album maybe but is less central to the concept and telling of the story itself i think i think that's one of the best examples and i think where it gets tricky is because it's expanded so greatly it's hard to just simply say oh it's because of this this and this i'm trying to think you know you've got mesh doing dream sequence where it's created a whole vhs and nailed a style down.

45:53And then you think of haircuts for men, you know, that artwork was iconic. And then there's a lot of in between. So I think there were definitely pioneers who created a style and the obvious one is Floral Shop and there was a lot of copying. So I do think it comes down to being recognizable. So you have your pastels, you have kind of a consistency. Okay, this is Vaporwave. We've got the kanjis, you know, it's not just about the visual artwork. It's about how the art looks on a MP3 player because you're incorporating kanjis into it. Now, what is that about? And we're playing into anonymity. It's so much more than just the image.

46:28Well, it's about, it's not just that it's like recognizable within the world that it moves in, but it's recognizable to people's past experiences, to the visual culture that it's referencing, that folks are consuming a shared touchstone, perhaps. But it's also about being completely unrecognizable, isn't it? Right, yes. It's about being, it's a juxtaposition. It's like, OK, this is familiar, but it's not. It's completely not what you expect. You know, you put a picture of a nice pastel shaded album on, you're not expecting 10 minutes of a glitch repeating. Are you saying, do we think it became so popular because of that integral connection between visual and sound?

47:10Yeah, the fact that the visuals and the sound can't be cleaved from one another. I'm curious to hear more about what function you think the aesthetics served in it. I'd say probably, well, Vincent, if you want to think about your answer, I'd say yes, when you reach that meme culture stage and we really had, you know, the vectroid artwork being 4chan the hell out of and it became, okay, the bust. We got this, we got this, we got that. Those uniform standards became much more widespread and accepted as a familiar face. Then I think that became the repetition. The memetic replication of these images.

47:46and florishop right there is is really that like that was the template both musically and visually everyone i think so right and that's where the color scheme really comes from perhaps um yeah and maybe maybe there is something about it as a subversive visual art form as much as is a subversive musical form in that you're taking bits of this and you're taking bits of that you're playing on all of this corporate ideology but at the same time it's like you said i think Chris there's also a lot of anonymity within there people don't want to be discovered for who they are because they are stealing music effectively they're stealing these corporate logos from the likes of Pepsi and Nike and and McDonald's and there's an anonymity that's there that's self-protective and also kind of hiding from the idea that this might get bigger than it is at that time but it goes beyond that though doesn't it from that moment because then we step into that merch world and actually it's that because the two are linked then cassettes became appealing you're like what i can buy a cassette of this or i can buy a a random format and you're like oh okay so this looks great i do like the sound it's a collector's item and then we're playing into a whole new world and i think shima really kind of touches that you know where we've gone from an ironic take on capitalism consumerism and now oh wait there now we're actually getting into that again and what did he say was the quote is so funny with buying all this he schlock that our parents were kind of hooked into buying when they were younger yeah it's the hardest question that you've asked to answer because on the one hand you can you can say that you know this is an immersive art form where the the art and the music are a marriage uh not just of convenience like as in they're part of telling the story and that felt like a return to concept albums and you You could give loads of examples of that.

49:40But then there is also the kind of throwaway aspect of stuff like Floral Shop, which just replicated, replicated, replicated, and is almost just like a piss take in a way. It's just a joke, an internet joke, but it's visually recognizable and people learn to love it and recognize it and it helps them to find other music that they like. So you can kind of approach it in several different ways. You can understand it, but it takes ages to understand. And just when you think you've got a grip on what Vaporwave is, it changes again. So Skeleton Lipstick took Floral Shop as a specific example and broke down what's on the cover.

50:15What are you seeing there? You're seeing the Twin Towers before they fell. You're seeing this helium bust. You're seeing these ideas of institutional certainty that you think are going to be there forever. Or you go through your life expecting to be permanent. And then suddenly, nope, they're taken away. and with this art form what he was making the point that you're trying to play around with established truth and certainty and subvert it and i'm gonna take your truth and make it clip art that was it wasn't it i'll take it i fucking love that so much and i guess maybe it's also kind of as simple as like the sound of vaporwave is generally sourced from visual media specifically that's fair and so you can't necessarily have the music i mean you could and you do the music on its own but even just listening to the music on its own it still conjures images you know and maybe that's why it feels like such an aesthetic genre because it inherently is perhaps yeah and the places where it emerged people discovered it through tumblr and they discovered it through flickr and images and gifs and you know here come that boy and many other kind of you know like gifs and clips that were thrown around on the internet at a time when it was just being shared as something through.

51:26I mean, it really did explode visually as much as it did musically. Totally. It's as much problematizing the trajectory of mass media as it is anything else, I think. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a good point. I definitely see like a line from what they're doing, not just to like the sort of aesthetics wiki like tiktok aesthetics thing of like the early 2020s but also to certain like almost like nft culture and certain kinds of like crypto communities where there'll be like a group of people who sort of like all identify themselves by sharing the same iconography and like posting it over and over again i wonder if that came a little bit from vaporwave or something there's like sort of like more um counterculture or did that come from meme culture as well it came from meme cult it's just how separable are these things like this these are phenomenons that occurred maybe in the early days of the internet and that in itself makes this the ultimate genre of its time yeah like i don't think it could exist in the way it has without being a product of its time both in the way you make it and in the way it expanded and in the way that it was possible for people from anywhere in the world to be a part of it when every other underground movement that had ever existed and even those like hauntology perhaps and earlier than that that had an approach to like plunder phonics and similar kind whether art or music you know they needed a geographical place to start they needed to happen in a bar in london or in new york or somewhere and then to expand outwards but now you could have one person in a village in australia engaging just as actively as someone in japan or america or london or anywhere just needed an internet connection in a laptop that was it you weren't competing for space at nightclubs and bars to get your music heard and shared you could just do it all yourself as whitewoods says in the film it was a different time there were no rules i love that he's the wise sage of the film isn't he oh yeah him and zero yeah and so you touched on this a little bit already but why was anonymity so central to the scene i think the answer that we got to as to why anonymity was such a big factor for people in the early days at least was because it was what everyone else was doing you know people were using pseudonyms to engage in chat rooms in early internet communities and so it kind of started that way but then there's other factors as the music becomes heard by more people people are making maybe simultaneously an aesthetic choice to hide their true identity and not make it about them but make it more about the art that they're sharing but at the same time there's also an element of self-protection you know and this idea of not being discoverable so that if you get caught sampling Michael Jackson or Diana Ross, there's really no way of finding you and there being any consequences for that.

54:10It might be a protective move on that part. It's only in the last decade that there's been this real kind of personal identity online, you know, manifesting worldwide. I remember going back to AIME or even just setting up your first email. You weren't putting your real name. You're coming up with something creative. You know, there's a flourish, there's a sense of play. And I think those early days pre-Facebook, you know, where that started actually, you know, this is your online identity. So we don't explore that a lot. But I think there was a rejection of that to stick with that playfulness, that artistic sense that, no, we're going to be whoever we want to be.

54:46expanding what chris was saying there the one thing that did come across when we were talking about vaporwave and community was that you know for a lot of people they couldn't find a home in other scenes they didn't feel like they fitted in with more mainstream trends and cultures and vaporwave was like a home for people you know the weird and wonderful the wacky very different people who were able to be themselves in a way that they might not initially be able to be face to face in a social environment vaporwave as a community inherently being an online thing at that time at at least, gave people an opportunity to sort of find a tribe.

55:19I think anonymity might have been, made it easier for people to do that. And we also spoke to female artists who really felt like they were much more likely to be judged. They just wanted their music to be judged. And there were a handful of people who said the same kind of thing. There's a judgment that comes with putting yourself out there. And so anonymity makes it very much easier for you to express yourself and be brave enough to release music and share your art without fearing that something like, you know, your personal appearance or identity or where you're from. Your shade of lipstick.

55:49Or just where you're from and what, you know, like you can really just put the art out there and let it stand for itself. And, you know, the trans routes to this movement, obviously you think of Ramona straight away and that's its own story. But this is a time where that wide acceptance of alternative, I think, was finding its voice. It was about the music. It wasn't about sexual identity. It wasn't about gender. You know, it was very much making friends. In a safe space. Yeah. And it's very difficult. But look, I'm a white man of a certain age from Britain, and that comes with its own kind of inherent biases and lived experience that's not able to fully articulate a lot of these things.

56:30part from the people when we discussed gender wasn't it that it was like okay that really makes sense like we get the fun part and but then when people are sharing our stories about how they're discriminated against you know we haven't got to deal with that and and that felt like okay that makes it even more important and that makes it into the film when lux talks about that experience of people suddenly finding out that luxury elites a girl and how that suddenly ends up with people sending weird dms and everyone wants to know what she looks like and stuff i mean that's not acceptable in any form but in online culture when you're in a scene where people are able to sort of be anonymous you're less likely to encounter that and it becomes just more of a safe fun creative space it shouldn't have to be like that but that's the world and it's the internet and just to answer the question as well i think anonymity creates wonder it creates intrigue aside from those other, you know, more serious reasons.

57:26When you see kanji, it's a completely different language. Ooh, what is that? Or you see an odd object in a utopian dreamscape with pastel colors and you've got an artist named it. Or telepath is probably a good example of anonymity, isn't it? He performed live with a mask on. It creates intrigue, wonder, becomes a selling point, if you will, without buying it. It's interesting because the anonymity thing reminds me of some of the ideas, values associated with an earlier era of the internet, like web one utopianism of like, oh, we can escape our earthly existences and be whoever we want online.

58:08And then I think about also, you know, there's obviously an aspect of like, they were using these uncleared samples, and anonymity affords you a bit of protection. I also think about how probably a lot of these people by virtue of their age grew up in the era of file sharing um which was also associated with an ideology of like all music should be free yeah which i think came from like the europeans uh the napster era and then this genre emerges right around the time when that sort of like commons of the internet is being closed off by streaming like the rise of streaming so it goes from like this free-for-all to things sort of being like tamped down and then Corporatism.

58:51Yeah. Yeah. And I can see how this would emerge as a response to that. I'm curious, like as vaporwave continues along the decade, did that sort of like anti-corporate? Well, it always seems like it was anti-corporate, but how did it like economically evolve? Like there's this narrative about how like people weren't selling stuff. And then you talked about how they actually did eventually become very interested in physical media. and so I'm curious how that evolved. I think Bandcamp is a good starting point there because previously the genre had basically been shared in like chat rooms and via Mediafire or free downloads and to a point that Bandcamp made you able to share stuff for free.

59:36I mean, from a distribution point of view, that time you didn't need a label, you didn't need anything, you could just log in and distribute your music and you could give downloads codes away for free on Bandcamp even but at a certain point you'd run out of them and so you'd have to have and name your price and there were a couple of people I spoke to who said that really it was it's kind of increasing popularity and the fact that people were rapidly running out of free downloads that they could use that led people to introduce the kind of pay the bare minimum to continue to download this and I don't know like with any genre maybe that kind of archival thing I mean tapes don't make a lot of money and even in punk you know even if you're anti-capitalist you still have petty capital petty capitalism you know you still have very small things that are exchanged for a reasonable price to help you subside you know to to help subsidize your your living it doesn't mean that you're you know suddenly running a sony style enterprise because you've released 50 tapes on a vape wave label and i think that maybe it got to a point when a thousand records were selling out in a couple of minutes and that happens quite quickly because the number of people listening to vape wave is growing people are stuck they start collecting they don't know how or when to stop more and more of these bona fide classics from the earlier are being repackaged in tape form and then vinyl and so it becomes like a collector's mentality like economically yeah it perhaps is stepping away from those early days but i'm not sure it necessarily ever subverts the original intent because you're not talking about a lot of money here you're talking about a handful of people being able to spend all of their time working on music that's my personal take on it we spoke to a few people who maybe felt that it lost some of its humble kind of origins when it was more about media sharing for free but by and large I think a lot of the artists and fans kind of feel like you know being able to earn a few pounds or dollars whatever to to spend more time creating art without pressure I think is a is a good thing it's not like anyone's getting super rich off it I know that they talk later in the film about how on the DSPs vaporwave started becoming a category or a playlist and on um that on YouTube vaporwave stuff seemed to have sort of a be algorithmically favored or something but i'm curious like how did they make the transition from you know where they started to like can this music actually go on dsps or how that's a really good question and i'm one of the people vapor we spoke to and he said that exact thing chris didn't he well i just i was thinking of skeleton lipstick's response that again we didn't include because it didn't quite fit but it's like fuck copyright what they're gonna do but that doesn't answer your question which systems change is what we need but if we are talking about conforming to the current systems and models um then it's original composition isn't it so george for example simple as that moved away from doing music as esprit and became more focused on his project as george clanton which is less reliant on samples there are still a few in there but it's much less reliant on that and like many artists i think dan mason's another good example of someone who started using solely original composition runners club themselves they don't sample they sample themselves they record music and then sample their music back and create the same kind of end result um and jeff was more explicit when we spoke to him vaporer said that it was a conscious decision to move away from sample based music because he wanted to be able to upload the music to spotify without fear of recriminations down the line and especially when spotify created that playlist i imagine for a while people were really waiting to see what would happen you know is this going to lead to a lot of people receiving kind of takedown notices and legal threats and for for the most part it hasn't happened and maybe it's because algorithmically, financially, they don't really see much value in shutting down what is a cottage industry by their standards and people are making a few quid here and there making art and it doesn't it's just not worth the time and the hassle we haven't really in the entire history of this genre had too many examples of actual legal problems i know shima talks about dream i was gonna say dream catalog that was that and that stood out to me and and they said that some of their you know when when that rolling stone magazine article happened um there's obviously all these eyes are suddenly on their music and people are like okay you've not got permission to use this in the same way as many people found out a hard way in in the 90s and the 80s what happens if you don't make the effort to clear samples and you do make money it can be quite consequential it can ruin careers it can make you you know poor but by and large there just haven't been that many cases of people haven't had that yet and so it's kind of been a wait and see but we have dream catalog they got the story was as rick counted in the documentary they got a rolling stone mention or it wasn't even like a full article on them they were well it was like top 10 albums of the year artists to watch out for and i think there there is like an they did an interview and there's quotes within that that attributed to david and and maybe um telepath as well hke and telepath alias of 2814 but obviously that was a big deal for yeah it had a bit of meat on it and it was a big like you know public visibility moment for the genre and then he took they talk about how what is the gender of the person who talks about it i can't there it's a he shima yeah and then um he talks about how the it became like it got on the um radar of the major labels and then they all like it was like a feeding frenzy maybe that's too strong a term but they all just like what's that went after the label they had legal on a legal on our ass yeah like they they got hit with all these um complaints take down notices and then it ended up they had to delete the entire catalog i mean i should make a point of saying at this point that some people dispute that version of the story and that and that there's there's an there's an argument from some people at that time there was a big division you know hke um he had a feeling that vaporwave had lost its way and that it wasn't just dead because um we had to stop doing things the way we were doing or we're going to end up all getting sued i don't think you know he on a broader sense felt like the genre genre was turning into a joke um and that it was completely failed in all of its early ambitions and was going nowhere culturally.

1:06:34So he created Hard Vapor, which was a really kind of edgy way to say, like, to hell with everything that I've been a part of. And some people argue that he just took those albums down because he didn't want to be associated with the genre anymore. A better example of what you're saying, though, here is perhaps what St. Pepsi said to us, which was that he had a call. basically he had an email from pepsi and his manager when he'd signed to car park records his manager was approached by pepsi and said okay we need to have a chat about the fact that you're using this name saint pepsi without our permission and in a lot of cases you're using the iconography we didn't use the anecdote in the film because it's quite long but essentially what that boiled down to was them saying you can finish this tour because you've already put posters and sold tickets but you need to stop using that name and so he had to rebrand himself as skyless bence not because he was rejecting or moving on from vape wave but because he was told he had to drop the name pepsi or he would you know he couldn't be on a label and make money out of this whilst kind of blatantly taking that copyright um and just using it so there are some examples of people falling into trouble because of this i just think that when kind of was it the epic takeover of band camp and with all these playlists coming up on spotify and apple radio i think people feared that we would see another wave of that and it would be more serious because these days a lot of it's done automatically these detections yeah so far like you know so far from where i stand and we can move on for this from where i stand the um and the research i've done the environment maybe it's there's something about the way that these compositions are constructed and slowed down that it gets like it's not getting fly i don't know maybe it's certain platforms and not others but from where I stand the um the environment of um you know labels and also like financial entities take kind of um looking to buy up catalog like music catalog and then squeeze as much money as they can out of it is becoming it's like gotten more and more intense like there's all these articles about these you know private equity style companies that buy up you know companies but buy up an artist's uh repertoire and then you know they exist just to sort of passively find ways to squeeze revenue out of everything which is almost the same as the smiley corporation that was set up because i think the smiley face without going too far off on a tangent was created as a gift to make people feel a little bit better about being made redundant so they were all given in these badges with a smiley face and the designer wanted it to be free and free of copyright and then eventually someone set up the smiley corporation literally to copyright it and then aggressively sue anyone and everyone that uses the word in association with the smiley face and that happens now you can only license that i found this out the hard way someone who worked for me had this because they were selling a smiley face related product on etsy but you know wow no away hyper commodification he was part of a list of a thousand people who were basically joint sued in america and he'd probably made 15 20 pounds out of it but it's probably a subject for a wider conversation about copyright but yeah yeah so we've talked a lot about how this scene obviously was you know intentionally anonymous very ephemeral scattered across platforms you guys have both mentioned several times of you know it's just how many sub genres or different aspects there are how difficult it is to pin down tell us a little bit about what were the challenges of capturing a movement and subculture that was pretty much deliberately decentralized and and how did you go about doing so what were the challenges where to begin well i mean the obvious challenge was the travel restrictions, COVID, when we launched the film and the aesthetic vision for the film.

1:10:43We knew we didn't want to, albeit an internet-born genre, we didn't want to make the film on the internet. We felt, given the way that we raised crowdfunded, that there was an element that people wanted to see contributors, people wanted to see real people on screen, And we'd had Econ 1, we'd had Econ 2 at that point. And it became clear as Econ 3 was announced that that would be our best opportunity to get as many people within budget in a respected place in time. And while we could travel to America, I would go off to different parts of the country independently because of the budget. and then we would meet the team again in Los Angeles to pick up even more visitors, contributors.

1:11:38So that was the main challenge, the logistics, the finance and the creative vision kind of how do we not make too many compromises because I think we went into the project. I wanted to create ethereal worlds for everybody and have this as the most unique documentary known to man. you have never seen anything like this it's going to be revolutionary just like vaporwave and of course the compromises come um the reality of getting this many people to share their thoughts and you know these are real people these aren't performers they're not actors so you know that in itself requires a lot of time and so i think we did our best to make sure that every venue we visited was aesthetic and if it wasn't we would create sets build sets and try and make each individual location personal to their music and their style as opposed to trying to pin them to a location it was very much pinned to their aesthetic and I think we did that pretty well and those are kind of practical roadblocks and challenges we had to overcome but I think maybe from the conceptual standpoint as well it's a difficult story to tell because um a lot of it happened in very small chats chat groups that don't exist anymore how do you get people to understand and feel immersed in this idea of uh of an spf 420 show that's being hosted on tiny's chat how do you kind of show the stuff that is no longer possible to see like we couldn't even find the group xerox fax machine sorry we couldn't even find it didn't we then well we couldn't even find xerox fax machine sorry we couldn't even find xerox fax machine superheroes which is almost impossible to say it was one of the early facebook groups because it just wasn't available to us so it's kind of the challenge of taking you to an aesthetic time and place in an interesting and immersive way that in and of itself is hard but also when people don't agree on a definition um there's a decade of time to cover in which the music has changed fundamentally from being an online only thing to being a url thing um it's grown and so there's all these conversations and discussions that we had to have about the changing ideals of it and whether it was attempting to become mainstream um and there were just so many kind of angles that we could have discussed getting it down into two hours even like the length of it to some people probably think it's quite long we could have gone on for another hour and not told the whole story and that was it the real challenge the biggest challenge was what we could not include like what had to be in the story what had to be part of the story and the fact that we didn't want to have a narrator because we didn't want to impose our own bias we were only able to use uh the product of the contributions that we had so the interviews that we did so the biggest weakness in the end would have been whether we asked the right questions at a certain time and whether the takes be usable so all of those things become factors um but i think it is that the hardest thing is to tell a story that people feel that they can trust as being true to how they view vaporwave and this is a genre that people have absolutely fallen in love with and everyone has a different relationship with it so i think we had to kind of we did a few diligence making everyone happy yeah yeah and making sure that the foundational research was in place instead of just going off to film um which i did make it sound like that is what we did you know we spoke to so many people on zoom so many people who didn't make it into the film and making sure that the foundations were there you know there's eight associate producers so you know there was a lot of talking and we had time to talk fortunately but making sure that we weren't sucked into the in crowd if you like conversations or caught in the loop of insular direction instead letting ourselves go on these tangents you know cover the subjects that didn't make it in you know hours and hours of footage that just it doesn't work as an entertaining and interesting piece of film albeit each story has its own value, it has its own interest.

1:16:03So I think the challenge and what has taken so long is both me and Enzo sitting at this computer, wrangling it, wrangling it to the absolute minute detail and doing justice to the time and effort and love that has been given to us from the community. Yeah. I mean, you look at the comments on YouTube and you can see that I think we're really proud of how it's been received we feel really good about it in the end we overcame a lot of those challenges and we're proud of the end result we're not under any illusions that it's the perfect conclusive and only way of telling the story it's the definitive documentary on vaporwave can we use that word but if you look at the comments you'd see a handful of people saying why wasn't this included why weren't they interviewed and it we had we you can only go so far um and so we've had to make compromises um but try and stay as true as possible to the original intention and tell a story that's as true for as many people as it possibly can be you're never going to make everybody no happy or feel like their side exact side of the story was so true you guys already kind of went above and beyond having what is it more than 50 interviews or contributors to it and like chris said all the other people that we spoke to that was part of that you know when lockdown suddenly happened we literally did the crowdfund a few weeks before lockdown was announced the first time and we'd planned to go to Canada to do filming at this show I think it was called um aesthetic aesthetica there was a show that was being held in Toronto I think anyway and we're gonna go and start filming there and then go to the next econ when that happened and we couldn't do anything for two years and so we spoke to a ton tons of people we did written interviews as well so there's a lot a lot there and we'll make it into the book i should mention the book q a's yeah you should plug the book that's a classic so so the way we approached it obviously a lot of stuff and a lot of people that we spoke to didn't make it into the final cut but there's so much stuff that you could do with a book like a coffee table style book where it's told in the same way through the voices the people that we interviewed but it allows us where we've cut people down or where we've missed stuff out that was great but didn't fit into the story as it kind of emerged that stuff can all come back in and we can kind of expand outwards a bit more and go a bit deeper and it'll also give us a chance where we feel like maybe taking on feedback since the film's come out that we could have gone a bit further into the x or y we can then reach out to a few more people and maybe touch on some of those those gaps there are gaps in every story i think we've got to be able to accept that yeah yeah i I don't accept that.

1:18:47It's the definitive documentary. So that's officially in the works? Oh, it's been in the works all along. Oh, amazing. We had to approach this almost like in the way you'd approach a dissertation, transcribe all the interviews, have a very boring spreadsheet, which is sorted by subjects so that I can kind of find stuff when we're looking at a specific idea. Of course, yeah. It just gave us the idea that there's so much more that could be done with this. Yeah. um i'm curious where do you guys see vapor waves influence extending today like do you see any subcultures or genres as as heirs to vaporwave directly in terms of genres that it's inspired i mean vaporwave has always been a collective kind of basket of cousin drummers almost if you will you know like all these different sounds and i think that one of the things that's really emerged in the last couple of years has been slushwave which i think the people who are into slushwave really see it kind of as its own distinct genre now and that is very much if you look at the if you look at band camp that that's emerged as a really um sorry slushwave if you look at band camp uh for example has really blown up with artists like desert sand feels warm at night and others like taking this different approach and then the whole fruit to get aero um kind of movement liminal spaces um barber beats i mean there are they might you might argue that they're all already directly related to vaporwave but they kind of seem to be expanding outwards into their own thing like ps1 jungle pizza hotline sure who was making it maybe and it got pulled into the vaporwave aesthetic but there's a wider movement of modern uh jungle which is i use the word modern but it's very much looking back on that kind of era of late night gaming after a rave like the ps1 era of um of music as a soundtrack so those kind of things are really blowing up but i think like from a more mainstream perspective you can see vaporwave everywhere you could see it in you know products released by nike and adidas and they've got overtly vaporwave um collections even like Louis Vuitton and the famous PVC backpack that came out.

1:21:03That was blatantly a ripoff of Vaporwave. You could see Arizona iced tea tie-ins everywhere with the kind of the neon green and the palm trees and all that stuff. And then there's Lopatain, who's producing for The Weeknd and curated the Super Bowl halftime show, music for Uncut Gems. Even going back as far as Rihanna appearing on Saturday Night Live, that was... C-Punk Azealia Isn't that Azealia Banks? You think that's C-Punk, do you? Alright Wasn't the Rihanna thing called C-Punk? Or maybe I'm thinking of something different There was like the C-Punk Yeah And she was riding on one, wasn't she?

1:21:41Yeah, exactly That was in the film at one point Yeah, it was And I think you're Now you point that out I think that was one of the reasons Why we pulled that out Is because we felt like It wasn't necessarily Explicitly Vaporwave But all those things Aren't airs of Vaporwave, are they? They still fall into Vaporwave nostalgia is being commodified more than ever. What musically is after? Is that where you're going with this? I'm not going anywhere. I'm just curious, like, where... I mean, I think you know as music critics. You definitely know. I think the zeitgeist... It feels like the zeitgeist has shifted a bit more towards...

1:22:18back from electronic sub-genres to rock in the last couple of years um i do see something vaporwave-ish though in like aesthetic cultures associated with underground musical movements and especially like the gen z uh fascination with uh like old forms of like cassette tapes and flip phones flip phones and uh you know not cdjs walkmen and sharing things via usb like kind of like be when you have the part in the film where you talk about like the physical media element and that the physical art objects that were being sold by people in the vaporwave community were often harping on these like older modes of technology like i see that um yeah and i think that vanitas makes a really point about how maybe people of a younger generation feel like having a phone that does a thousand things is quite intense and so there's a little bit of a movement i've seen online for people who are looking for basically just simple phones that are just phones and maybe text messaging because we're being constantly bombarded with content in a way that's probably quite alienating and tiring to people who don't remember what it was like before and maybe don't even think about switching off and I can't speak for them yeah there's something in the idea of everything being digital you don't own it you can't hold it and you can have a much more direct relationship with something especially art if you can physically touch it and see it in the real world you know yeah I think yeah Enzo you mentioned liminal space like I definitely see that even though that's maybe more of an aesthetic movement than a music genre but i to me i feel like i'm like that's gen z's vaporwave you know um but like the sort of nostalgizing of like like old volvos and like here's what your suburban street looks like with a a hazy filter on it you know and like summer camp sounds kind of um but i also think it's sort of this is something emily and i talk a lot about on this show that you know there's a current there's sort of a spiritual like return to noise music that i think happening so even if more emergent genres um right now feel or more some of the more like exciting stuff bubbling up feels like more rock oriented it feels like a lot of it is sort of rooted in noise and in that pull towards analog technology analog forms of media consumption and i think maybe that that could be kind of an air or a future forward iteration of sort of a lot of what the roots of vaporwave were yeah and i think we see that over here with like the return of jungle music and and i mean it's always been there but what what i'm seeing definitely is a lot of people who are making a big point of saying that we've used an amiga or an Atari and we're using Octomed, we're not using Logic.

1:25:37We're kind of forcing ourselves to operate within the constraints of the old technology that was a lot harder to use and to master. And that in itself has like, it creates a sound that you can recognize as being distinctly different to using digital only platforms and samples of a break, say, rather than throwing them through an Akai. Like those things, there's a nostalgia for forcing yourself to be limited by what's available to you you know 100 yeah yeah can i give one other example sorry go on chris that's because i say we're seeing a lot more ogs coming out of the woodwork realizing they can use social media and still have life beyond uh retirement aren't we you know got wu-tang's final tour uh we've got goldie london electricity representing you know i'm seeing a lot more dj zinc is to start it's a really interesting um real series so i think canada just announced their first album in many years as well did they really yeah so that's interesting maybe they felt like they've had enough of a rest and they want to get back in via vhs no less yeah yeah yeah i mean maybe things have changed but they haven't changed all that much and that we're still in this moment where music is sort of flattened out and a lot of artists are finding that their music I mean it may be a little different with boards of candida but a lot of the older legacy acts are finding that their stuff can randomly just like catch an algorithmic eddy and um blow up again and then sometimes they end up exploring enjoying more success now than doing a sort of like you know retrospective tour than they did at the beginning of their career I mean I'm definitely nostalgic for that I've posted in our nobody here group yesterday um massive attacks track I was like guys I need some new music I really want to hear something born from this feeling or this sound and you know something that makes you feel that good yeah just it hits the spot you know you've got that what was it unfinished symphony you know i just remember the feeling when that came out and you're watching on saturday morning charts tv i i just wanted to find the prodigy experience that was the one that that i used to look back to yeah prodigy you said yeah the first album experience that early really hardcore sound breakbeat they're having a huge moment now the prodigy they're back i feel like trip-hop and sort of those adjacent genres are all sort of re-infusing themselves this is kind of what graft and tanner was saying was about cycles of nostalgia and maybe at the time when vaporwave started everyone was sampling diana ross and 1980s kind of or you know that kind of period but as time moves on and younger people get into it you know we interviewed enrail who's much much younger than i am and he's nostalgic for early iphones whereas i was probably nostalgic for a time long before I had a mobile phone where you'd have to go to the phone box or you'd make a plan on a Wednesday where you'd meet up on Saturday and hope that they remembered.

1:28:42You know, like the world is different. And, you know, like we were probably at that point when Vaporwave was first coming out, those people were the last generation to be able to straddle both sides of that technological divide, which I think is interesting. What lessons might younger musicians be able to take away from the story of the Vaporwave movement, especially when it comes to building something of lasting value but outside of the corporate music industry why is their story still kind of inspiring well hopefully the confidence to take whatever they want to play and have fun and who knows what will come from it you know don't intentionally break the rules just be authentic and play because look what comes out of it i kind of feel like coming back to the point i made at the start which is about it helping you deal with your own relationship with nostalgia and how you process that kind of transition from being young into being an adult and we got a lot of that from people that we spoke to making the film you know the way your expectations for adult life really crash headfirst into reality when you reach adulthood and maybe kind of realize that the dreams you were sold were a lie or weren't necessarily open to everyone so you can repackage the things that make you feel a certain way about the past and kind of frame that frame of reference will continue to change.

1:30:00I think that will be there for any generation. So Vaporwave could continue forever, theoretically, if people wanted to continue to interpret the past in that way. I'd like them to be inspired to completely reject corporatism, replace the current mechanics of society and inspire change for others. That's what I desperately hope this film achieves. For me, the thing that I found inspiring about it was the idea that if you want to make art, you don't have to go into it and worry about making money. There are extrinsic rewards, or you don't have to worry about your face becoming plastered everywhere, that there are extrinsic rewards and pathways to really genuine community through making art that isn't aspiring to end up on a major indie label and then a major label.

1:30:50Just start something. If you feel it, start it, take it. This literally took people out of dark places. You could break it down to they were just sharing some MP3s on a file share program or just saying hello on Messenger and feeling like they had someone to talk to. It's so far reaching, but the essence of creation and art. And that community thing and this idea that it was like the promises of the internet being fulfilled at last, because, you know, the early utopian ideals of the internet were lost for a long way. And then suddenly, you know, what Vaporwave showed to a lot of people was that you can find a community online.

1:31:28It doesn't have to be big. You know, you're now able to just log on and share that with people. well Enzo and Chris thank you so much for taking the time where can people follow you follow your work obviously the doc is up on YouTube what's next oh yes everything's on my pet flamingo isn't it yeah so if people wanted like to download a proper like full HD version of it for the you know to keep for posterity and you know maybe even to just support then that that's available along with a lot of the music that's in the film. So we had a... It was a great sampler, yeah. Yeah, which was kind of part of the original crowdfund.

1:32:06And that's still on My Pet Flamingo as band camp. So you can just go to mypetflamingo.com.

1:32:15This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominick. To check out more, head to our sub stack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.