I was thinking of replying to this with just images of vaporwave stuff but that’d be pretty mean and completely unhelpful, so here’s a serious answer:
vaporwave is a music/art genre which is all about repurposed 80s/90s early digital art imagery and aesthetics. in particular there’s a lot of collage work involved—superimposing marble statues over blue skies, abstract backdrops with stereotypical “computer imagery,” etc. Like, this is probably the most iconic vaporwave image (it’s the cover of “Floral Shoppe” by MACINTOSH PLUS):
It’s kind of hard to describe if you don’t already know what it is, though. Like, I was born in 1989 so I feel like this kind of stuff taps exactly into my childhood: vague ideas of what “digital art” and “the future” were, dreaming of beautiful 1995 crystal malls and checkerboard floors. I still have memories of playing a very rudimentary 3D game (kind of like the hacking segments in Shadowrun, if you’re familiar with it) by accessing it secretly through Windows, somehow. I’m not sure if it ever actually existed, but maybe it did.
That’s vaporwave: the secret parts of your computer, the images you remember from growing up with Windows 3.1 and the intros of educational videos you used to watch in school, and later the crystal futurism of the Sega Saturn (that’s a big one for me), but they don’t hold together anymore. They’re just bits and pieces, like the head of a marble statue without a body.
This ended up being heavier than I thought. But That’s What Vaporwave Means to Me! It’s pretty important to me actually, because these floaty, ungrounded memories of mine resonate with other people. It’s kind of like “oh my god, I wasn’t dreaming it after all!! iT WAS REAL!!”
Anyway, vaporwave is also pretty funny though because of how non sequitur a lot of it seems. I love vaporwave, but I also really love making jokes about it. 420//DVD, etc.
I haven’t really talked much about the music side of it because I feel like I’m not really very music-critique-literate, if that makes sense. I will say that I listened to and downloaded FLORAL SHOPPE and NEW DREAMS LTD. before I even heard the term vaporwave, and I still like them a lot. (FLORAL SHOPPE is definitely my favorite though, it has this really moody late-night abandoned shopping mall feel and I love it so much)
