Digging Deeper: Vaporwave

 When I began researching Vaporwave, I quickly came to the realization that I was in way over my head, and I still feel like I only have a basic understanding of what it is. During the script-writing process, I had frequent flashbacks to my daunting college course on literary theory. I think that my struggle with both literary theory and Vaporwave stems from my immersion in the postmodern world, which has inexorably tainted my ability to understand and comprehend artistic movements in part because postmodernism has crushed most of them before they could begin. What made me excited about Vaporwave, however, is that it may be the first true art movement to come out of that mire. 

 I know, I've invoked the evil “P” word, so for those of you who who didn't grow up with an artistic background, let me give an extremely condensed background on postmodernism: through history, there have been groups of artists who develop theories and styles of art, and these movements have been granted their own names, often pompously ascribed by the artists themselves. Impressionists, for example, would paint paintings that had soft, blurred borders as a way of making the statement that the way we see and understand the world is subjective, among other high and lofty ideals. Surrealism, cubism, expressionism, and countless other movements have had their places, and each of them has been accompanied by the small group of people that defined it.

  After modernism gave way to the culture of mass dissemination, there has only been postmodernism, a movement that, at once, observes all artistic movements and repurposes them into something else by distilling them and combining them wantonly in order to challenge what we consider as “normal” and “natural,” while often not providing any ideas to replace it. It's commonly not even considered an art movement at all, and rather is a way to describe whatever the hell is happening now that modernism has faded away.
 Enter Vaporwave. I mentioned in the video that Daniel Lopatin was a part of the Noise community, but his music itself is much more atmospheric, a rejection of the hard beats and cynical production that characterizes pop music today, which itself is born of postmodernism and its disillusionment with art. When he created Eccojams under the name Chuck Person, he was creating something that he wanted to hear, something totally apart from the brutality of modern media. It was also a sort of return to excitement for the future that had died in the 90s and 00s, a death with postmodernism as the poison. His dissatisfaction spread like an arc of electricity coursing through the internet, reviving others who heard his message.

  When viewed as an artistic movement (and yes, I understand the ad hoc nature of this assertion), many of the elements of Vaporwave make more sense. Most artistic movements begin as a fight against the previous movement—in this case, postmodernism. Check. These movements also tend to have a select few artists at its center, though there's a wide swathe of other artists underneath the purview of the movement. Check. There also is a central set of ideas or ideals around which these artists work. Very big check.

  There is one aspect of an art movement that Vaporwave problematizes, however, and that's the fact that most artistic movements tend to take place in one location. Vaporwave latches onto the ideal of anonymity online, something that died with the advent of social media. During the ancient days of IRC chats, however, people felt sheltered under the fact that nobody could, with any certainty, know who they were, and this leveled out every person interacting with one another; this is, of course, not entirely true, especially since a limited demographic of people could afford computers, but the ideal remained intact. Vaporwave attempts to recapture that feeling, and part of that means concealing everyone's locations. Ironically, by adding this stipulation, this gives Vaporwave a new centralized location: online.

  This assertion I'm making may be completely wrong, but I think that observing it as such may have merit.