“Vaporwave Is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism”: Genre Work in An Online Music Scene (original) (raw)
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Nowak and Whelan Vaporwave Is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism Genre Work in An Online Music Scene
Open Cultural Studies, 2018
Vaporwave, first emerging in the early 2010s, is a genre of music characterised by extensive sampling of earlier “elevator music,” such as smooth jazz, MoR, easy listening, and muzak. Audio and visual markers of the 1980s and 1990s, white-collar workspaces, media technology, and advertising are prominent features of the aesthetic. The (academic, vernacular, and press) writing about vaporwave commonly positions the genre as an ironic or ambivalent critique of contemporary capitalism, exploring the implications of vaporwave for understandings of temporality, memory and technology. The interpretive and discursive labour of producing, discussing and contesting this positioning, described here as “genre work,” serves to constitute and sediment the intelligibility and coherence of the genre. This paper explores how the narrative of vaporwave as an aesthetic critique of late capitalism has been developed, articulated, and disputed through this genre work. We attend specifically to the limits around how this narrative functions as a pedagogical or sensitising device, instructing readers and listeners in how to understand and discuss musical affect, the nature and function of descriptions of music, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of critique, and of capitalism as something meriting such critique.
Human Excess - Aesthetics Of Post-Internet Electronic Music
There exists a tenacious dichotomy between the 'organic' and the 'synthetic' in electronic music. In spite of immediate opposing qualities, they instill sensations of each other in practice: Acoustic sounds are subject to artificial mimicry while algorithmic music can present an imitation of human creativity. This presents a post-human aesthetic that questions if there are echoes of life in the machine. This paper investigates how sonic aesthetics in the borderlands between electronic avant-garde, pop and club music have changed after 2010. I approach these aesthetics through Brian Massumi's notions of 'semblance' and 'animateness' as abstract monikers to assist in the tracing of meta-aesthetic experiences of machine-life, genre, musical structure and the listening to known-unknown noise. The idea of a post-Internet society acts as framework for the intimate relation between pop and avant-garde in contemporary electronic music. This relation is a result of a sonic contextualization of late-capitalist society via the Internet. Finally I discuss how pop is the noise in the avant-garde and how the human in a post-Internet era presents itself through synthetic plasticity.
Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 2017
In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson (1991) mentions an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping" as a new form of radical aesthetic practice to deal with the set of historical situations and problems symptomatic of late capitalism. For Jameson (1991), cognitive mapping functions as a tool for postmodern subjects to represent the totality of the global late capitalist system, allowing them to situate themselves within the system, and to reenact the critique of capitalism that has been neutralized by postmodernist confusion. While Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, and specifically its question of how to represent the totality of the late capitalist system, has been taken up by a number of poststructuralist critical race theorists and social geographers (Bartolovich, 2000; Beverly, 2000; Tally Jr., 2000), relatively little attention has been paid to the cognitive mapping of postmodern affect. Drawing upon a close reading of the music and visual art of the nostalgic internet-based "vaporwave" aesthetic alongside Jameson's postmodern theory and the affect theory of Raymond Williams (1977) and Brian Massumi (1995; 1998), this essay argues that vaporwave can be understood as an attempt to aestheticize and thereby map out the affective climate circulating in late capitalist consumer culture. More specifically, this paper argues that through its somewhat obsessive hypersaturation with retro commodities and aesthetics from the 1980s and 1990s, vaporwave simultaneously critiques the salient characteristics of late capitalism such as pastiche, depthlessness, and waning of affect, and enacts a nostalgic longing for a modernism that is fleeing further and further into an inaccessible history. This paper seeks to illustrate the potentiality of Jameson's cognitive mapping project in the realm of affect, and investigate the relationship between late capitalist affect and subcultural aesthetics.
2022
Mention electronic dance music and perhaps one of the first thoughts that springs to mind is a DJ performing with vinyl records or a musician playing a synthesizer. Although these might be somewhat anachronistic, stereotypical tropes by modern standards, they are nerveless still considered iconic concepts and practices amongst many fans and practitioners of electronic dance music alike, stubbornly persisting even in the face of significant advances in music technology. Vinyl records remain prized, scarce resources that seamlessly accrue financial and subcultural value, while certain items of music production hardware are lionised: their sonic output considered desirable and the distinct creative practices they facilitate deemed traditional and thus authentic. This paper asserts that while such ideas are often reliant upon the rhetoric of tradition and ritual, they are also facilitated by digital, internet-based communications platforms, and so ironically could not exist and flourish in their current form without much of the technology they position themselves against. Furthermore, discourse surrounding these concepts and practices is not without issue, and over the previous decade has contributed to increasing fractures within the larger, underground electronic dance music community. By combining textual analysis, virtual and traditional ethnography, the following paper attempts to trace the roots of this phenomenon which, for the sake of discussion, is here referred to as the analogue promise: an emergent and problematic strand of discourse exhibited by certain electronic dance music practitioners wherein nostalgia is employed as a forge for notions of subcultural identity, authenticity and exclusivity.
Information, Communication & Society, 2017
This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. It has two main aims. The first is to provide a macro-historical, multi-causal explanation of changes in technologies of musical consumption, emphasising the mutual imbrication of the economic interests of corporations with sociocultural transformations. We identify a shift over the last twenty years from consumer electronics (CE) to information technology (IT) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced, and argue that this shift from CE to IT drew upon, and in turn quickened, a shift from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption, and from dynamics of what Raymond Williams called 'mobile privatisation' to what we call 'networked mobile personalisation'. The second aim is to assess change and continuity in the main means by which recorded music is consumed, in long-term perspective. We argue that disruptions caused by recent 'digitalisation' of music are consistent with longer term processes, whereby music has been something of a testing ground for the introduction of new cultural technologies. But we also recognise particularly high levels of disruption in recent times and relate these to the new dominance of the IT industries, and the particular dynamism or instability of that sector. We close by discussing the degree to which constant changes in how people access musical experiences might be read as instances of capitalism's tendency to prioritise limiting notions of consumer preference over meaningful needs.
It’s difficult to locate the exact starting point of Postmodern Jukebox, as Scott Bradlee acknowledged in a speech to the members of Oxford Union on the 8th of March 2017. Indeed, whilst the first recorded video on the Postmodern Jukebox YouTube channel features a younger Bradlee playing the jazz standard ‘A Night in Tunisia’ (2009a) on keyboard in his living room, it was not until the second video, ‘Classic 80s Hits… Interpreted for Ragtime Piano’ (2009b), that Bradlee initiated what later came to be Postmodern Jukebox’s ‘unique selling point’: covering mainstream late-twentieth and twenty-first century pop music in various ‘retro’ styles. Postmodern Jukebox went on to expand dramatically in size, progressing from a Bradlee and a singer, to a small band, to a loose collective with rotating guest singers, and finally to a group of freelance musicians, known as the ‘PMJ Family’ which is large enough to sustain multiple concurrent global tours. Yet the immense success of Postmodern Jukebox and their global appeal would be inconceivable without digital technologies: it was through the viral success of videos such as ‘Thrift Shop (Vintage ‘Grandpa Style’ Macklemore Cover)’ (2013) and ‘All About That [Upright] Bass’ (2014a) that Postmodern Jukebox was brought to international attention, and these videos remain the primary way through which their fans are first introduced to and consume their content today. The following dissertation aims to explore the effects of digital technologies on music consumption patterns and the socialities thereby engendered amongst British fans of Postmodern Jukebox through a digital ethnography of Postmodern Jukebox’s online presences, semi-structured interviews with Postmodern Jukebox fans, and fieldwork at two separate events: a Postmodern Jukebox concert at Hammersmith Apollo, London, and a talk given by Scott Bradlee at the Oxford Union. In doing so, I will establish three key ideas: (1) the consumption of Postmodern Jukebox’s music and the socialities that are there entailed is mediated not only by technologies of the early 2000s, such as Web 2.0 and the subsequent Social Networking Sites, but also specifically digital features such as the collecting of metadata about cultural products, recommendation algorithms which factor in this metadata; (2) whilst this consumption takes place within Madianou & Miller’s (2013) environment of polymedia, listeners not only choose the platform on, device through and format in which they listen to this music based relational technological affordances and socio-cultural perceptions thereof, but may also decide to ‘disuse’ a given platform based on negative socio-cultural perceptions; and (3) the varying modes or genres of consumption within this environment of polymedia, whilst all modes of ‘fandom’, result in distinct, yet overlapping and concurrent socialities.
Global Rhetoric, Transnational Markets: The (post) modern Trajectories of Electronic Dance Music
2004
This dissertation examines electronic dance music: its transnational production and dissemination, its techno-universalist rhetoric, its racial and sexual politics, its Eurocentric mythologies and liberal humanist ideologies. To grasp the possibilities and problematics of digitally-created pop music, I will draw upon a multiplicity of discourses generated by electronic musicians, disc jockeys (DJs), remixers, producers, club/rave promoters, techno/house fans, club-goers, ravers, popular music historians, cultural critics, music industry insiders, dance press, multinational major labels, independent imprints, and regional retailers. By tuning into the contentious dialogues between the makers, shapers, and buyers of computerized dance music, I hope to illustrate the multifarious cultural functions a mass-produced sonic commodity can have. In addition to considering the positive aspects of digitally-crafted music, this project demystifies the utopian rhetoric emanating from dance music aficionados/promoters/producers. My work explores how electronic dance music employs “postmodern” technologies in the service of Enlightenment discourses (such as its tendency to cast itself as the universal language of the Information Age or its Cartesian delineation of the music listening audience into those that ‘feed the head’ and those that serve the hedonist flesh). I also examine how electronic dance music reflects and reinforces imperialist desires (the white male producer’s use of orgasmic loops regenerated from the vocals of black/Latina female divas and racialized queers in ‘sexy’ dance tracks), Romantic notions (the widespread assumption that electronic music producers are divinely-inspired auteurs; the techno/house fan’s elitist admiration of musicians that remain true to their “art” by remaining in unprofitable underground markets; and the music critic’s celebration of sampling and remixing as high art), and modernist concerns (the DJ’s obsession with mastery, the intensely-policed borders between high/low genres, the producer’s preoccupation with technological progress).
Zones of non-communication: Music and the relative immanence of capitalism
New Sound
The goal of this paper is to show not what music is, but what music as a sort of political practice can do in the age of contemporaneity. The age of contemporaneity is defined by the relative immanence of capitalism, which is structured as a society of control on the level of the socius. On the one hand, capitalism consists of a certain number of axioms that enable the denumeration of flows, while, on the other, the society of control forges a connection between the capitalist axiomatic and the infra-individual levels of every (in)dividual. In an ontological and epistemological framework structured like that, art in general and music in particular create zones of non-communication that break affective connections between the infra-individual and the trans-individual in the form of the axiomatic and society of control. With affective non-directionality, music produces a space-time wherein different and new connections between affects may occur. Those affective connections are not exc...
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls
In this article I focus on the genre of 'vaporwave', using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a case study, to explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes pleasure in, a kind of 'memory play'. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak ® , 1980s elevator music and new age ambience. Vaporwave's 'memory play' is a project that takes remembering as its audiovisual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is therefore understood as a pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself. To explore this theme, I examine vaporwave's memory play using the terms of Chris Healy's 'compen-satory nostalgia', as well as the idea of 'ersatz nostalgia' as discussed by Arjun Appadurai and Svetlana Boym.