Do people still like Vaporwave?

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So because there was a maymay about it means there's definitely no genuine interest?
There are plenty of great Vaporwave songs, but I will agree that too much of it is derivative from a lot of the early adopters who wanted to jump on what they saw as a low-effort bandwagon. However; most of those people have either evolved or left Vaporwave production and who's still around tend to be more serious about it.
I still feel that while the lo-fi subgenre has a lot of promise and some is really good but too many goddamn people think lo-fi and hip-hop must go together and use the same canned backtracks in every song. Lo-fi is best for casual listening (why Lo-fi Girl is so successful.)

The trick to finding the best vaporwave is looking for people who don't use or use very little or more creative sampling. My favorite is Runners Club '95.
https://soundcloud.com/runnersclub95
 
I like Trevor Something and not a lot else. I'll have that 'NewRetroWave' channel playing in the background when I got some vidya playing but I won't actively seek it out.
 
The nostalgia layers are getting to be too much at this point. That was my late-high school to college jam and now I feel too much like a rootless 18 year old when I listen to it.
 
It was a nice idea, but similar to the whole Synthwave thing, they quicky made themselves into a cliche and drove it into the ground.
Sadly neither really amounted to anything in the long run. If people don't iterate on your ideas they are good as dead.
 
When people confuse the aesthetic with the music, thats kind of why it died, to be honest.

Synthwave, as a genre, never really had any philosophy behind it other than "wow, 80s synth music is cool".

Vaporwave, for reasons highlighted before, did- and then had a fast death pulled on it in a way that punk managed to stave off for maybe a decade, but vapor got co-opted within less than a year or two.
 
DiscoRodeo dijo:
When people confuse the aesthetic with the music, thats kind of why it died, to be honest.

Synthwave, as a genre, never really had any philosophy behind it other than "wow, 80s synth music is cool".

Vaporwave, for reasons highlighted before, did- and then had a fast death pulled on it in a way that punk managed to stave off for maybe a decade, but vapor got co-opted within less than a year or two.
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Didn’t help that it became less a cultural observation and more a political critique. Early Vaporwave stuff was vague enough to be appealing, the moment the trannys went nuts it became immediately embarrassing. Synthwave really is just Vaporwave without the avant garde edge and late 80’s samples. Part of why I prefer Vaporwave over Synth, funny enough, is that weirdo edge to it. More interesting when there’s less political screeds attached to it.
 
I do wish mallsoft and vaporwave could make a comeback again. Maybe when GTA 6 ever comes out, they’ll make a radio station that plays nothing but vaporwave and remixes to 80’s music with vaporwave elements.

Here’s to hoping they go back to Vice City :optimistic:
 
I unironically like vaporwave but more the "post-music" subgenre that exists on Bandcamp, and sits on the outskirts of other vaporwave videos on YouTube. There's a good distribution label called DMT-FL Tapes that releases some pretty good stuff on their Bandcamp/YouTube. Though most of their followers are autistic trannies that are obsessed with McDonalds lore. I'd say I mostly listen to it for the creative vision and atmosphere - vaporwave has this uncanny ability to take you to different places and times, real or imaginary. This is especially true of those videos with 80s commercials played over the top, peak vaporwave stuff:
Don't read the comments on any vaporwave video its absolute cancer.

I agree that the vaporwave community has become really gay. That said, even before Vektroid/Macintosh Plus, vaporwave was a thing, though it just didn't have a label. There's an album called eccojams and it pretty much laid out the blueprint for vaporwave (doubt anyone on this site would like it). It was produced by Daniel Lopatin/Oneohtrix Point Never who went on to do various film soundtracks and critically acclaimed albums. Its very heavily sampled, but I think there's a lot of artistic direction and compositional competence on display here. You have to at least appreciate the guy for pretty much inventing the genre before it was invented. Vaporwave lore is sometimes more interesting than the music itself.

Its easier to identify which subgenres I dislike - future funk is overrated as hell, you hear a lot of popular artists now use future funk (and synthwave) as a base for their songs. Vaportrap was never good. Lofi can be great when done by people who are talented and dedicated, but 'slowed + reverb' shit is horrendous. Definitely would love for the better subgenres (signalwave, mallsoft, slushwave) to make a comeback, although the quality of output would probably decrease.
 
The other original vaporwave artist besides Chuck Person is James Ferraro. He came out a little earlier and made an extreme amount of albums under many aliases before the vaporwave trend started in 2011. Both Chuck Person and Ferraro came from a noise background, and their records are a lot more dissonant and chaotic than what later became popular, but also much more enduring as I still listen to Ferraro's music all the time.

 
Never personally been a massive indulger however I do see videos on YouTube still racking up serious numbers.
 
I still listen to vaporwave on occasion, but I think the cool kids are listening to this "post-rock-nihilistic-lowfi-djent" stuff now; and, I gotta say... it sucks but also doesn't.
 
feedtheoctopus dijo:
It's really interesting how vaporwave sort of just took over pop culture in the past few years. The music itself nobody really gives a shit about anymore, but that lo-fi 80's synth thing and the aesthetic that went along with it is pretty much everywhere now.
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It's in such a phase now that I see Japanese printed on tshirts in the grocery store in the teen section. I don't get the point of having letters on clothes that you can't even read tbh. I've been able to read moonroons, hold 95% of kanji, since the vaporwave thing started so I guess I just never thought of it until recently.

This crossed my mind today:
Is there an overlap with vaporwave fans and weebs?
 
AbyssStarer dijo:
It's in such a phase now that I see Japanese printed on tshirts in the grocery store in the teen section. I don't get the point of having letters on clothes that you can't even read tbh. I've been able to read moonroons, hold 95% of kanji, since the vaporwave thing started so I guess I just never thought of it until recently.

This crossed my mind today:
Is there an overlap with vaporwave fans and weebs?
Presiona para expandir...
Japanese shit on t-shirts isn't new. It's a cool looking language. If you go to Japan you'll see a lot of kids with shirts that have nonsense English phrases on them also, because nobody really cares what it says.

Funny story, I know a teacher who can speak Chinese. One of her students came to class one day wearing a shirt with some Chinese characters on it. The teacher pointed it out to her that it just said "table". Not even a sentence or anything, just "table".
 
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