Breathing in the Vapor
During my mid-teens, in the early 2010’s, a new aesthetic and music genre gained a fair amount of traction. While vaporwave is commonly viewed as a satirical bent on modern consumerism, I can’t help but see it as an attack on technological progress itself.
Though the word vaporwave supposedly originates from “vaporware,” a term for a product (usually computer related) that is promised, but never actually developed nor cancelled, the root of the word has some other meanings. Vapour is among other things an archaic term for an acute feeling of faintness, nervousness or a state of depression, which fits perfectly with the genre’s atmosphere. Vapor as a verb can also mean boasting or speaking pompously. I can hardly think of a better way to describe the whole project of civilization.
As a music genre it conveys feelings of universal decay and hopelessness. You can feel your depersonalised body being dragged through cold hallways of a crowded mall; surrounded by hundreds you are alone, and so is every other undead automaton in that nightmarish place. George A. Romero’s 1977 film Dawn of the Dead comes to mind; in it zombies mindlessly wonder around in a shopping centre, much like the living do as we speak. In a drunken, fatigued delirium you hear distorted commercial music and advertisements telling you to have fun, to be happy… but you are not, so they force you to smile, all while shoving carcinogenic junk food in your mouth and pouring diabetes inducing soda in all of your holes. This progress is supposed to bring relief from life’s blights, is supposed to be wonderful, but deep down you know there’s no light at the end of this tunnel. Modern comforts paradoxically lead only to inner discomfort and restlessness.
When your tired, bloodshot eyes look around they can only see soulless sterility, everything in our surroundings is sanitised to the point where nothing can live there. Survive perhaps, as evidenced by an occasional floating dolphin, lone human, palm tree or office plant. But these things are lifeless. Personality, individuality — vanquished. So is community. Something about this cleanliness is putrid — the demonic cleaner will not stop until all but empty disinfected marble hallways and hotel pools remain of this world. Frequent ominous sunsets appear gloomy and depressing, as if the Sun will never rise again. Light shades of green, blue, pink and purple give vaporwave art a surrealist appearance, especially when coupled with its unnatural placement of objects (often of synthetic origin) — it all seems like a fever dream, until you realise it’s really just a hyperbole of the life we live.
In places like Tokyo and New York the incessant flashing of giant screens filled with commercials never tires, so none of their residents can ever step outside and see the beauty of midnight sky. Some beaches now obstruct the horizon with floating billboards. ‘People’ like Elon Musk talk of projecting advertisements onto the sky itself. Nothing seems to be sacred or safe from ghoulish technological monstrosities. The advert-plague might soon be forced into our dreams some sleep researchers warn, as reported in Popular Mechanics (Jul 8 2021).
We religiously follow technology like a messianic force, hoping it will bring about an era of endless comfort, pleasure, and happiness, even though it keeps proving to us again and again… and again, that that’s exactly what the techno-future will NOT be like. This genre scuffs at all the empty promises that we keep on believing… or buying (pun intended). It unveils the hollowness of our increasingly more alienated world that we sing praise to. “This is what you wanted, huh?” it taunts us sarcastically. Things typically considered beautiful, or cool, or useful (statues, computers, malls, hotels, pools) are mockingly painted in a completely different light, one free of deception.
“Enjoy Yourself,” a song by Saint Pepsi encourages listeners to enjoy themselves, to let the groove of music get to them, in an annoying repetitive manner that can only evoke the thought of “who the hell are you to demand this from me?”
The cover art for Floral Shoppe, an album by MACINTOSH PLUS features a bust of Helios, gazing towards the sky with an expression that can be described as emanating both ecstasy and despair; he turned his back to an image of a ghastly cityscape and Japanese computer graphics. Need I say more? There is profound suffering in the comfortable confines of modernity, as evident by the ever-worsening mental health crisis.
Nearly all songs by Whitewoods have a drunk tone to them, while their music videos show early computer graphics, fast food being made, commercials with false images of an ideal life, and upbeat cartoons or ancient video games. Combined they sound like someone who wishes to present as happy, but has lost all their energy to fake it. The facade we gaslight ourselves with is thin.
Unfortunately, as with all satire, it can become hard to identify it as such, when exceptionally zealous individuals believe things that make comical exaggerations of irony seem normal. Meet Yuval Noah Harari, professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and airport-lounge-paperback pop intellectual, who just loves to yap about how “things are better than ever before,” and salivates over possible future scenarios that make any normal person’s skin crawl.
Since the emergence of mass society we have witnessed a gradual disintegration of the community, from tribal bands into extended families, then nuclear families, and eventually the current assortment of single-parent households, flatmates of convenience, and atomised loners. Japan, for instance, a soul-killing high-tech dystopia admired by technophiles, has seen a seemingly unstoppable rise in loneliness, the hikikomori phenomenon — condition in which a person is socially avoidant to the point of staying isolated at home for at least six months without social interaction — being the perfect epitome of this overall trend. How is this a good development, and an improvement? Does the professor of history (!) need to be reminded of the unprecedented ecological destruction civilization has caused ever since its emergence, and of the acceleration of this process caused by industrialisation?
Harari is either blissfully ignorant or a straight up monster. I’m leaning towards the second option: the current nightmare is precisely what this dollar-store intellectual wants, after all he has referred to a hypothetical future cyborg human species as “Homo Deus” aka God-man. “You could surf the Internet with your mind; you could use bionic arms, legs, and eyes; you will augment your organic immune system with a bionic immune system, and you will delegate more and more decisions to algorithms that know you better than you know yourself,” he told NBC News (May 31 2017), more than happy to throw the last semblance of his independence in the dumpster. As if being limited to only make inconsequential choices related to consumption and standing within the technological juggernaut wasn’t bad enough, Harrari thinks we should get rid of any and all choice. There’s nothing God-like in merging so fully with the technosphere as to forfeit one’s will.
Being a commentary of a less explicit and more artsy character than, say, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, vaporwave has since its emergence been thoroughly absorbed by the system. Its motifs now adorn overpriced shirts, and products mocked by it, like Fiji water, have become popular aesthetic accessories BECAUSE of vaporwave.
