I often think that my life would have gone much better and I would have skipped a great deal of silliness had I earlier on decided to get properly into writing essays. I look back and see what a good track I was on and lament the years I wasted in between then and now. My mind rushes back to a specific moment.
One of the first times I ever had to write a proper essay was for my A Level English Literature coursework. For non Brits, that’s when you’re around 16-18; finishing high school. While the contents were achingly pretentious and tryhard, beyond even my current work, my essay on Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, which I’d skim-read and watched a “Better Than Food” review of, was as much of a labour of love as my attention deficit mind could muster at that age. As was always the case, I was interested, so I put in the effort. It wasn’t until writing my Final Dissertation at University that I would pair the love I had discovered at this age for essay writing with actual dedication and content worth reading.
I was brought reeling back into these memories recently by a caprice of the YouTube algorithm. My long study sessions, interspersed with frequent bouts of Mount & Blade: Warband, or whatever hole I was pouring precious time into in those days, were accompanied by a choice (and already a bit outdated) vaporwave mix from the channel Soundstation:
It was terrific. Opening with the Playstation One startup screen that would then transition with the first track into a dreamy graphic that would passively await your flipping back to its tab from Google Docs. The range of stimulating tracks, the cream of the obscenely oversaturated vaporwave “genre”, bathing you in euphoric nostalgia. It was perfect for writing about existential melodrama and made me feel right at the razor’s edge of culture.
Here I was. This was the 2010s, when we were coming of age, and this was our art.
When I sat down to write the other day I saw recommended to me.
“exiting the plaza... (Assorted Vaporwave Mix/Compilation #5 | 2+ Hours)”1
At first I thought it must have been one of the few playlists made by the same creator from about a decade ago and had a brief moment of unreflective nostalgia, but then I noticed - it was only posted two years ago.
The top comment read “vaporwave is alive and well.”
Other commenters astutely pointed out that we in the mid 2020s now feel nostalgic for vaporwave.
The half-ironic, at first quite impenetrable set of slow, reverb drenched 80s jazz, soul and “elevator music” tracks, attached to a visual style that was its most unifying characteristic, was wholly rooted in a nostalgic feeling for the early days of information technology. It took the goofy, low-res - then state of the art - graphics of the late 90s / early 00s and transmuted it into the aesthetic. What had been the incidental appearance of an ephemeral stage in technical development was given permanence, turned into a “place”; the plaza; a haunting of the sounds and ambience of a time sealed off in unreliable memories, in a more primitive stage of the internet when it was young and full of optimistic end-of-history promise. It was a brilliant expression of hauntology.
It’s almost cliché to say that nothing defines the 2010s. Perhaps this is because decades, which only became cultural packages in history in the Twentieth Century, no longer cut it. Years feel like centuries these days. During the onset of “stuck-culture” and the dissolution of subcultures as the internet served every hyper-niche and unified every weirdo with a worldwide community of weirdos with their exact taste in obscure whatever, we had no defining cultural scene or artistic movement. There was no punk, rock and roll, grunge, or even the decomposition product of goth and other more rigid subcultures that was the “scene” of the 00s. We looked backwards to these things - this was what defined the 2010s. It is exactly this looking back, in its sampling and in its visual and thematic content, that also defines vaporwave, which was the only true equivalent to these older movements in the last decade. Only the paradoxical inversion of these conditions could do this. Vaporwave was the authentic artistic expression of the 2010s - the 2010s are defined by the “aesthetic”.
Aesthetic itself became an adjective. A picture, building or any image could be said to be “aesthetic”. I feel like this usage has subsided. The last time I remember seeing it used was, to the outrage of French twitter, to describe the flame-engulfed Notre Dame in 2019. What a difference the turn of the decade made - that feels like an entirely different era, and infinitely closer to the heyday of vaporwave than to now.
Vaporwave comments on the transience of modern times, when a poor decade like the 2010s can’t hope to present anything like as lasting an artistic face as the 20s-90s, nor sustain discussion in the same way.
That spike around December 2019 is of course only because the decade was ending. A huge amount of that discussion was saying exactly what I am contending now, that it was a time defined by nothing. In building a castle of “vapour” in the sky out of skeins of ephemeral retroware, it not only comments on the “false promise of capitalism” as is laboriously narrated in every dull video essay on the topic, but symbolically inverts this transience into an everlasting space that you can step into whenever you want. A pre-9/11 dreamscape of sometimes disconcerting, always soothing tones from the time before the world went mad - before social media, the explosion of which immediately predates the birth of the genre.
The retro cyperspace and 80s imagery, oozing with consumerism, is flanked to the left by a white-marble Ancient Greek bust of the god Helios. The left is where our eyes start, as readers of a left-to-right alphabet. Towards the left is “backwards”, and towards the right is “forwards”. Being to the left of the screen implies being in the past in relation to the right - twinning with the bust’s representation of antiquity and classical civilisation. It is also the side of the screen usually associated with the protagonist, who moves rightward; forward. The bust and its situation as the “virtuous past”, not only draws a straightforward contrast between its symbolic permanence and noble tangibility and the “vaprous” unreality of the digital pseudoforms it accompanies, but to imbue that same aesthetic of vapour; of metamodern intangibility, with a sense of eternity.
As long time readers will know, I wrote a pair of articles that I never shut up about on the classical aesthetic of white marble statuary and the significance of the fact that this is the result of the fading of the original paint. My earlier comments will help to illustrate the function of the marble bust in vaporwave art.2
Our image of Ancient sculpture is based on its dead, decayed state. That “sneer of cold command”1 so powerful in its blank austerity is the relic of the moribund Roman, Greek or indeed Egyptian world. We do not only see this in the corpse of the classical world itself. The artists of the Renaissance and later periods were captivated and obsessed with this very image - the cool white marble of that prior “golden” age. Far from just being a mistaken vision of that remote period, it becomes an aesthetic in its own right, even long after we discard its historicity.
[…]
Colour will fade as the colours of the original statues did - the “deadness” of this aesthetic is its immortality and lasting resonance - indicating that period of time that is always so present in our collective consciousness. Through remaining uncoloured, the marble ideal of the renaissance is untouched with mortality - with the dirt and grime of life that was preserved to be found at Pompeii.
The “paint” of the statue is, in a way, equivalent to the transience of modern digital epiphenomena. Both are a momentary appearance that fades away amid history’s advance. The “death mask” of the classical world, that which lives on, is its pale white marble bones. In creating the plaza, we create a permanence and solidity out of this very quality of impermanence - we transmute these images of ephemerality into a lasting ideal space. The marble bust does not break with this thematically, it embodies it further, in classic vaporwave irony, by existing as a figmentary cypher for that solidity and permanence that the physical statue has. Its existence as a PNG, dragged into the cyberspacial realm of the album cover, renders it symbolic to the point of being pseudoreal and absurd.
Glorying in this absurdity, the aestheticタべヰ is an unreachable pseudospace that contains every broken promise ever made in 80s advertising. It makes permanence out of the transient. It transcends its own irony, reaching a neo-naivety embodied in the nostalgia-bound imagery of the young internet and early home computers. While irony is at the core of vaporwave, this understanding of its own ridiculousness enabled it, for a short time, to artistically embody the void of art in its day.
The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
It was a thrilling inversion and felt like a revolutionary moment, but it got stale.
As I listen to this final playlist in the series, I realise that I left the plaza years ago. My gut reaction, seeing comments pledging their unwavering loyalty to this dead genre, a decade on from its golden age, is to think “you still on that?” Have we really come no further? Has there really been no artistic movement since the mid 2010s of any note, besides AI art?
It would be quite a statement to say no and would be quite arrogant also, but I honestly don’t feel as though anything has had the zeitgeistal “it”-ness of that mid 2010s moment.
Just as we became nostalgic for a celebration of nostalgia, vaporwave was consumed by the same cultural processes that inspired it. Once the “aesthetic” solidified in enough minds, it was able to degenerate from its ideal status into a petty accessory, gradually gutted of any meaning or significance it had held.
All of a sudden around 2016, not just in political spheres where it was routinely employed in lame propaganda, but everywhere online, people started to use a synthwave/vaporwave look for their content. Many still do. It became the default aesthetic of the internet at large, absolutely nowhere in normiedom, but everywhere online. You still can’t move for its presence; it remains appealing, but this process of dissemination left the already highly fragile and somewhat confused philosophy of this movement completely at the mercy of the “content” mill.
As I spoke about in The Purifying Chaos, Mircea Eliade writes in Patterns in Comparative Mythology about “infantilism”; the degenerative process by which religious symbolism is emptied of its value and sacredness through a gradual process of wider and wider familiarity leading to the vanishing of its real meaning.
For Eliade, the authentic and potent religious symbol acts as a “breach” between the profane and the sacred.4 In the same way, the “aesthetic” momentarily acted as a portal into an ideal plane of the sweet falsehoods of advertising and purple-tinted nostalgia.
The infantilisation continues as men tend “to repeat them [sacred symbols] at every possible level and often in a quite mechanistic and crude fashion”,5 leaving them facile and profane. Exactly this happened to the vaporwave aesthetic. Once obscure and arcane and incredibly self-conscious, it became ubiquitous to the point of having absolutely no consciousness whatsoever. It was the intro to a Paul Joseph Watson video just as much as it was a cringe Jeremy Corbyn meme.
And so history hollowed out another stab at eternity, had its wicked way with it and left a husk of meaningless, discardable and ephemeral refuse. All of vaporwave’s consciousness of exactly this issue has been swept aside as it has itself succumbed to time.
It feels like no one planned for the world to go on for this long. In fact, we know they didn’t - the era that vaporwive valorises and satirises in equal post-ironic measure looked to abolish history altogether. The cringing feeling of looking back at a 2016 Trumpwave edit replete with smirking Pepes is in a sense similar to the difference between the painted original of a classical statue and its white marble effigy. We cannot see the “paint”, anymore; the colour and vivid reality of “that time” (2016) is lost to us and inaccessible forever - we could never see it with the eyes that we did back then. Those symbols have been infantilised to the point that using them would be bizarre, only doable with extreme irony.
The Classical World was ennobled through its embalming,* but the same is sadly not true for the “aesthetic”, which lingers on in facile ignobility. Its “final blazon”6 is Jeremy Corbyn with a purple filter.
We must resign ourselves, in metamodernity, to the rapid disintegration of cultural forms. Vaporwave was a brief moment when a genre of art managed to find the biting point of the confused consciousness of the age, through dauntlessly staring down its absurdity - its void of creative expression - and using this very desolation as its content.
As I have said for some years now, in this, the world’s night, we must wring poetry out of the impossibility of poetry.
I’m listening to it while writing, it’s very good - Windows96 is my absolute favourite Vaporwave artist. As far as I’m concerned he took what I’d hardly even call a genre to places no one else did and is in a league of his own. Just phenomenal stuff.
Lindsey, M. The Whitewashed Classical World.
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
Eliade, M. Patterns in Comparative Religion, p447.
Eliade, M. Patterns in Comparative Religion, p454-5.
Philip Larkin, An Arundel Tomb.
>Jamming out ot vaporwave and playing Mount & Blade in the 10s
I identify very strongly with this