Capitalism, Abandoned Shopping Malls, and a Post-9/11 Internet Age

 

 

In a YouTube video entitled “THE GALLERY AT MILITARY CIRCLE”, filmmaker Dan Bell walks across acres of glistening deserted marble floor with a hand held camera, slowly lifting it to show the sun shining through a glass ceiling that is met with the kitsch exoticism of a tiled fountain encircled by plastic palm trees. A track taken from HAIRCUTS FOR MEN’s 19-83 album plays ominously in the background.

The video is an instalment in a series called “THE DEAD MALL SERIES”, where Bell films and documents abandoned shopping malls across America. These videos have as their soundtracks music provided by vaporwave artists. This is entirely consistent with Bell’s intention, because the vaporwave here is made using samples taken from the 80s, and 90s muzak that would have been playing in these malls while they were open for business.

However, there’s something about the pitch-shifted vocals, the filtered synthesiser sounds, and the enveloping reverb of these soundtracks that give Bell’s videos an unsettling haunted quality, founded in nostalgia for an optimism that proved to be false, as he makes his way through these abandoned spaces of a recent past that also seems strangely distant.

Vaporwave is form of plunderphonics, a technique pioneered by John Oswald, in which an existing form of audio is altered in some way to make a new composition, but where the source itself remains recognisable. In vaporwave, the source music or sound is sliced up, spliced back together and repackaged in loops and slowly evolving soundscapes.

This echoes, and is echoed by, a visual aesthetic consisting of the bright imagery used in the advertisements of the time. Repetitive clips of period defining items like Cornetto ice-cream, Harmony hairspray, the Triumph TR7, and the Sony Walkman, in concert with a seeming infinity of other such reminders along with references to Japanese pop culture and civilisational collapse in the form of disembodied Roman busts.

Shortly after vaporwave’s inception in the early 2010s, it was characterised as a critique of the debt-fuelled overproduction and hyper-consumerism set in motion during the Regan-Thatcher era. “Free market” capitalism was driven and maintained by relentless and ever more expensive marketing campaigns¹. The upbeat optimism contained in advertising and mainstream cultural output, whereby freedom and personal identity are expressed through consumer choice, and life is made whole through what we buy, was given its defining statement by the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama. In a revised introduction to his book The End of History and the Last Man², he acknowledges his argument that western liberal democracy constituted “the end point of man’s ideological evolution” and “the final form of human government”, and as such “constituted the end of history” (page xi).

It is this optimism that many, both inside and outside the vaporwave community, came to see as its target. By taking its marketing aesthetic to aural and visual extremes, it subverts and undermines its central message.

Adam Harper, in “Vaporwave and the Pop-Art of the Virtual Plaza”³, wrote what became widely seen as the defining article on vaporwave, but which had a polarising effect on the vaporwave community itself.

 

Adam Harper’s article became the de facto say on vaporwave. Overnight, the genre became synonymous with anti-capitalism, and corporate culture, despite the fact that sentiment wasn’t universal within the community. The article divided the fan base into those who agreed with the criticism, and those who thought it missed the mark entirely.⁴

 

In asking what vaporwave is about, we will begin by asking how far Harper’s view is true. And the first thing to say is that in the internet age, where vaporwave has its home, truth is increasingly lost amidst ambiguity and outright fabrication. Consequently, it is more difficult to effectively satirise anything.

According to Poe’s Law, without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create something that parodies extreme views, as it will be understood as a clear exaggeration to some, but as a sincere expression of the truth to others. We often see this when what starts off as a meme poking fun at a political view, later gets used as support for that very view. So, taking this into account, how effectively does vaporwave satirise the fading optimism of “free market” capitalism.

At first glance, we could be forgiven for concluding that vaporwave does the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to do. If we aware of the chopping and looping techniques popularised by its flag-bearers; Ecco Jams Vol. 1, and Floral Shoppe, vaporwave might sound like nothing more than regurgitated mall muzak. Moreover, the dreamlike presentation of outdated consumer goods could be seen as romanticising consumer culture before the turn of the century.

It would be possible to conclude from this that understanding it as a critique, as satire, requires us to have insider knowledge, and that the discussions about it are just as important to it as the work itself. Raphaël Nowak and Andrew Whelan point out that part of what informs appreciation of the genre is an awareness of the wider context that the music inhabits:

 

The first feature that interpretive genre work raises regarding vaporwave is that it is a genre that is “about” capitalism. Authors describing vaporwave often turn to figurative forms to highlight how characteristics of vaporwave reference or evoke (for them) broader phenomena outside of the music. These analogical accounts are not simply descriptive in a sense that they would help readers understand what vaporwave sounds like, and identify the range of influences it (re)mixes. Instead, the metaphors that are deployed inscribe the music in a critique of something that is beyond the music genre and its direct social and cultural context.⁵

 

A good example of this, and perhaps a pivotal one, is surely one of vaporwave’s most revered releases, 猫 シ Corp.’s News at 11. The album is a sound collage of news excerpts, infomercials, and weather announcements that were broadcast on September 11^th 2001, before the towers were attacked. Despite its cheerful upbeat nature, News at 11 is a pretty harrowing listen; there is now only one way of reinterpreting a pitch-shifted sample of a weatherman declaring:

“There’s a storm coming.”

The album has been praised by its adherents as a haunting representation of the event that would finally shatter the idealism of a better, easier world brought on by advances in technology and the consumer society, and stand as final evidence of how empty Fukuyama’s optimism had been⁶.

However, if one weren’t initially aware of 猫 シ Corp.’s intentions, News at 11, might sound like nothing more than a compilation of audio samples taken from American daytime TV. In 猫 シ Corp.’s defence, we might well argue that only those familiar with vaporwave would know of it, and would, therefore, know what they were getting into. However, this really only serves to show how it does in fact seem to fall victim to Poe’s Law, if understanding requires prior knowledge of the author’s intent.

A further argument for vaporwave possessing this “anti-capitalist” motivation might be found looking at in how the music is made. Vaporwave seems to relish in mass-producing itself, like some kind of musical production line. But apart from this, it doesn’t have much else in common with the means of production found in the mainstream music industry.

Most vaporwave is released online, where it can be downloaded free of charge, and any money that the artist might gain will come in the form of a donation. Anonymity is also something the vaporwave community holds in high regard. Through making multiple releases under different pseudonyms, artists rarely take direct ownership of their music. Of course, this is also due to the extra-legal ways in which the music is made, and the general disregard that vaporwave has for copyright law.

Also antithetical to mainstream means of production, is that it is relatively cheap and easy to make, blurring the lines between its listeners and its creators. Vaporwave thrives on forum-based websites, such as Reddit and 4chan, where users freely share their own work along with resources such as samples, old infomercials, and start up sounds for others to use.

In these respects, while vaporwave might draw on the content of capitalist marketing and production for its material, which might lead the uninitiated to suspect its intentions, its actual practice seems anarchic, inclusive and democratic. Yet though this might point us towards the truth of the issue, Poe’s Law still seems to hold, because not only does ambiguity remain in the tension between the often quite unsettling quality of its presentation, the imagery we are seeing, and the optimistic consumerism this was first intended to represent.

It is difficult to see how anyone outside the vaporwave world would understand how its ethos runs counter to that of the music industry it stands outside of. And, in any case, we might ask if it really is the case that the producers of vaporwave over the last ten years have been engaged in consciously taking a stand against capitalism?

Following the many online discussions on the topic, and stopping to consider the opinions held by producers and listeners alike, it becomes clear that vaporwave’s message is full of ambiguity. Some believe that vaporwave’s satirical depictions of capitalism are a sincere heartfelt jab at the powers that be, while others see nothing more than a meme designed to make it more substantial to outsiders who don’t know any better.

So, it would seem that Poe’s Law applies to the satire itself as well as how the satire might be interpreted. So does vaporwave function as a critique of capitalism as we have described? Well, the answer seems to be that it can do, depending on who the listener is. For every person that sees Floral Shoppe as an ironic indictment of late-capitalism decay, there’s another that sees it as simply intriguing music with a quirky, if not strange, presentation.

However, while vaporwave’s status as a legitimate anti-capitalist artistic movement might remain up for debate, I personally believe that the genre actually possesses nuanced emotional content, which expresses how we relate, or fail to relate, as individual human beings to the wider society in the age of the internet. This may in the end be bound up with capitalist society, and nostalgia for a false optimism exposed by financial disaster and terrorist destruction, but it is far more subtle and multi-dimensional than Harper’s formula suggests, which might also explain its longevity.

Returning to the work of Dan Bell and his “DEAD MALL SERIES”, in a TED Talk that he gave on his work, he described vaporwave as follows:

 

Vaporwave is more than an art form, it’s like a movement. It’s nihilistic, its angsty, but it’s somehow comforting. The whole aesthetic is a way of dealing with things that you can’t do anything about. Like no jobs, sitting in your parent’s basement eating ramen noodles”. Vaporwave came out of this generation’s desire to express their hopelessness, the same way the pre-internet generation did, by sitting around in the food court.⁷

 

I feel that here Bell has touched on a much deeper meaning within vaporwave than that which is usually discussed.  As well as possibly implying a tongue in cheek superficial affection for late capitalist culture, its over the top stylisation resembles a dream like sense of alienation, that resonates with the increasingly reclusive lifestyle of someone growing up in the internet age. Its over saturation seems to mirror how easy it is to become isolated amidst the hyper connectivity of the information age. Its frequent appropriations of Japanese pop art, and Roman buffs, captures a detachment that vaporwave’s primarily English-speaking audience feels towards its surroundings.

It could be argued that vaporwave isn’t trying to capture what capitalism is now, but rather what it never was. Perhaps 猫 シ Corp.’s News at 11 doesn’t represent the death of idealised capitalism, but what the western world was looking forward to before 9/11. The rapid expansion of the internet that capitalism brought was supposed to usher us into a brighter age of interconnectivity, and easier access to information – the “information superhighway”.

Now we live in a time where detachment and isolation are more rampant than they’ve ever been, and a sense of what is and isn’t real is far more ambiguous now – we have this endless sea of information at our finger tips. Although it may not always function as an effective critique of capitalism, vaporwave does seem to capture the plight of a generation literally lost in translation. It creates an almost dreadful nostalgia for a promise that was never met.

Vaporwave captures this sense of disillusionment better than any other music genre spawned by the internet. We can see this in its over decade-long life span, which in the flashing years of the internet reads like a century, and as long as we continue to live in the world we currently live in, vaporwave is likely to remain with us.

 

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1. Holleman, Hannah, et al. “The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital.” Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 11, 2009, pp. 1–23. ↩︎
2. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Penguin, 2012. ↩︎
3. Harper, Adam. “Comment: Vaporwave and the Pop‑Art of the Virtual Plaza”. Dummy Mag, 12 July 2012. ↩︎
4. Pezzuti, Gianluca. “TEST TUBE GENRE”. The Overdub, 26 Aug. 2015. ↩︎
5. Nowak, Raphaël, and Andrew Whelan. “‘Vaporwave Is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism’: Genre Work in An Online Music Scene”. Open Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018, pp. 451–62. ↩︎
6. Palley, Thomas I. “Globalization Checkmated? Political and Geopolitical Contradictions Coming Home to Roost.” Monthly Review, vol. 69, no. 8, 2018, pp. 2-3. ↩︎
7. Editor’s Note: This quotation comes from Dan Bell’s YouTube video essay “VAPORWAVE: A DEAD MALL DOCUMENTARY”, instead of his talk at TEDxMidAtlantic. Discussions on the internet merged and mixed the two sources. This misattribution had been circulating on Tumblr aesthetic blogs, Reddit vaporwave threads, and Discord communities devoted to mallwave and late-capital nostalgia around 2018–2022. ↩︎