What do you think?
Rate this book
Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts
In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry.
Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it - "haunted."
Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production.
Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave's many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism's effect on art, musical raids on mainstream "indie" and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce.
Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it - "haunted."
Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production.
Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave's many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism's effect on art, musical raids on mainstream "indie" and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
60 people are currently reading
1891 people want to read
About the author
Grafton Tanner
6 books98 followersGrafton Tanner is the author of The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech, and Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts. His work has appeared in NPR, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Real Life. He also hosts Delusioneering, an audio series about the myths of capitalism, and he writes and performs music with his band Superpuppet.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 119 reviews
May 8, 2017
More like three and a half. The author is clearly very young, and offers an intelligent and worthwhile critical analysis on a hyperniche musical movement within the accelerated culture that deserves such academic attention. As a gateway into the analysis of hauntological scholastic studies, it is valuable if only as a summation of its sources.
BUT
As someone who has suffered from depression for a decade plus now, what I took as the author's tacit admission of being a fellow sufferer in the acknowledgments made abundant sense as a guiding force behind his interpretation. When I stumbled upon the proto-spf420 collective when room surfing in turntable.fm, I didn't want to hang with them because of any post-9/11 malingering capitalist monoculture malaise. It was FUN. There was a definite sense of humor amidst the nihilism, and this book focuses on the latter almost to a fault. I like vaporwave because it helps me get out of depression and to think less of the miserable world described within this text. Perhaps Simpsonswave, a largely vapor-soundtracked meme that finally helped many of my friends understand the appeal of the music, would be worthy as an additional chapter. But the authors views are definitely valid...i just don't see it as quite as dark.
Apart from that, my only complaint is that the sections that venture into philosophy are largely a series of quotations from pretty heavy texts that a layperson such as myself largely intimidated by the works of merleau-ponty et al cannot fully appreciate, which is fine. The last chapter is really good (but I'm sorry, I don't care how capitalist Taylor swift is, you're not going to make me hate the ear candy of 1989). If anything, I wish I'd had the notion to write a book about my larger turntable.fm experience while it was still fresher in my mind. Stupid short-term memory loss.
BUT
As someone who has suffered from depression for a decade plus now, what I took as the author's tacit admission of being a fellow sufferer in the acknowledgments made abundant sense as a guiding force behind his interpretation. When I stumbled upon the proto-spf420 collective when room surfing in turntable.fm, I didn't want to hang with them because of any post-9/11 malingering capitalist monoculture malaise. It was FUN. There was a definite sense of humor amidst the nihilism, and this book focuses on the latter almost to a fault. I like vaporwave because it helps me get out of depression and to think less of the miserable world described within this text. Perhaps Simpsonswave, a largely vapor-soundtracked meme that finally helped many of my friends understand the appeal of the music, would be worthy as an additional chapter. But the authors views are definitely valid...i just don't see it as quite as dark.
Apart from that, my only complaint is that the sections that venture into philosophy are largely a series of quotations from pretty heavy texts that a layperson such as myself largely intimidated by the works of merleau-ponty et al cannot fully appreciate, which is fine. The last chapter is really good (but I'm sorry, I don't care how capitalist Taylor swift is, you're not going to make me hate the ear candy of 1989). If anything, I wish I'd had the notion to write a book about my larger turntable.fm experience while it was still fresher in my mind. Stupid short-term memory loss.
July 7, 2016
a great first (real!) published book to come out on vaporwave! it touches enough on the subject independently, but is mainly concerned with the cultural concerns that surround it (which is, in my opinion, totally relevant and okay! he seems to know everything that is important, but i think gives too much credit to graham harman and pitchfork [possibly TMT])
the most obvious flaw above my critique of OOO is that he rips into "avengers" as drivel cinema, while praising "cabin in the woods" as some sort of deconstructionist masterpiece without acknowledging that they are by the same director.
i think there was more to work with than what he presented and that this could be extended into something larger, but as far as i am aware he is one of the first to actually publish on this subject in a meaningful way and did so with great promise. i'm still skeptical of object-oriented ontology because it seems reductionist to me (i/r/t marx who seemed to assert the opposite as realism?) but i haven't read enough yet to adequately respond to the author's adherence to philosophical trends.
this should all be read as complimentary. the author knowledgeably tackles contemporary culture and succeeds, while even acknowledging the importance of the caretaker, negativland, and death grips. i'd cite u
the most obvious flaw above my critique of OOO is that he rips into "avengers" as drivel cinema, while praising "cabin in the woods" as some sort of deconstructionist masterpiece without acknowledging that they are by the same director.
i think there was more to work with than what he presented and that this could be extended into something larger, but as far as i am aware he is one of the first to actually publish on this subject in a meaningful way and did so with great promise. i'm still skeptical of object-oriented ontology because it seems reductionist to me (i/r/t marx who seemed to assert the opposite as realism?) but i haven't read enough yet to adequately respond to the author's adherence to philosophical trends.
this should all be read as complimentary. the author knowledgeably tackles contemporary culture and succeeds, while even acknowledging the importance of the caretaker, negativland, and death grips. i'd cite u
May 21, 2019
I’m not sure why I decided to read a book about vaporwave in 2019 since, as I understand it, the genre has long been dead. I’d considered reading Babbling Corpse when it first came out, but synopses I read lent the impression that whatever passingly interesting while more or less straightforward takes on the music and its aesthetics it contained would be saddled down with too much over-simplistic anti-capitalism fluff to ultimately warrant a read. So I passed.
Only to pick it up a couple years later when the music had arguably exceeded its prime. Having finished it, I’m realizing that it was because vaporwave is past its prime that I finally read it. Vaguely I’d begun envisioning some commentary that would treat vaporwave the way vaporwave treats the recent past, that would reinvigorate it by compressing and condensing it into something more essential than it ever in fact was. I let building nostalgia for the genre I enjoyed override my initial reservations about the book—which in the end proved correct.
How have I managed to stick with vaporwave despite my failure to identify with its anti-capitalism origins? Largely because vaporwave has splintered into too many subgenres (micro-micro-genres) to sustain anything like a consistent political message. But to the degree that something like this does hold I think it’s the wrong way to interpret it—or at least the wrong way to phrase it. Anti-consumerism, yes, but consumerism and capitalism aren’t the same thing, and their frequent treatment as synonyms generates confusion. Consumerism is to some degree an individual spending mentality (or time preference) independent of the economic system, and then it’s also the result of monetary and fiscal policies favored by Keynesian economists which aim to instill this mentality into the population. There are other flavors of government policy still within the capitalism framework that don’t make the same emphasis—or that deemphasize it. Different conceptions of capitalism and many a tweak could send the system in quite divergent paths. At any rate, capitalism in the book isn’t really defined—the impression is more that the readership will arrive already equipped with a healthy disdain for whatever that term might encompass.
The capitalist-consumerist equation is unfortunately one that Grafton Tanner takes and runs with (although he usually uses the phrasing “unrestrained capitalism”—as if what we have, what he’s rebelling against, is anything near being free of restraint), leaving him ill-equipped to fashion any denunciation more sophisticated than what’s already baked into the music itself—it’s origins at least. (The music actually seems a little more complex in these respects—setting firmly into print what’s so strongly implicit in the subject of analysis in fact makes parts of the book even a little embarrassing to read.)
Setting aside a concerted rallying cry at the end of the book, such analysis generally arrives here and there by inserting something effectively the equivalent of …because of capitalism after some otherwise half-interesting, engaging even, observation that on its own would be perfectly worthy of inclusion in a book on vaporwave. It’s not quite as clumsy as that, but it’s not all that great an exaggeration either—the point being that keeping the interesting discussion separated from the bloat is a mental subtraction that’s not too difficult. Still, these over-simplicities will likely prove annoying to readership segments beyond the pro-market crowd. (If it helps with the arithmetic in making the call on whether or not to read it, the book’s only 71 pages.)
The idea is that vaporwave makes visible the wreckage of the present, robbed of its last scraps of meaning by capitalistic excess, by putting on ironic display the consumerist relics of our recent past in all their warped glory. If the only remaining cultural avenue for expression we’re left with is to continue mining the past in the hopes of exhuming a blueprint for the next retro revival, vaporwave will do likewise, but it will do so grotesquely, humorously, uncannily, so that our necromancy might not continue totally unperceived.
While I agree about the ongoing decline in meaning, I’m suspicious of the attributed cause. Yes, vaporwave makes visible the wreckage of the present, but it’s a developmental coordinate that it highlights, not a particular present. Trouble distinguishing signal from noise, or isolating multiple contradictory signals in the same sea of noise, these are problems we’d presumably be contending with in any alternative present where the informational (and accompanying entropic) infrastructure had reached the same point of development.
Vaporwave crafts an interplay between our ironically and authentically experienced nostalgias. It mocks how naive it was to accept at face value such simple cultural-ideological transmissions while honing an intense fascination for a time when it was possible to do so. We’ve lost meaning to the granularity of our inspection—not to what we’ve chosen to focus our inspection on, but to what we’ve made it possible to inspect. While vaporwave’s aesthetic is shaped by shopping malls and cola advertisements, it isn’t these specifically that we long for. Our longing aims more generally at a period of time, one when the entropic frontier was a visible horizon that we strode purposefully toward. Before meaning disappeared for good beyond that horizon, into concentric rings of snowballing extremes and microscopically tapering granularities, it used to manifest at the human scale. Where novelty manifests now in increasingly arcane data structures at scales we can’t directly interface with, it formerly evolved before our eyes, creating new cultural landscapes as it went. 90s computer design is another element of the vaporwave aesthetic, digital touchstones from a time when you actually logged on and logged off of the internet. How recent, yet how quaint! A choice vaporwave sample, “You’ve got mail”, summons a time when you needed something to inform you whether or not you’d actually received a new email. Now a counter displays the non-zero number of unread messages you have accumulating in an always-open inbox. There’s undeniably a consumerist commentary in vaporwave but it’s difficult to pinpoint much more than that. Despite an almost visceral disgust toward advertising, I frequently have dreams set in the shopping malls of my youth. The yearning is for a time when it was possible to get lost and to get bored. Parking lots and highways cordoned the mall off from any external reality and my only link with the outside was a quarter for the payphone to call for a ride home.
Regrettably my process when encountering new music these days involves hopping through an album in segments of thirty seconds to a few minutes to gauge whether or not it’d be something I’d enjoy listening to if I had the time to listen to music anymore, drifting off into fantasies of what it’d be like to actually listen straight through. Vaporwave’s genius is in counteracting this sort of scan-listen music perusal. Through repetition of short samples vaporwave turns scan-throughs into a practical joke. The recognizability of its substrate—chart toppers and sonic ambiances from prior decades—makes clear that the listening experience is being deliberately slowed. The decelerated soundscape that emerges palpably precludes information overload, serving as cathartic antidote to 2x podcast listening and hurry-up-and-enjoy-yourself media binging.
Tanner’s analysis focuses on a fairly narrow scope of vaporwave, but (as I already noted) vaporwave is somewhat vaster. (Here’s a nice video outlining its history and internal divergences.) Its Marxist origins fairly early dissolve into the much more general aim of creating transportive experience: alternative soundscapes and timescapes and e-scapes (electronic escapism if the pun wasn’t clear). Escapism, more so than resistance to capitalism, becomes an aesthetic commonality.
As our capacity to manipulate matter and information becomes increasingly fine-grained, activity on a human scale becomes second- (third-, fourth-, fifth-…) order effect—installing us into a virtual reality completely coextensive with the world of our physical bodies, an envelope of noise that absorbs whatever signal we attempt to transmit through it. Abandoning capitalism in an effort to reinstall meaning would simply be another avenue of escapism. Would mandating that humans perform historical reenactments of jobs that any machine could do (that is, forestalling automation) flood the world with dignity and meaning? As things progress more of our lives adopt this reenactive/performative aspect.
An excess of concern over the crisis of capitalism distracts from the ongoing entropic crisis. Plastered onto our shared event horizon are the last bits of meaning that were scaled for human interface. In an effort to prevent these fading signals from blinking out of existence we’ve amplified them, autotuned them, knocked the gain around, and subjected them to whatever other digital augmentations we could concoct to keep them alive, imbuing gaudy revival with fleeting verisimilitude. Vaporwave made this losing strategy visible. But this was only its initial phase. With the implicit realization that “reality” has surpassed our sensorial remit, vaporwave took these last scraps of meaning and, disavowing any pretension they had in their original incarnations to uniformity of appeal or narrative self-consistency, comingled past with future-aesthetic into soundscapes which evoked eras that never existed yet which were still somehow padded with nostalgic feeling.
So is vaporwave dead? It’s fractured and evolved too much at this point (like capitalism) for that to any longer be a meaningful designation. In one of the book’s more interesting analyses, Tanner likens vaporwave to punk (in the way that vaporwave takes a critical stance, under a proliferation of pseudonyms, has strong accompanying visual component, and manifests and circulates in DIY fashion). But vaporwave’s subsequent dissipation into the broader stream of internet music says something about the wider revolution Tanner advocates.
Is punk dead? What does it mean for a genre to be dead? They die when they’re codified into an aesthetic. Once codified as such they can be (dis)simulated at will. Sporting a mohawk makes only one statement at this point, fashion statement—and an especially obnoxious one since the wearer hopes to win points for the rebelliousness for which that haircut has been encoded, for what’s merely an alternative brand of conformity. Fashion has already incorporated its own dissent. And then how in a world with increasingly fewer prohibitions do you voice disapproval when almost anything you wear will be interpreted as you doing your thing? As it is for fashion, so it goes for aesthetics more broadly. To the degree that vaporwave is a new form of punk, like cyberpunk or steampunk, it’s punk aesthetic. If there’s an online punk today (when there is no opt-out) it’d be the cypherpunk.
None of this is to paint vaporwave as a failure or in some way less gratifying. When asserting dissatisfaction or merely non-accidental indifference (an indifference that makes a difference) requires more effort than taking an active part in the system, vaporwave’s struggle in making assertions along these lines has been valiant. And for a music that has created so much confusion as to whether it should be classified as a new genre or just a meme, the fact that it’s still around at all is impressive. This ambiguity is part of vaporwave’s allure. I did like much of Tanner’s analysis, but vaporwave isn’t something to classify so certainly. It seems to thwart certainty more than it thwarts capitalism. Its longevity maybe stems from (apart maybe from its initial phase) making approval and recrimination near impossible to disentangle. The nostalgia incorporated into vaporwave plays an important role in shaping this ambiguity. Are we nostalgic for the synthetic worlds evoked by these soundscapes (this would be a feat) or merely for a time that had a future that we could interface with, for a time prior to nostalgia’s codification? But Tanner wants to end with a rallying cry—something to the general tune of Vaporwave is punk and let’s bring down capitalism. Now that vaporwave’s quintessential 2011 Floral Shoppe has received an 8.8/10 in Pitchfork’s Sunday retrospective review feature when they’d almost not even mentioned the genre prior, it should be time for any remaining hangers-on to be second-guessing vaporwave’s ultimate revolutionary potential. Vaporwave is now old enough to haunt us.
If power has been increasingly centralizing, it’s because our media’s reach has outpaced their sensitivity. More locally directed action involved sorting ourselves with an inaccessible resolution. There’s a strong intuition that says that the more knowledge we collectively accumulate the greater our ability to coordinate and calibrate society with greater and greater acumen. But in fact, the greater the granularity of our knowledge, the more we’re able to (dis)simulate the affairs of the human scale. Coordination at grand scale hereby suffers under the continuous requirement for verification. What at first blush resembles consensus on closer inspection is revealed as a massive ongoing DDoS attack whereby society’s few conspicuous chokepoints are flooded with the varied individual definitions of what society is that each of its constituent members generates. The increasing malleability of our network topologies within physically static geographies, on the other hand, engenders novel action at the “local” level because such reorganization reconstrues locality. Centripetal macro-narrative, which had always been a poor fit but couldn’t be overcome due to the prohibitive cost of self-sorting, begins to dissipate. Not only is there a more complete satisfaction of our individual affinities but new, more specific, and potentially more ad hoc affinities become possible to organize around.
Revolution, to have any prospect of success, must make the simulator its target. Revolution within the simulation will be simulated revolution. The simulator cares nothing about ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃｓ. Only the rules are real. While today’s institutional orders are far from ideal, the solution isn’t to topple them but to obsolesce them (hopefully without much further collateral obsolescing of ourselves, but that may very well be the necessary price). Although simulation is inescapable, there’s no ultimate solution—that is, we don’t want some unitary simulation imposed upon everyone at the expense of all other simulations. And the system should be structured such that it doesn’t rely on putting the “right people” in charge. Such unstable equilibria are far too undependable to build anything atop of. Even the best of us (however you’d chose to define that) too quickly entertain ideas of installing the “right” simulation. Music, of whatever (micro-)genre, isn’t going to fix this. Because simulation is inescapable the idea is to optimize the system for the proliferation of simulations in order to maximize the chance of finding one that’s enjoyable, one you feel like inhabiting rather than escaping (which will be the case when forcing people into a simulation they would not choose), one that—although it may be a simulation of a time that never actually existed back when reality was real—you can feel nostalgic for. Tanner ended with an exclamation point when it should have been with a question mark. Revolution is already coded as such. What do we do in light of that?
Only to pick it up a couple years later when the music had arguably exceeded its prime. Having finished it, I’m realizing that it was because vaporwave is past its prime that I finally read it. Vaguely I’d begun envisioning some commentary that would treat vaporwave the way vaporwave treats the recent past, that would reinvigorate it by compressing and condensing it into something more essential than it ever in fact was. I let building nostalgia for the genre I enjoyed override my initial reservations about the book—which in the end proved correct.
How have I managed to stick with vaporwave despite my failure to identify with its anti-capitalism origins? Largely because vaporwave has splintered into too many subgenres (micro-micro-genres) to sustain anything like a consistent political message. But to the degree that something like this does hold I think it’s the wrong way to interpret it—or at least the wrong way to phrase it. Anti-consumerism, yes, but consumerism and capitalism aren’t the same thing, and their frequent treatment as synonyms generates confusion. Consumerism is to some degree an individual spending mentality (or time preference) independent of the economic system, and then it’s also the result of monetary and fiscal policies favored by Keynesian economists which aim to instill this mentality into the population. There are other flavors of government policy still within the capitalism framework that don’t make the same emphasis—or that deemphasize it. Different conceptions of capitalism and many a tweak could send the system in quite divergent paths. At any rate, capitalism in the book isn’t really defined—the impression is more that the readership will arrive already equipped with a healthy disdain for whatever that term might encompass.
The capitalist-consumerist equation is unfortunately one that Grafton Tanner takes and runs with (although he usually uses the phrasing “unrestrained capitalism”—as if what we have, what he’s rebelling against, is anything near being free of restraint), leaving him ill-equipped to fashion any denunciation more sophisticated than what’s already baked into the music itself—it’s origins at least. (The music actually seems a little more complex in these respects—setting firmly into print what’s so strongly implicit in the subject of analysis in fact makes parts of the book even a little embarrassing to read.)
Setting aside a concerted rallying cry at the end of the book, such analysis generally arrives here and there by inserting something effectively the equivalent of …because of capitalism after some otherwise half-interesting, engaging even, observation that on its own would be perfectly worthy of inclusion in a book on vaporwave. It’s not quite as clumsy as that, but it’s not all that great an exaggeration either—the point being that keeping the interesting discussion separated from the bloat is a mental subtraction that’s not too difficult. Still, these over-simplicities will likely prove annoying to readership segments beyond the pro-market crowd. (If it helps with the arithmetic in making the call on whether or not to read it, the book’s only 71 pages.)
The idea is that vaporwave makes visible the wreckage of the present, robbed of its last scraps of meaning by capitalistic excess, by putting on ironic display the consumerist relics of our recent past in all their warped glory. If the only remaining cultural avenue for expression we’re left with is to continue mining the past in the hopes of exhuming a blueprint for the next retro revival, vaporwave will do likewise, but it will do so grotesquely, humorously, uncannily, so that our necromancy might not continue totally unperceived.
While I agree about the ongoing decline in meaning, I’m suspicious of the attributed cause. Yes, vaporwave makes visible the wreckage of the present, but it’s a developmental coordinate that it highlights, not a particular present. Trouble distinguishing signal from noise, or isolating multiple contradictory signals in the same sea of noise, these are problems we’d presumably be contending with in any alternative present where the informational (and accompanying entropic) infrastructure had reached the same point of development.
Vaporwave crafts an interplay between our ironically and authentically experienced nostalgias. It mocks how naive it was to accept at face value such simple cultural-ideological transmissions while honing an intense fascination for a time when it was possible to do so. We’ve lost meaning to the granularity of our inspection—not to what we’ve chosen to focus our inspection on, but to what we’ve made it possible to inspect. While vaporwave’s aesthetic is shaped by shopping malls and cola advertisements, it isn’t these specifically that we long for. Our longing aims more generally at a period of time, one when the entropic frontier was a visible horizon that we strode purposefully toward. Before meaning disappeared for good beyond that horizon, into concentric rings of snowballing extremes and microscopically tapering granularities, it used to manifest at the human scale. Where novelty manifests now in increasingly arcane data structures at scales we can’t directly interface with, it formerly evolved before our eyes, creating new cultural landscapes as it went. 90s computer design is another element of the vaporwave aesthetic, digital touchstones from a time when you actually logged on and logged off of the internet. How recent, yet how quaint! A choice vaporwave sample, “You’ve got mail”, summons a time when you needed something to inform you whether or not you’d actually received a new email. Now a counter displays the non-zero number of unread messages you have accumulating in an always-open inbox. There’s undeniably a consumerist commentary in vaporwave but it’s difficult to pinpoint much more than that. Despite an almost visceral disgust toward advertising, I frequently have dreams set in the shopping malls of my youth. The yearning is for a time when it was possible to get lost and to get bored. Parking lots and highways cordoned the mall off from any external reality and my only link with the outside was a quarter for the payphone to call for a ride home.
Regrettably my process when encountering new music these days involves hopping through an album in segments of thirty seconds to a few minutes to gauge whether or not it’d be something I’d enjoy listening to if I had the time to listen to music anymore, drifting off into fantasies of what it’d be like to actually listen straight through. Vaporwave’s genius is in counteracting this sort of scan-listen music perusal. Through repetition of short samples vaporwave turns scan-throughs into a practical joke. The recognizability of its substrate—chart toppers and sonic ambiances from prior decades—makes clear that the listening experience is being deliberately slowed. The decelerated soundscape that emerges palpably precludes information overload, serving as cathartic antidote to 2x podcast listening and hurry-up-and-enjoy-yourself media binging.
Tanner’s analysis focuses on a fairly narrow scope of vaporwave, but (as I already noted) vaporwave is somewhat vaster. (Here’s a nice video outlining its history and internal divergences.) Its Marxist origins fairly early dissolve into the much more general aim of creating transportive experience: alternative soundscapes and timescapes and e-scapes (electronic escapism if the pun wasn’t clear). Escapism, more so than resistance to capitalism, becomes an aesthetic commonality.
As our capacity to manipulate matter and information becomes increasingly fine-grained, activity on a human scale becomes second- (third-, fourth-, fifth-…) order effect—installing us into a virtual reality completely coextensive with the world of our physical bodies, an envelope of noise that absorbs whatever signal we attempt to transmit through it. Abandoning capitalism in an effort to reinstall meaning would simply be another avenue of escapism. Would mandating that humans perform historical reenactments of jobs that any machine could do (that is, forestalling automation) flood the world with dignity and meaning? As things progress more of our lives adopt this reenactive/performative aspect.
An excess of concern over the crisis of capitalism distracts from the ongoing entropic crisis. Plastered onto our shared event horizon are the last bits of meaning that were scaled for human interface. In an effort to prevent these fading signals from blinking out of existence we’ve amplified them, autotuned them, knocked the gain around, and subjected them to whatever other digital augmentations we could concoct to keep them alive, imbuing gaudy revival with fleeting verisimilitude. Vaporwave made this losing strategy visible. But this was only its initial phase. With the implicit realization that “reality” has surpassed our sensorial remit, vaporwave took these last scraps of meaning and, disavowing any pretension they had in their original incarnations to uniformity of appeal or narrative self-consistency, comingled past with future-aesthetic into soundscapes which evoked eras that never existed yet which were still somehow padded with nostalgic feeling.
So is vaporwave dead? It’s fractured and evolved too much at this point (like capitalism) for that to any longer be a meaningful designation. In one of the book’s more interesting analyses, Tanner likens vaporwave to punk (in the way that vaporwave takes a critical stance, under a proliferation of pseudonyms, has strong accompanying visual component, and manifests and circulates in DIY fashion). But vaporwave’s subsequent dissipation into the broader stream of internet music says something about the wider revolution Tanner advocates.
Is punk dead? What does it mean for a genre to be dead? They die when they’re codified into an aesthetic. Once codified as such they can be (dis)simulated at will. Sporting a mohawk makes only one statement at this point, fashion statement—and an especially obnoxious one since the wearer hopes to win points for the rebelliousness for which that haircut has been encoded, for what’s merely an alternative brand of conformity. Fashion has already incorporated its own dissent. And then how in a world with increasingly fewer prohibitions do you voice disapproval when almost anything you wear will be interpreted as you doing your thing? As it is for fashion, so it goes for aesthetics more broadly. To the degree that vaporwave is a new form of punk, like cyberpunk or steampunk, it’s punk aesthetic. If there’s an online punk today (when there is no opt-out) it’d be the cypherpunk.
None of this is to paint vaporwave as a failure or in some way less gratifying. When asserting dissatisfaction or merely non-accidental indifference (an indifference that makes a difference) requires more effort than taking an active part in the system, vaporwave’s struggle in making assertions along these lines has been valiant. And for a music that has created so much confusion as to whether it should be classified as a new genre or just a meme, the fact that it’s still around at all is impressive. This ambiguity is part of vaporwave’s allure. I did like much of Tanner’s analysis, but vaporwave isn’t something to classify so certainly. It seems to thwart certainty more than it thwarts capitalism. Its longevity maybe stems from (apart maybe from its initial phase) making approval and recrimination near impossible to disentangle. The nostalgia incorporated into vaporwave plays an important role in shaping this ambiguity. Are we nostalgic for the synthetic worlds evoked by these soundscapes (this would be a feat) or merely for a time that had a future that we could interface with, for a time prior to nostalgia’s codification? But Tanner wants to end with a rallying cry—something to the general tune of Vaporwave is punk and let’s bring down capitalism. Now that vaporwave’s quintessential 2011 Floral Shoppe has received an 8.8/10 in Pitchfork’s Sunday retrospective review feature when they’d almost not even mentioned the genre prior, it should be time for any remaining hangers-on to be second-guessing vaporwave’s ultimate revolutionary potential. Vaporwave is now old enough to haunt us.
If power has been increasingly centralizing, it’s because our media’s reach has outpaced their sensitivity. More locally directed action involved sorting ourselves with an inaccessible resolution. There’s a strong intuition that says that the more knowledge we collectively accumulate the greater our ability to coordinate and calibrate society with greater and greater acumen. But in fact, the greater the granularity of our knowledge, the more we’re able to (dis)simulate the affairs of the human scale. Coordination at grand scale hereby suffers under the continuous requirement for verification. What at first blush resembles consensus on closer inspection is revealed as a massive ongoing DDoS attack whereby society’s few conspicuous chokepoints are flooded with the varied individual definitions of what society is that each of its constituent members generates. The increasing malleability of our network topologies within physically static geographies, on the other hand, engenders novel action at the “local” level because such reorganization reconstrues locality. Centripetal macro-narrative, which had always been a poor fit but couldn’t be overcome due to the prohibitive cost of self-sorting, begins to dissipate. Not only is there a more complete satisfaction of our individual affinities but new, more specific, and potentially more ad hoc affinities become possible to organize around.
Revolution, to have any prospect of success, must make the simulator its target. Revolution within the simulation will be simulated revolution. The simulator cares nothing about ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃｓ. Only the rules are real. While today’s institutional orders are far from ideal, the solution isn’t to topple them but to obsolesce them (hopefully without much further collateral obsolescing of ourselves, but that may very well be the necessary price). Although simulation is inescapable, there’s no ultimate solution—that is, we don’t want some unitary simulation imposed upon everyone at the expense of all other simulations. And the system should be structured such that it doesn’t rely on putting the “right people” in charge. Such unstable equilibria are far too undependable to build anything atop of. Even the best of us (however you’d chose to define that) too quickly entertain ideas of installing the “right” simulation. Music, of whatever (micro-)genre, isn’t going to fix this. Because simulation is inescapable the idea is to optimize the system for the proliferation of simulations in order to maximize the chance of finding one that’s enjoyable, one you feel like inhabiting rather than escaping (which will be the case when forcing people into a simulation they would not choose), one that—although it may be a simulation of a time that never actually existed back when reality was real—you can feel nostalgic for. Tanner ended with an exclamation point when it should have been with a question mark. Revolution is already coded as such. What do we do in light of that?
September 29, 2021
Insightful look at vaporwave as a genre, process and cultural phenomenon. While it might seem like a niche topic, Tanner does a great job of demonstrating why vaporwave is important and how it relates to the wider trends of postmodernism, neoliberalism and internet culture. I particularly found the discussion of media overconsumption and music exhaustion to be really interesting, it seems like something a lot of us are feeling but don't often discuss or know a good way of escaping without feeling alienated from the wider culture. The book's only short and very readable so definitely recommend to anyone interested.
June 26, 2019
really didnt expect a book on vaporwave to blow me away this much but i am thoroughly impressed.
the book feels sort of pretentious, but thats a problem that all music writers seem to have. theres no good way to discuss music without listening to it, without letting your audience hear it. you have to describe music, describe how it feels to listen to a song, and doing that work seems pretentious. theres no way around this. anyone who writes about music sounds like some smug /mu/ asshole without necessarily meaning to do so.
but in the second half and particularly the last third, the author makes this light book on vaporwave into an absolutely scathing critique of mass culture. i mean, he is fucking brutal. tanner is ultimately asking: is any of this instant access to instant gratification even worth it? and the more we delve into it the more we realize that perhaps it isnt, perhaps vaporwave is a response to a traumatized society incapable of experiencing true emotion. everything is there at our fingertips. we dont need to worry about not having access, we just need to worry about missing out. and the entire media and culture industry has adapted to capitalisms soul sucking in ways that feels hollow and inadequate. we are ghosts being sold ghost music.
its a short but damning read, 10/10
the book feels sort of pretentious, but thats a problem that all music writers seem to have. theres no good way to discuss music without listening to it, without letting your audience hear it. you have to describe music, describe how it feels to listen to a song, and doing that work seems pretentious. theres no way around this. anyone who writes about music sounds like some smug /mu/ asshole without necessarily meaning to do so.
but in the second half and particularly the last third, the author makes this light book on vaporwave into an absolutely scathing critique of mass culture. i mean, he is fucking brutal. tanner is ultimately asking: is any of this instant access to instant gratification even worth it? and the more we delve into it the more we realize that perhaps it isnt, perhaps vaporwave is a response to a traumatized society incapable of experiencing true emotion. everything is there at our fingertips. we dont need to worry about not having access, we just need to worry about missing out. and the entire media and culture industry has adapted to capitalisms soul sucking in ways that feels hollow and inadequate. we are ghosts being sold ghost music.
its a short but damning read, 10/10
April 6, 2021
A couple tricky hurdles the book stumbled with. One is that it refuses to outline what vaporwave was/is, but without very much of a rigorous or meaningful justification for avoiding it. Even outlining that a definition was provisional and then giving it with that clause intact would’ve been a more useful and tidy gesture for the reader (and for the actual writing itself); also wandered pretty aimlessly between various media forms without grounding how the theory or the genre looks as it adapts to those mediums. Another hurdle is that the writing on the music itself is pretty uninspired, and much like Fisher fell prey to in his work, utilizes almost zero actual close-listening or insightful descriptions of the music (here, more specifically the production techniques) at hand, instead relying on a kind of thematic album reviewer voice, rarely if ever illustrating connections between the popular theory enlisted (chiefly: Jameson and Hutcheon, Fisher, Land, And Derrida) and the vague picture of the beloved music. There’s no innovation in clumping the above listed theorists together, nor in wanting to infuse the haunted motif into a genre that might actually benefit from that kind of theoretical zest, but, well, this could’ve been a short essay, and it could’ve staked out some point; if an essay doesn’t have even a tiny thesis, just some argument someone could reasonably disagree with, is it an essay? At what point does particular writing stop being an essay or a book-length argument and start being an ambitious album review survey? Lots of great idea seeds, but underbaked. Zero books has such a strange latitude, where you get amateur titles like this, nauseatingly academy-poisoned hyperdrive versions of the ambitious album review (melancology), and never the meaningful philosophical treatments in an accessible public voice (which is kinda supposed to be their whole thing). Also, bruh, the mall is not the devil? Like, the edgelord ‘Taylor swift and all pop music is soulless and makes the world a giant mall and that’s bad’ gag is kind of a laugh and reflects A) that the project needed an actual thesis to pursue instead of a redundant rhetorical superficial complaint path to tread down and B) that the project hasn’t considered the actual sonic spaces that influence the music and its reception, that our point of audition in a mall actually would be a great way to interrogate the theory and the music itself and its formal qualities and its effects on us—take for instance, the almost dopplering quality as you go from one store to the next, each vapid muzak track stamped on your brain alongside a different store’s chemical perfume, a small buffet of overwhelming sensory surge and diminishment, but an unconscious, unfelt experience, and that vaporwave helps render that kind of shopping center script conspicuous and visible, blah blah blah; and here’s my question: did vaporwave actually have the power to do that? Honestly, I doubt it. Music has, for a very long time, been the least demanding art form to engage with for the audience, and that’s not some new late-capitalism symptom, that’s the fact that the language of music is almost entirely divorced from the rest of the experience, and the rest is just set dressing. I’m glad I finally got to this book after lots of recommendations over the years, but I’m wishing it had a formal thesis, and perhaps a crueler editor at the helm.
December 28, 2017
For now, we live in the mall, but I think it’s closing soon.
Very hauntological.
Some good lines:
Very hauntological.
Some good lines:
April 1, 2020
Okay, I read this some time ago, but so far as I remember Tanner show us the basics arguments and interpretations of vaporwave as we understand it and as it became publicised as an artistic/well-thought genre of music, whose makers were over-cryptic bored young adults whose life had been made idle by the huge load of meaninglessness up their asses since birth. So it came to this: the delusional reverie as it loops over and over, the cramped up past vastly standardized, floating memories of artistry backed up by endless digital morbidness, and a constant feeling of not being anywhere to be found. And in fact, that's vaporwave. But to take this as some avant-garde plot bursting out of a young & saturated movement or a spout of capitalistic revolt is but stupidity, and as you can see the snake has bit it's own tail -- and although various records have been made afterwards with this intention, I do not thing this is the real meaning of the genre. Vaporwave's full of jokes, and of one them is to make its critics fall spellbound to the same power of nostalgia that inspired the records.
So this is how the over-intellectualization, or better, the understanding of vaporwave as this massculture-war train is mocked by its object. And now we have people who despise vaporwave, though not because they particularly don't enjoy the music, but because for them vaporwave has nothing of really critical, something that is innovative or would change something, is just what it is, a piece of well wrought commodity to put us farther and farther away of our true rejoicing of art. The joke's on you too! The core of vaporwave as it try to overcommodify itself, and to present this as pleasing as possibly, indeed is to put us farther and farther away from "enjoying" art, and it does this collapsing its music, so now to be understood as "sound", and drag it to ambience (this do not refer the ambient music, but to a kind of sensibility) and by no means there's no pleasure in this.
That being said, I look forward to find out in wich joke I'm stuck in.
So this is how the over-intellectualization, or better, the understanding of vaporwave as this massculture-war train is mocked by its object. And now we have people who despise vaporwave, though not because they particularly don't enjoy the music, but because for them vaporwave has nothing of really critical, something that is innovative or would change something, is just what it is, a piece of well wrought commodity to put us farther and farther away of our true rejoicing of art. The joke's on you too! The core of vaporwave as it try to overcommodify itself, and to present this as pleasing as possibly, indeed is to put us farther and farther away from "enjoying" art, and it does this collapsing its music, so now to be understood as "sound", and drag it to ambience (this do not refer the ambient music, but to a kind of sensibility) and by no means there's no pleasure in this.
That being said, I look forward to find out in wich joke I'm stuck in.
May 19, 2017
This slim non-fiction volume (what's the non-fiction equivalent of a novella? Should I just call it an essay?) seems at first to be almost absurdly niche: it sets out to examine modern ideas of 'hauntings', whether the incorporeality of our digital selves or what Tanner calls 'Western culture's preoccupation with the past', through the lens of musical microgenre vaporwave. But its scope becomes much broader than that, exploring contemporary notions of the uncanny and the fraught relationship between capitalism and culture. While it comes a little unstuck at the end (some of the conclusions are a bit hysterical), it's a really interesting read.
February 7, 2018
Babbling Corpse is een boek dat ikzelf had willen schrijven.
October 25, 2023
One of the few later Zer0 Books that reads like a proper Zer0 Book - short, well-argued, intense, ambitious, a little bit overwritten.
December 31, 2021
Some fair points and a lot of insightful data on a genre of music I never really paid attention to (during 2010 I believe I was still illegally downloading music on dial up).
Like Reddit and tumblr, this underground movement flew over my head.
The book itself was kind of all over the place. However, a lot of great books cited/new artists to check out.
Is the future dead? I’m not too sure, but y’all should listen to The Caretaker and think about it yourself.
Like Reddit and tumblr, this underground movement flew over my head.
The book itself was kind of all over the place. However, a lot of great books cited/new artists to check out.
Is the future dead? I’m not too sure, but y’all should listen to The Caretaker and think about it yourself.
December 26, 2016
Interesting discourse analysis of vaporwave music and visual aesthetics. Definitely worthwhile reading if you are into internet sub-cultures and micro-genres. It has a lot of references of audiovisual pop culture (it is handy while reading it to have a smartphone so you can search the examples mentioned). The concept of hauntology is beautiful used and illustrated.
June 20, 2021
Despite vaporwave never really being a thing and it being a dead genre (I mean, how many musical genres can you name that are dead?), I want to laud the author on working out its certain universalities that are still very much apparent within the confines of basically anything we consume in this dead and final stage of capitalism. It's always been about much more than just music. A lot of its inner workings and trappings you can see in other things such as 'PC Music' as well. Gets a bit long winded at the end and some of his examples (e.g. Taylor Swift) really take the wind out of you while reading. Solid book regardless and valuable for anyone with even a remote interest in art, capitalism and the postmodern.
February 20, 2019
excellent read
March 13, 2021
Writing in the tradition of Mark Fisher, Tanner crafts an argument that is broadly compelling, weaving together eclectic references to familiar literary favorites (Dellilo and Leopardi) as well as contemporary theory (McLuhan and Zizek). The theoretical account of vaporwave in terms of Graham Harman's Object Oriented Ontology, while interesting in many respects, approaches these ideas in a way that privileges style over substance, making reading these passages frustrating for anyone with a background in Meillassoux and his co-thinkers. However, these short-comings are ultimately not fatal, and the text manages the difficult task of saying something meaningful about Derrida's concept of hauntology without parroting deconstructive talking points. Tanner summarizes Badley's Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic in an especially pithy way; ghosts are "gaps in the meaning of reality signified. They are meaninglessness made manifest." The ghosts produced by vaporwave aesthetics can be seen as pointing out these gaps, making manifest the meaninglessness of a capitalist reality that mines the past for meaning and packages it in neat consumable commodities.
Tanner is at his best when criticizing the way capitalism lowers our standards, asking us to accept a comfortable life free of illusions:
"All the Muzak, all the consumer goods, all the accessibility – none of these amenities have helped us to swallow the reality that the great deterritorializing force of unrestrained capitalism has wiped any sort of meaning from society. As Alain Badiou reminds us: “Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil.” By lowering our expectations for what a decent, well-mannered society could be, we can then accept whiling away our days in the virtual plaza, taking advantage of what the megacorporations have to offer and blindly believing the lie that any of us can live the dream as long as we pull ourselves up by the boot straps."
Vaporwave and similar musical genres can be understood as radical insofar as they challenge this dream, reminding listeners that the harmonious dreamworld of late capitalism covers over contradictions to produce the appearance of a conflict-free world.
Tanner is at his best when criticizing the way capitalism lowers our standards, asking us to accept a comfortable life free of illusions:
"All the Muzak, all the consumer goods, all the accessibility – none of these amenities have helped us to swallow the reality that the great deterritorializing force of unrestrained capitalism has wiped any sort of meaning from society. As Alain Badiou reminds us: “Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil.” By lowering our expectations for what a decent, well-mannered society could be, we can then accept whiling away our days in the virtual plaza, taking advantage of what the megacorporations have to offer and blindly believing the lie that any of us can live the dream as long as we pull ourselves up by the boot straps."
Vaporwave and similar musical genres can be understood as radical insofar as they challenge this dream, reminding listeners that the harmonious dreamworld of late capitalism covers over contradictions to produce the appearance of a conflict-free world.
May 21, 2017
My experience reiterates the other reviews here. As someone who was already a fan of vapourwave, this book struck me as a timely and incisive meditation with an unusual relevance to my own listening habits. For this reason, I was delighted by the numerous references to vapourwave music and to other comparable aspects of internet culture that riddle the text. With my smartphone to hand, I could read the text while listening to the music that it was analysing, as if the book had its own soundtrack. I have never had a reading experience quite like that. The book also comes with a handy discography of vapourwave music with plenty of albums I've never heard of. The author clearly knows more about music production than I do, and I found his analyses of the genre informing and interesting.
As someone who is also interested in Philosophy and who is sympathetic to left critiques of society and political economy, I did not discover in this book any particularly insightful additions to the genre. On two or three occasions, the author digresses away from his comfortable territory of musicology to offer mostly vague and even cliched indictments of capitalism in general. The author name-drops a number of authors without pursuing them, as well as drawing analogies to philosophical movements without adequately explaining them or giving any detailed explanation of their relevance to vapourwave, such as 'object-oriented ontology' and 'speculative realism', leaving me still unclear as to what these movements actually posit and why. I also think is is unprofessional to cite big-name philosophers in order to justify simple, even platitudinous insights. For example, the author cites Derrida in order to conclude, effectively, that people are still suffering under capitalism. The writing is, however, very clear and enjoyable reading. The whole text reads like a very polished Honours or Masters level dissertation.
I think, overall, this book's target audience is - and this might not come as a surprise - people that are already interested in vapourwave, and I cannot see it having much wider appeal.
As someone who is also interested in Philosophy and who is sympathetic to left critiques of society and political economy, I did not discover in this book any particularly insightful additions to the genre. On two or three occasions, the author digresses away from his comfortable territory of musicology to offer mostly vague and even cliched indictments of capitalism in general. The author name-drops a number of authors without pursuing them, as well as drawing analogies to philosophical movements without adequately explaining them or giving any detailed explanation of their relevance to vapourwave, such as 'object-oriented ontology' and 'speculative realism', leaving me still unclear as to what these movements actually posit and why. I also think is is unprofessional to cite big-name philosophers in order to justify simple, even platitudinous insights. For example, the author cites Derrida in order to conclude, effectively, that people are still suffering under capitalism. The writing is, however, very clear and enjoyable reading. The whole text reads like a very polished Honours or Masters level dissertation.
I think, overall, this book's target audience is - and this might not come as a surprise - people that are already interested in vapourwave, and I cannot see it having much wider appeal.
March 24, 2021
very engaging almost the whole way through, altho the last chapter takes a sharp turn into boring humanism, which is sometimes making me think that the humanist left has lost, for good. Tanner falls into the pitfall he decides to critique modern capitalist society of, the romanticizing of a haunted memory of life before the rapid information society, this is despite the fact that he takes op OOO in the first chapter and goes into how philosophy has taken an interesting turn to look at objects outside of the human, even going so far as to parrot the watchmen's authors rather conservative opinion about how grown men "shouldnt watch cartoons/hero movies"(MCU. red)(this has nothing to do with marvel basically being fastfood movies btw, but that point was never brought up, we just get a swift "cartoons that are meant for children should not be consumed by "adults" and moving swiftly on).
This happens right after as well with a quote from Chris Hedges that parrots the idea of a cyclical history view and the fall of empires that is usually used as justifications in works from such thinkers as Spengler and Evola.
another problem is the jab at the author of Elevator Musik, Joseph Lanza when he says that muzaks purpose was to distill the happiness that modern technology brings, but how is this not true? I do agree that its hauntological in its own right, because the promise was never fulfilled and I cant say if it will, but it clearly attributes to his own case here if only he bothered to read more into the quote.
I cant figure out if im the pessimist or he is, but we're at a crossroads here that I think calls for something more radical than just navel-gazing, falling into the same trap as we critique capitalism to do, for capital gain or not. The future is posthuman, this is a hill I will die on.
This happens right after as well with a quote from Chris Hedges that parrots the idea of a cyclical history view and the fall of empires that is usually used as justifications in works from such thinkers as Spengler and Evola.
another problem is the jab at the author of Elevator Musik, Joseph Lanza when he says that muzaks purpose was to distill the happiness that modern technology brings, but how is this not true? I do agree that its hauntological in its own right, because the promise was never fulfilled and I cant say if it will, but it clearly attributes to his own case here if only he bothered to read more into the quote.
I cant figure out if im the pessimist or he is, but we're at a crossroads here that I think calls for something more radical than just navel-gazing, falling into the same trap as we critique capitalism to do, for capital gain or not. The future is posthuman, this is a hill I will die on.
July 18, 2018
I like the way how in the logic that Tanner appoints to vaporwave genre and the aesthetics that accompany it, the (re)surface of the uncanny occur in the form of a crisis in the otherwise seemingly natural workings of contemporary capitalism. vaporwave by taking its setting in non space and non time in turn defaces the non spatial and non durational character of capitalism. in a twist it creates a foil in which the nightmarish features of vaporwave fails to divide itself from reality. moreover by exposing culture as a strictly edited virtuality, it also exposes capitalism as simply a constructed reality. thus in turn capitalism ceases to have the appearance of an only possible way.
Read
July 26, 2020Not a huge fan of vaporwave, but the prospect of reading about an essentially underground form of music put in the context of the sociopolitical state of its age seemed pretty promising, and it didn't dissappoint.
+I should read more Simon Reynolds.
+I should read more Simon Reynolds.
April 6, 2018
Very weird reading about Vaporwave and Youtube Poops in an academic context, but interesting. While slightly overfilled with jargon, it makes me happy that somebody has written this book.
May 8, 2020
In 'Babbling Corpse', Tanner demonstrates that Vaporwave straddles the line between homage and parody but ultimately arrives at the unambiguous conclusion: destroy all history.
June 29, 2020
good writing abt music, amateur writing about postmodernism
March 22, 2024
Like most published Zero books, it turns out what should have been a great 30-page essay into an overdrawn book.
January 3, 2019
Fantastic book examining hauntology, our obsession with nostalgia as a means to cope with historical trauma, and the deconstruction of that nostalgia to tell us something about our present. Details examples of the musical genre as well as talking about how the music industry itself had a hand in the creation of the DIY and semi-anonymous aspects of the genre. The book brings the current cultural climate into focus in a way that I hadn't considered, talking about how the obsession with the just-distant past and non-place connects with listeners who are stuck between the culture makers' siren call of retreating into ourselves and our nostalgia for a "better time" and the strong desire to break down the structures around us that are evidence of the failure of a promised utopia technology promised us.
It's kind of like realizing you were promised The Jetsons and delivered Blade Runner, the vaporwave reaction being to YouTube Poop old episodes and mix them with a slurry of distortion, static, vertical holds, and analog corruption. The memories we have will never stand up to the reality of what is for long. A personal favorite aspect of the book was the surprise of finding discussion of the popular [adultswim] short "Too Many Cooks" to illustrate the taffypulling, disquieting, chopping, screwing, remixing, and redefining of nostalgia through the lens of 90s family TV programming. I went back and watched the video several times with an increasing sense of dread for what it is trying to warn us against.
I am intrigued by the focus on Jacques Derrida's hauntology concept as a spine to this book. For those not familiar with the term, hauntology suggests the ghosts of what was as neither fully dead nor fully alive in their relation to culture, which seems to fit vaporwave fairly well. The 80s neon futurism of the genre is both present and corrupted, echoing itself and bouncing back brokenly as the memories of playing telephone at a childhood sleepover; the clarity of what was is lost somewhat in the longing to feel it again. The emotion itself becomes saturated in our strong, almost desperate desire to not only feel it again, but get some of it back. In a culture in the traumatic birth pangs of change, it is hard not to see the desperation behind our quest for nostalgia and comfort as something that dulls the ache of imminent reality.
I do have to say in regard to the assembly of the slim volume: I get that this book is under 100 pages, but it doesn't seem to make sense to me to rail against the hashtagging and retweeting music journalism that is de rigueur these days and then essentially do the same thing in your own book. I can see where quoting from other reviewers and sources is simpler and gets across a lot of the same ideas but...what then is the point of coming down on the idea of the echo chamber of review when you are contributing to it yourself? If you are willing to dedicate a significant chunk of your book to the idea of music as consumption and consensus as our collective gruel, why do it yourself and not do more to expand on that or challenge it?
Further criticism: though I see the validity in questioning the desperation we have to retreat into fantasy, I don't think it helps the argument to lay down the idea of trauma and desperation first one minute and then sneer at the fact that it is being done the next. I'm inclined to agree with the author (and Alan Moore) that it is a bit disturbing to see grown adults still running to superhero movies and nostalgia porn with such fervor and seeing that taken advantage of by a capitalist system that is now even able to sell your last refuge back to you. I'm not sure, however, that being the kind of person to see it and acknowledge what is happening is any cause for smugness on the part of the author. Tanner himself acknowledges the broken promises and extent of the trauma and wants to galvanize others to look at what is happening and choose a path other than that of heads in the sand and familiar lullabies of our youth; he wants to challenge us to change, resist, and reinvent as the genre has. I admire him for breaking it down in a way that gives a lot of examples to chew on and trying to make this concept more accessible, but he simultaneously seems to suffer from the insecurity of his own youthful desire to be seen as a Real Serious Academic at the same time, and as a grown adult who has already done that dance, it makes me want to pat him on the shoulder and go "shhh, we get it. Sociology is a great tool. Now don't get so excited you hammer your thumb instead."
Hooboy. I took forever reading this and now I feel like I need to lie down.
It's kind of like realizing you were promised The Jetsons and delivered Blade Runner, the vaporwave reaction being to YouTube Poop old episodes and mix them with a slurry of distortion, static, vertical holds, and analog corruption. The memories we have will never stand up to the reality of what is for long. A personal favorite aspect of the book was the surprise of finding discussion of the popular [adultswim] short "Too Many Cooks" to illustrate the taffypulling, disquieting, chopping, screwing, remixing, and redefining of nostalgia through the lens of 90s family TV programming. I went back and watched the video several times with an increasing sense of dread for what it is trying to warn us against.
I am intrigued by the focus on Jacques Derrida's hauntology concept as a spine to this book. For those not familiar with the term, hauntology suggests the ghosts of what was as neither fully dead nor fully alive in their relation to culture, which seems to fit vaporwave fairly well. The 80s neon futurism of the genre is both present and corrupted, echoing itself and bouncing back brokenly as the memories of playing telephone at a childhood sleepover; the clarity of what was is lost somewhat in the longing to feel it again. The emotion itself becomes saturated in our strong, almost desperate desire to not only feel it again, but get some of it back. In a culture in the traumatic birth pangs of change, it is hard not to see the desperation behind our quest for nostalgia and comfort as something that dulls the ache of imminent reality.
I do have to say in regard to the assembly of the slim volume: I get that this book is under 100 pages, but it doesn't seem to make sense to me to rail against the hashtagging and retweeting music journalism that is de rigueur these days and then essentially do the same thing in your own book. I can see where quoting from other reviewers and sources is simpler and gets across a lot of the same ideas but...what then is the point of coming down on the idea of the echo chamber of review when you are contributing to it yourself? If you are willing to dedicate a significant chunk of your book to the idea of music as consumption and consensus as our collective gruel, why do it yourself and not do more to expand on that or challenge it?
Further criticism: though I see the validity in questioning the desperation we have to retreat into fantasy, I don't think it helps the argument to lay down the idea of trauma and desperation first one minute and then sneer at the fact that it is being done the next. I'm inclined to agree with the author (and Alan Moore) that it is a bit disturbing to see grown adults still running to superhero movies and nostalgia porn with such fervor and seeing that taken advantage of by a capitalist system that is now even able to sell your last refuge back to you. I'm not sure, however, that being the kind of person to see it and acknowledge what is happening is any cause for smugness on the part of the author. Tanner himself acknowledges the broken promises and extent of the trauma and wants to galvanize others to look at what is happening and choose a path other than that of heads in the sand and familiar lullabies of our youth; he wants to challenge us to change, resist, and reinvent as the genre has. I admire him for breaking it down in a way that gives a lot of examples to chew on and trying to make this concept more accessible, but he simultaneously seems to suffer from the insecurity of his own youthful desire to be seen as a Real Serious Academic at the same time, and as a grown adult who has already done that dance, it makes me want to pat him on the shoulder and go "shhh, we get it. Sociology is a great tool. Now don't get so excited you hammer your thumb instead."
Hooboy. I took forever reading this and now I feel like I need to lie down.
March 30, 2019
This book will quench your thirst if what you're looking for is a starting point from which to understand Vaporwave. On the other hand, the analysis is both uneven and seemingly arbitrary, at times (some people might find the comparisons to The Shining, or Jameson, or Derrida, more convincing than me), but it doesn't take away from the fact that it's an incredibly unique and interesting book. The discussion of Muzak, in particular, is excellent, as well as the discussions of "non-places." In conclusion, I think this book is extraordinary, but unevenly so.
Read
December 9, 2024I was afraid that this wouldn’t age well – after all, vaporwave’s era has passed by this point. But no. It’s still a relevant work. Like so many good cultural commentators, Tanner was able to articulate a lot of thoughts one has had or at least had an inkling of more lucidly than one could ever do. Granted, it’s a more than a bit of a retread of Mark Fisher’s ideas (bingo card if you’re playing at home, hauntology, The Caretaker, record scratches, The Overlook Hotel), so it doesn’t feel hyper-original, but it does feel like something of a definitive text.
August 22, 2025
i thought it would be funny to read a book about vaporwave in 2025
kind of a bummer how even the optimistic pessimism of a couple of years ago reads as too optimistic in a few places
clearly heavily inspired by mark fisher, would probably be an accessible intro on the surrounding theory to someone new. what it has to say about specific kinds of vaporwave is a bit dated at this point, but it's more focused on the (still generally true) theorizing anyway
kind of a bummer how even the optimistic pessimism of a couple of years ago reads as too optimistic in a few places
clearly heavily inspired by mark fisher, would probably be an accessible intro on the surrounding theory to someone new. what it has to say about specific kinds of vaporwave is a bit dated at this point, but it's more focused on the (still generally true) theorizing anyway
July 11, 2021
Would have enjoyed more explicit critiques/analysis of a wider array of Vaporwave projects but I understand that is largely not what he was trying to do with this book.
Really enjoyed this, and I definitely got the feeling that me and the author have spent a lot of time down the same internet rabbit holes.
Really enjoyed this, and I definitely got the feeling that me and the author have spent a lot of time down the same internet rabbit holes.
September 29, 2022
Досить цікаво але дуже коротко. Можливо тема і така що важко прям багато написати, але тут десь 100+ сторінок і воно скоріше як 3 статті читається. При чому більшість інфи в якійсь формі мені вже була знайома. Хотілося б більше аналізу суб-жанрів. Книжка звичайно не про історію жанру а про культурний феномен і його філософське підгрунтя.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 119 reviews