vaporwave (the treachery of images, or whatever)
weather: ☀️ i think it was hot?
critters: my cat. i did not go outside once
yesterday i made a list of vaporwave from ten or more years ago. it was fun to go down memory lane, digging through my bandcamp bookmarks and old downloads. i re-found some music i hadn't heard years and was happy to hear again.
am i a different person from back then? online has stolen my life away (he said, writing online) and turned my memories of it into a kind of a lost film. only a few scenes and frames are left. their silver nitrate edges are melting. vaporwave can sound like this, and in fact, the best of it does: a memory-world in dissolution.
i can listen to one of the albums i'd lost up the folder tree and only kinda remember the past. what was i doing while i listened to this music for the first time? i was writing a novel, maybe? i don't write novels anymore and don't know the right people to get published anyway. was i drawing? i hardly draw anymore. i ask what i was doing then, suspicious that i wasn't doing anything with my twenties, but what am i doing now? even less.
this genre will always have me in a vise. it sounds like the memory of music from when i was alive, or thought so. before i knew how soon it was gonna be too late.
every music scene evolves as new blood comes in and the old guard goes out. i don't resist this, and in fact i like a lot of recent vaporwave (though there is a new mental load to account for: trying to make sure what i'm hearing wasn't generated by a slop machine).
the emotional equivalent of vaporwave for people too young to hate dubya seems to be "frutiger aero." the music usually slides right off me, but it remains a wonderful visual aesthetic, like a well-curated collage made out of a children's illustrated encyclopedia. (love you, windows XP frog.)
inevitably, there's a certain quality to the "classic" vaporwave that's hard to find in recent entries. i'm sure it just boils down to what different age groups find nostalgic. probe the brains of any given thirtysomething in the western middle class and their childhood will soundfeel like a shopping mall, a commercial for a resort, the weather channel in the waiting room. and watching their dad play myst when he's not too tired from his white-collar job.
this gives us the layered quality of the genre: simulacra of nostalgia for simulacra, which, at that more innocent time, plucked at our true emotions despite the falseness of the stimuli. vaporwave is an ironic memory of a time before irony walled us off from feeling, though it acknowledges we, as a generation, were never free of the treachery of images.
(one treatment for this, i've found, is nature. any nature. even just looking at it.)
once, in the car, i showed my mom mantra by VHS logos. i think it was 2015 or thereabouts. she loved it--her favorite track was "50% OFF." i even remember where we were: in the rural hills north of home, on a winding road.