What's your thoughts on vaporwave as a genre?

I went through a big vaporwave phase and I still greatly appreciate the genre, I think it has had a lasting effect on pop culture in general. People still use the glitched-out David bust almost a decade after Floral Shoppe came out.

It's also a bit wild how all these different sounds are "vaporwave" but are so different from each other:

• Saint Pepsi - Hit Vibes: Future Funk? Absolute banger of an album.

• Contact Lens - ALLNIGHTER: It's pretty much Phonk and Vapor combined, one of my favorite hidden gems

• MACINTOSH PLUS - 420: The classic of course

• Blank Banshee - Infinite Login: I don't even know how to describe how essential Blank Banshee is

All these styles are so far from each other

I think the Vaporwave aesthetic is a lot of fun and I like the general idea of retro-wave music and taking prominent elements of 70s/80s music and updating them with a modern sound palette and modern production tools, but the specific music that comes out labeled as "vaporwave" I tend to not gravitate to at all. I much, much more prefer vaporwave-adjacent music genres like synthwave, lofi, nu-disco and glitch.

And I personally don't really care about the effort or complexity of one song or genre versus another. I've been producing music since the 90s and I just think fun is fun. If I'm having a good time, I don't really care anything other than if I like the song. Or similarly as Ice-T put it in Rick & Morty, "Over-developed, under-developed...a bad song's a bad song..."

I had a phase where I listened to Vaporwave a lot and I still listen to it from time to time. It’s kinda hard to be actively listening to it, especially when I stream most of my music and the good stuff just aren’t there.

I like the glitchy-ness and the empty mall vibes of it all is something that kinda transports me to a different place. It’s a bit weird but it is comforting.

Lazy is the best way to describe it for me. In the few cases where I have heard a vaporwave track I liked, I realized that what I actually liked was that it made me think of something else, which I liked more than the derivative product. So then I went and listened to that instead.

The videos are awesome though.

I dismissed it as a joke that would quickly fade when Floral Shop came out and there was that whole big blog post trying to explain the concept behind vaporwave. In the same vein as witch house, as a self aware, made-up genre that wasn't really a genre. Before too long it spiraled out of control, and anything vaguely synth-y got lumped into the genre.

I was a fan of chillwave from early on, which, of course, vaporwave completely overtook...the offshoot became the new catch-all. I still miss the 80s-inspired music you saw a lot from the mid to late 2000s. To me, vaporwave is just an imagined fictional 80s on quaaludes. Some of it works, but more often than not it really rubs me the wrong way.

Not to dump on anyone who likes it of course, obviously this is a matter of subjective taste here. I'm just a picky bastard.

With today's ease of producing music, there is always a microgenre that comes up from time to time that gets really popular but is easy to produce.

Does anyone remember Nightcore? I'm still really upset about that, honestly.

My views on them are rather simple. If you enjoy them, listen to them. But unless they put a lot of effort into their music then I don't think they're worth spending money on. Once upon a time there was a Synthwave artist I really liked, so I would buy their music. But when I realized that most of their songs were just City Pop songs with a (usually pretty sick, really) modern beat added to them, I stopped buying them.

I actually enjoyed vaporwave quite a bit. First hearing it around 2016 or 17 I think. It was a stepping stone into synthwave for me which has become my go to musically.

I’m almost a big fan, in the sense that I listen to maybe 3 vw albums that I really like and then the rest are just meh.

Floral shoppe has some great tracks, but they’re only good because quality of the source material (i.e. sade) is so high.

Chuck persons eccojams is another one I like to dive into from time to time, it works well as a “zone-out” track when I want background noise that’s vaguely musical.

The derelict megatower series by death’s dynamic shroud was also great (especially the set of “NOBODY HOME” tracks), but it got removed from Spotify because of its egregious and blatant copyright infringement lmao.

As @Lenny_twotubes mentioned, I don't think it's made for intentional listening but it's really just something mellow in the background. Something about it evokes nostalgia, a sense of loss without delving too deep into it. It's like one of those thoughts you have about how life was different back then etc. It's got a sense of soothing built into it, somehow. Hard to describe really. I do really enjoy it.

I was huge on vaporwave when I was in high school. I think a large part of why it grew in popularity was that it’s great for studying music. You don’t really need to listen to it actively to enjoy it (and I think you have to listen to it that way).

I’m not a fan of it now, I am much more into pop punk/alt rock. I think there’s a lot more inherent talent that comes with actually playing an instrument, instead of using samples.

I agree that it has an element of "laziness" I still enjoy it and the new retro wave. Its good in small doses when you have people filter out all the junk. The good stuff is worth it, there is just alot of meh in the way.

I like Lofi and have it on in the background when I need to study, and I like trance, so I guess Vaporwave is okay, it doesn't really catch me as a genre, but genre is branding, so who knows. I like the audio production aspects of grainy filters and hope that we can get better producers out of it as well. It's sort of how Nightcore set the stage for Hyperpop when all of those young producers actually learned their tools started chasing more ambitious mixes and developing their skills into original tracks.

I really enjoy it, it's not always great music for intentional listening, but it's absolutely perfect for having something on in the background at work. It fits the gaps of being interesting enough for when I am paying attention and chill enough to tune out while I'm doing something with focus.

i'm biased because i've produced vaporwave music in the past and have been a fan for over 6 years, but i'd say that vaporwave can be viewed as both very simple mood music and also as conceptual and rich in emotion. the ethics of the sampling is its own can of worms but id say if its not making a ton of cash or nothing its probably not super immoral.

a lot of classic vaporwave is either based on slowing down and looping samples of pop and r&b from the 1980s and 90s, or doing the same to stuff you'd hear on the weather channel like various forms of 1980s easy listening jazz. in even this most basic form though it can recontextualise these samples, and id argue especially when looped, to create different settings and conjure different memories. e.g. internet club's 'DREAMS 3D' uses hazy vhs samples of simple midi music from the background of webTV to create an optimistic and fantastical world in which this service is still being used, the internet is still new and exciting, and the dotcom bubble hadnt yet burst. depending heavily on the artwork, style of sample chopping and effects, and source of music and sounds plundered, the concept and atmosphere can vary pretty greatly.

conversely, you can get other subgenres of vaporwave like vhs pop, which make use of further production and new instrumentation in the form of hip-hop drum patterns, often making use of lots of tape hiss too, whilst sampling more from 80s r&b. this creates the vibe of listening to a very old beat-tape , or sometimes if the drums are subtle enough or are not present, just an old, hazy, summery tape of fuzzy loops.

i personally love all the different atmospheres and aesthetics vaporwave provides space for, especially as they all fall somewhere on that spectrum of romanticised 1980s/90s memories. i'm fairly certain most people know this view of the past isn't accurate, and if anything i'd say the existence of this genre proves people want to live in a time where there is hope for a future again. mark fisher writes a lot about that idea in his book 'ghosts of my life'.

Around 2017 to 2019, I was full into it. I was on a massive 80s and 90s nostalgia kick around that time, and was watching a lot of TV shows and cartoons from that era, playing a lot of SNES and Sega Saturn games, and listening to a lot of 80s and 90s hits along with vaporwave mixed in. Also I live in a small city in Japan that has a very showa-esque downtown, so I would like to take walks while listening to vaporwave.

By mid 2019 though, I was starting to come out of it. Started recognizing some of the more unhealthy elements of deep nostalgia and that there was still a lot to appreciate about the current era. I still listen to vaporwave occasionally, and I have a massive collection of Minidiscs I created during that time, but for the most part, It deepened my appreciation for lo-fi and I ended up transitioning to jazzhop and snailhouse from there.