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Does anyone else feel like the whole vaporwave/outrun "movement" is a little played out?
It felt cool a few years ago but now it feels like everyone and their grandmother's dog has latched onto the style and it just feels overdone.
I've been obsessed with the 80s visual styles and music since the 80s, so was super happy when it "came back", but also won't be sad for the fad to pass as I know for myself personally it's not just the flavour of the week.
To me it's mostly about the nostalgic warmth and memories associated with living through the 80s, thinking back to simpler times that (for me personally) were much happier times. I'm a huge nostalgia addict in general, and have never really clicked with modern music/movies/shows/art/etc (although I do love lots of 90s stuff too, but that's about as modern as I get ;P)
If anything, rather than being upset that it's in fashion now and getting all hipsterish about it, i'm thankful and appreciative of all the new art and music I now get to enjoy based around my favourite era.
I really love vaporwave when it's done artistically well. Yeah, it was a meme genre from the very beginning, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a coherent aesthetic theory behind it. Sadly I think a lot of folks 'into' the genre now are only exploring it as deep as "this is nostalgic sounding and has japanese characters, palm trees, windows 95, roman busts, and cyan / magenta" and are totally missing the meta-irony element that is at the core of the genre.
I like to recommend /r/vaporwave 's wiki for a great overview of what the genre's about.
I guess I worded my opinion incorrectly because you described how I feel. I've been subbed to that subreddit before but it seems to feel more meme-y and forced and I'm over it unless it's done well, artistically speaking.
Ah okay lol. Yeah, I think that's just what happens to most artistic movements as they mature and enter the mainstream. People start to appropriate stuff from them so they can appear hip and interesting (which, in the context of vaporwave reapproriating things from bygone eras for the aesthetic, is truly ironic).
I'm just getting into it, so definitely late to the party. Any big names I should definitely check out?
Blue Stahli's Sunset Neon project is amazing, as is Celldweller's Scandroid project. Those two are my favorites.
I've been playing this on a loop for a while.
Melting my face. Thx!
Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1
This is one of the first albums to really define the genre of vaporwave.
I do feel that vaporwave and outrun shouldn't be grouped into the same 'movement'. Outrun is directly imitating the aesthetic of the 80's, while vaporwave tends to filter the aesthetic through a few layers of irony and re-contextualization.
Sadly I think the line between the two has become blurred and have crossed the point of no return.
I personally don't mind some the music that's come out of it, but everything else just bores me.. and I was born in the fudging early 80's!
I think a common misconception is that being born in an era means you're supposed to be nostalgic about, and love, that era. Most people are nostalgic for the era when they were ~10-15 though, as that's when most pop culture becomes relevant to our lives and shapes us. I was born in the mid 70s, so the 80s to me is a sacred beautiful time.
It's like all those "I'm a 90s kid!" people who were born in 99, and don't actually remember any of the 90s.
Yeah man, those 99 kids totally don't get it. Being 98, now that's where it's at /s
Some parts of the 90's did survive into the early 2 thousands though, especially if your family was poor like mine was at the time. We still had a VCR and 1991 CRT television with bunny ear antennas, the first computer I used was a Pentium III sporting Windows 98, my dad drove an old Ford Focus that didn't have any AC or electrically powered windows, and you could still sometimes catch 90's era TV shows or cartoons playing. Obviously by the time we got old to understand pop culture that disappeared, but when it comes to specific experiences or memories some of us late 90's kids can still relate :D
On a more serious note, I personally find the late 90's / early 2000's to be incredibly fascinating from a historical perspective. It was such a rapidly evolving and changing part of history; 1996 and 2006 seem like totally different worlds in a lot of ways, and I don't think we'll likely see a decade like that again for a long time.
I can definitely relate. We were very poor (bouts of homeless, etc) and our first TV was a wooden box, black and white only, and no remote. Technically I'm not supposed to remember black and white TV but poverty holds you back in time as well as means!
The mid 90s to me will always be the most "iconic" period of my life. Home computers, the internet, video games, technology in general all exploding in such a colossal way in so short a time. Truly a mind blowing era to have lived in an experienced (especially coming from a black & white TV ;P). I was finishing high school though, so there's no warm fuzzy nostalgia to it, rather a deep seeded depression and dread over those late teenage years :P
The Internet has to be one of the biggest leaps forward for human society, surely? Hard to compare when we didn't live through the roll-out of telephony, or cars, or other things like that though... but it seems like it changed humanity more than anything else I can think of short of fire, the wheel, etc.