I used to think vaporwave was just another internet meme—pink grids, Roman busts, Windows 95 startup sounds looping endlessly.
But here’s the thing: vaporwave isn’t nostalgia in the traditional sense, it’s something closer to dissection. The genre emerged around 2010, roughly when the internet started archiving its own cultural detritus with obsessive precision, and what it does is hold up the glossy surfaces of 1980s and ’90s corporate aesthetics—the mall muzak, the Pepsi ads, the beige IBM terminals—and asks us to recieve them not as warm memories but as evidence of something deeply strange. It slows down Diana Ross tracks until they sound like funeral dirges, it layers stock photos of marble columns over pixelated palm trees, it turns the language of aspiration into a kind of haunted reliquary. The critic Grafton Tanner wrote that vaporwave is “the first musical genre to live completely inside digital culture,” and I guess that’s why it feels so uncomfortable—it’s not escaping capitalism through retro aesthetics, it’s trapping us inside them, making us sit with the uncanny realization that our childhoods were sponsored content. Wait—maybe that’s too harsh. But the discomfort is the point.
When Corporate Optimism Became a Ghost Story
Vaporwave takes the visual language of late-capitalist optimism—the CGI sunsets, the aspirational office spaces, the promise that technology would liberate us—and recontextualizes it as ruin porn. I’ve seen albums where the cover art is just a Windows error message superimposed over a faded photograph of a shopping mall interior, and it hits harder than any explicit political manifesto could. The artist Blank Banshee samples elevator music and stretches it into something that sounds like a panic attack in slow motion. The repetition is key: by looping a Muzak version of “Tainted Love” for eight minutes, vaporwave forces you to confront the emptiness at the core of these sonic wallpapers, the way they were designed to make you comfortable enough to spend money without ever actually feeling anything.
Honestly, the visuals do even more work than the music sometimes.
The retro-futurist aesthetic—those grids extending into infinite horizons, the neon Japanese characters (often nonsensical or misspelled), the marble busts of classical statuary juxtaposed with Fiji Water bottles—creates a kind of temporal vertigo. You’re looking at the future as imagined by the past, but filtered through the present’s ironic distance, and the whole thing collapses into a flattened now where nothing means what it’s supposed to mean. The art critic Johanna Drucker might call this “glitch ontology,” though I’m not sure she’d definately approve of the term being applied to a genre that traffics so heavily in appropriation. Some critics argue vaporwave is just lazy pastiche, that it’s emotionally sterile, but I think they’re missing the exhaustion embedded in every chopped-and-screwed sample—the artists aren’t celebrating these images, they’re performing a kind of archaeological survey of capitalism’s visual waste.
The Economy of Longing and the Longing for an Economy That Never Existed
What makes vaporwave a critique rather than just nostalgia is its refusal to pretend the past was better. Traditional nostalgia sells you the fantasy of return—Mad Men’s mid-century aesthetics, Stranger Things’ suburban innocence. Vaporwave, by contrast, shows you the return is impossible because the thing you’re nostalgic for was always already a simulation. The “aesthetic” accounts on Instagram and Tumblr that proliferated in the mid-2010s turned this into a visual shorthand: a sunset over a digital ocean, a lonely palm tree, a slogan in Greco-Roman font promising EXPERIENCE LUXURY NOW. It’s advertising without a product, desire without an object. Turns out, that’s a pretty effective way to highlight how much of consumer culture is built on manufactured longing.
I guess it makes sense that a genre born from pirated samples and anonymous uploads would resist commodification for a while.
But capitalism is nothing if not adaptive—by 2017, you could buy vaporwave-inspired clothing at Urban Outfitters, and brands were commissioning “vaporwave-style” ads, which is either the ultimate proof of the genre’s critical failure or a demonstration of its thesis about inevitable co-optation. The artist George Clanton told an interviewer that vaporwave “was always going to eat itself,” and maybe that’s the only honest ending for a genre whose entire premise is that nothing escapes the market. Still, for a few years, it felt like the internet had stumbled into a genuinely subversive visual language, one that didn’t reject consumer culture so much as mummify it, preserve it in amber, and invite us to stare at it until the horror and the beauty became indistinguishable.
