# Vaporwave: The Music of The Internet

## H I S T O R Y

Vaporwave is a sub genre of electronic music, that includes a visual art style that takes elements of internet culture through the ages to form a coherent aesthetic. The music is largely influenced by 'plunderfonics', a genre of music that creates new music from pre-existing sounds. This sounds trivial, but the efforts to maintain a consistent melody, time signature, and even key lead to fascinating sounds that for many, inspire a sense of nostalgia for dot-com era optimism around the future that the internet might bring. Many subgenres of vaporwave parody this enthusiasm well, creating 'Muzak', or music that intentionally sounds lifeless and corporate; in many cases, the juxtaposition of dot-com era optimism, to the real world the internet has caused can open our eyes to the failed promises of 1990s capitalism. Instead of ultra connected utopias, we live in a world where some of the world's most talented engineers -rather than designing technology to improve lives - spend their days designing algorithsm that keep people addicted to their phones, and in the worst cases, spending money on microtransactions within those phones.

## A E S T H E T I C

Vaporwave aesthetic derives from early internet imagery interspersed with other period-appropriate technology, including VCR. Coinciding with the music's nostalgic and often corporate themes, vaporwave aesthetic often focuses on commerticalism, and will often feature brand logos, usually older iterations of these logos, and feature shopping mall aesthetics. Also commonly present is early computer graphics. Text will sometimes overlay images, and in many cases, appears written by a lonely, sentient, and abandoned computer, left to rot in the backroom of a now-defunct Sears, calling out for someone to hear it.