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Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2017

Laura Glitsos
Laura Glitsos*
Affiliation:
Curtin University, Media, Communications, and Creative Arts, Kent St, Bentley, 6102 Perth, Australia Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this article I focus on the genre of ‘vaporwave’, using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a case study, to explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes pleasure in, a kind of ‘memory play’. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak®, 1980s elevator music and new age ambience. Vaporwave's ‘memory play’ is a project that takes remembering as its audio-visual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is therefore understood as a pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself. To explore this theme, I examine vaporwave's memory play using the terms of Chris Healy's ‘compensatory nostalgia’, as well as the idea of ‘ersatz nostalgia’ as discussed by Arjun Appadurai and Svetlana Boym.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 100 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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Discography

18 Carat Affair, ‘ΔΔΔ (MV)’, YouTube. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRisLJF4nkA Google Scholar
18 Carat Affair, ‘Jon Benet’, YouTube. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBRLbDzZ_yk Google Scholar
18 Carat Affair, ‘Mirror Mirror’, YouTube. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWqZ1H9a6YY Google Scholar
18 Carat Affair, ‘New Jack City II’, YouTube. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDlfheLBeTg Google Scholar
18 Carat Affair, ‘Pretty Girls I Don't Know Anymore’, YouTube. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYiczcg9NK8 Google Scholar
18 Carat Affair, ‘Promethazine’, YouTube. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmUjtU_YGew Google Scholar