What the Hell Is Simpsonwave?

If you are a person who spends any significant amount of time on the internet, you should know that at this point, you don't find memes—they find you. There’s something ingrained in the menagerie of algorithms that just plops random crap (bad and good) in your feeds at all hours, only to be replaced by new stuff the following week.

In the mass graveyard of memes, the micro-genre of music known as vaporwave was all but assigned its own headstone. It revolved around seapunk Tumblr aesthetics, ‘90s pop-culture nostalgia, and chopped and screwed elevator muzak, and it started around 2010 with James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Entries from the vaporwave canon, like Vektroid’s Floral Shoppe, continue to rank among the best-selling experimental albums on Bandcamp. Vaporwave’s critical height came in 2012, when writer Adam Harper painted the genre as the height of anti-capitalist gestures in music, a new “punk” so to speak. Since then, entire academic books have been dedicated to picking apart the nuances of vaporwave.

Like punk on a hyper-micro level, the question of whether vaporwave is dead seems to loom around the musicians most associated with the genre. Folks like James Ferraro, Skylar Spence (fka SAINT PEPSI), Vektroid, and Blank Banshee have, for the most part, moved on to other things. Some became entrenched with new trends like health goth (Vektroid), moved towards more mainstream pop sounds (Spence), or just grew weirder (James Ferraro). Which is why the recent emergence of a new sub-genre of vaporwave called Simpsonwave is all the more curious. Memes can have second winds, just look at Crying Jordan. But why vaporwave? You can thank a bored teenager for that one.

Original Article: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1188-what-the-hell-is-simpsonwave/

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