Vaporwave is music as Internet meme, an ironic and difficult to classify microgenre born online at the turn of the 2010s in an explosion of millennial ambivalence. Vaporwave blends an unlikely spectrum of musical elements — from Muzak and the incidental sounds of music on hold, to manipulated samples of smooth jazz, to looped fragments of the easy listening hits of decades past — and ask questions about authenticity, originality, and sincerity in a culture of falsity. Defined by a deadpan nostalgia for the optimism of late twentieth century consumer culture, vaporwave quickly evolved from a generation’s inside joke into a digital subculture with its own aesthetic worldview.This is a definitive study of a still evolving phenomenon. Profiling its key artists and producers while exploring the blurred feedback loop between music and the Internet, it makes a convincing argument for the music’s importance and relevance to the culture at large, both as an art form in its own right and as the ethos of some of Generation Z’s most successful pop stars.
