Abstract

Vaporwave is a genre of electronic music emerging in the early 2000’s and 2010’s. It features samples taken from genres like disco, muzak, R&B, elevator music, and smooth jazz. Slowing down tempos and drenching the samples in reverberation, distortion, and repetition, artists create a musical ambiance described as ghostly, uncanny, and hypnogogic. I use Vaporwave as a way to think with and through what has been recently posed in contemporary critical thought as the “decline of symbolic efficiency.” The unique perspective provided by the genre offers a critique of various aspects of our life including relationships and art. Vaporwave’s tendency to submerge previously vibrant vocals resonates with a suspension of the recognition of the friend and Heidegger’s “horchen” while the “virtual dream plaza” trope opens onto a logic of images and reification. Over. the course of my work, I shift to questions of the genre’s characterization as “postmodern” and its subversive potential. Vaporwave—a name that itself eschews the “solid”—provides us a way to reclaim a locus of agency in this evermore untethered social milieu.

Presenters

Nicolas Gascon
Student, Critical Theory A.B., Brown University, Rhode Island, United States

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

Literary Humanities

KEYWORDS

Debord, Lukacs, Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Critical Theory, Music, Musicology, Hermeneutics

Digital Media

Videos