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Vapor Wave Culture

Vaporwave is an electronic sub-genre that first hit the mainstream in the early 2010s pioneered by artists like Romina Xavier of Vektriud and Many more artists. The genre takes heavy influences to the 80s Italian disco and chillwave electronics and relies on the foundation of Aesthetics to send its visual message across; Vaporwave is a Visual electronic art inspired by the early 2000 decades. Being in the early Eras of the internet, Vaporwave has been a genre of its own that gave birth to several others such as complicated vapour and encouraged other forms of media to expand like Seapunk, Tumblr aesthetics etc. The music itself sounds like elevator music or music that they put you on hold for, for god knows how long. It is hardly EDM, But it has been inspired by it.


Vaporwave has almost been a meme in itself. Its simplistic design with easy listening tracks layered with heavy samples taken already from pre-existing genres like lounge music and R&B. The music itself Draws inspiration from smooth jazz and another easy listening type of songs. Vapour Wave is essentially background music that tunes to play in your bedroom or to have a chill relaxing time while doing another task. It's more of a background noise that's there. It's not precisely a piece of come-down music, but it is similar to the experience; however, it is not meant for heavy listening, although it is often heavily listened to. The wave speaks to electronic music fans who aren't always in search of hot new songs. In 2012 the wave experienced a surge in popularity, but the music wasn't what the fans were interested in but the cultural aesthetic wave behind it. Wave aesthetic is deeply in touch with vaporwave giving the fans an introduction to the culture of vaporwave. It is heavily characterized by the aesthetic of wave known for its glitch art graphics of the 80s and 90s internet-based imagery laden with renaissance-era statues. It uses cyberpunk imagery with Japanese characteristics.


With plants and olden internet age emoticons and pastel colours and watery-like imagery, it Also encompasses . "family computer room" that ran at the speed of a turtle, made that horrible, screeching dial-up sound, and eventually died a slow and painful death when you pushed it too far with one too many Limewire downloads or Runescape installs. Vaporwave's aesthetic and culture are nostalgic and perhaps unique to its right. It is colour stylistic style draws in people because of the eye candy visuals of its aesthetic. The music makes you feel like you're floating in space and is heavily linked to cyber-spaced punk aesthetics.



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