Vaporwave, city pop, future funk, hyperpop, and the why of it all

The Christian Poptimist, part 3

“And borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties”
—James Murphy, “Losing My Edge”

“Everything is haunted; everyone is evil and there’s blood stains on the carpet”
—Laura Les, “Haunted”

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A blurry image of a strange man with a giant head shaped like a crescent moon. He’s floating in a cloud, sitting at a piano, smiling and gesturing. You can’t see his eyes because he is wearing sunglasses, but he seems very happy. He and his piano swirl around as ethereal music floats in and out of focus . . . this song seems familiar, doesn’t it? The moon-piano man . . . he seems familiar too . . . over in the distance, the McDonald’s logo, the famous Golden Arches, appears. The piano man repeats grandiose gestures with his hands. The music (which isn’t a song in the usual sense, just a bunch of single lines looped and spliced together) continues to play as the scene shifts to the moon man riding around on a rollercoaster. Fries, burgers, and chicken nuggets appear in the stars. All of this seems so familiar . . . then you remember: you saw all of this in a commercial when you were a kid. It didn’t make any sense back then either, but you were too young to even know how to ask the nearby adults to explain it to you: the imagery remained in your back consciousness, a slightly terrifying, surreal mixture of the familiar and the oddly disconcerting, until you watched this video and it all came back.

Do you remember the last time your life didn’t have any problems? No existential tension, no looming disillusionment, no threat of advancing age? When was the last time that society as a whole didn’t seem to be full of problems? How old were you when you started noticing that there were problems in the broader society? If you’re a mid-to-young millennial, the chance is rather high that the first time you became aware of the problems in the world was on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, at around nine-o’clock in the morning, when the TV started showing pictures of skyscrapers tumbling out of the sky. Do you remember what it was like . . . right before that moment?

The germ of vaporwave, the kernel from which it all exploded and which contains everything, can be found in Macintosh Plus’ album Floral Shoppe from 2011. At first vaporwave was concerned only with chopped-up versions of pop and funk songs, in the same cabinet-of-curiosities aesthetic that pervades the sampling scene, from golden-age hip hop to the mashups of Neil Cicierega. However, vaporwave very quickly grew into a genre capable of a kind of oblique social commentary informed by what Mark Fisher called “hauntology.” In an important 2012 essay,¹ Fisher describes the failure of 90s-era electronic music to adequately progress beyond a mannerist caricature of itself; it became, in his words, “Futuristic in the same sense that fonts are gothic—the futuristic now connoted a settled set of concepts, affects, and associations.” Fisher bemoaned the lack of a bleeding edge in music from his vantage point of 2012. Fisher (and fellow music critic Simon Reynolds) identified, in certain British electronica groups, a nascent “hauntological” genre which dealt with a sense of the lost future, a present that didn’t really exist, and the lingering shadow of the past. Fisher died in 2017. To my knowledge he never discussed vaporwave. Cut to today and we can’t get away from vaporwave. The YouTube algorithm is obsessed with it; search once for vaporwave and that’s all you’ll see on the sidebar for weeks.

Floral Shoppe features an aesthetic of sonic experimentation; samples are slowed down, chopped, pitch-shifted, and generally bonked into different shapes until they completely lose the context they originally inhabited. Floral Shoppe is an icy, cerebral, methodically rigorous album. Almost the opposite (in terms of emotive connotation) is Catsystemcorp’s News at 11, which has all the same stylistic points as Floral Shoppe but delivers a particularized message about American society in contrast to Floral Shoppe’s pure aesthetic contemplation. Both are, each in their own way, focused on a question of what to do with the past: Floral Shoppe asks if the music of the past can be used to build coherent and independent musical structures; News at 11 asks us to go back to a specific event in the past and imagine a future in which that event never happened. Between them both, Floral Shoppe and News at 11 outline the spectrum on which all vaporwave albums can be placed; Floral Shoppe’s “here’s some stuff we found” aesthetic and the optative social commentary of News at 11 are two poles holding up a big tent.

What’s inside the tent? Mostly nostalgia. Vaporwave is a genre obsessed with the not-quite-in-focus past, with the fleeting impressions that are made in childhood and which stay with a person through their entire life. The nostalgia of vaporwave is quite certainly a generationally-flavored nostalgia, though; its images and sounds are closely keyed to the experiences of millennials and the older Gen Z cohorts. Can it speak, then, to the broader concerns of society as a whole?

The songs don’t often address the standard pop concerns of love and relationships. Is this an indication that the genre is somehow limited, is fundamentally unable to speak to the whole of human experience? Well . . . I think that’s not an interesting question. Remember how all the bubblegum pop from the early-to-mid-sixties was all about love? Was that limited to only a small part of human experience? Yes—but who cares? There are different genres for different moods; in the sixties, legions of teenagers were discovering sexuality for the first time and they made music about it; in the 2010s, millennials were being sad about the decay of the urban landscape and they made music about it. Maybe any particular vaporwave song doesn’t have much emotional depth or nuance but neither does Lesley Gore’s first album (which contains seven songs in a row about crying), and it’s a splendid little classic.

Like I said, it’s rare for a vaporwave song to be about love or relationships, but some of the mixtapes are—yet with intriguing nuances. Think about this one for instance.

The video clip is amazing. Just look at Winona Ryder’s eyes for a while; surely this mixtape is saying something about young love and all the possibilities it entails. It’s like a vaporwave version of the feeling that Gatsby had looking at Daisy Buchannan’s green light. But notice that it’s an eighties-coded version of that feeling of “nostalgia for an alternate present.” What is happening here, with this audio / video mix, is the feeling of wanting to be in the future made possible by a present which exists only as a desired past. James Murphy, in “Losing my Edge” from LCD Soundsystem’s first album, sings about “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.” The eighties were a rather ugly decade—much, much uglier than the seventies—but for some reason the decade has captured the imagination of young millennials. Why? Perhaps it’s because these are the people whose memories of going to the mall remain tantalizingly out of focus, who had an older sister who looked like Wynona Ryder or Molly Ringwald, who heard this music and now have it rolling around in their heads with little referents or touchstones. Nostalgia is a strange emotion; it is necessarily a distortion—only the good parts are remembered and they’re often remembered without any context. Think of nostalgia as a giant filter, changing and reconfiguring whatever is poured through it; when eighties urban teenage culture is poured through, what comes out the other end is vaporwave.

On the edges of the big tent of vaporwave are other genres which bear a relationship to it, which toy with the same nostalgic feelings; not, though, for a remembered past, but for an alternate past—a past from a different culture. This is how I read the resurgence in popularity of city pop. City pop is ostensibly pop music from 1980s-era Japan; after the style declined in popularity it became a laughingstock for the next generation of Japanese kids and began a slow fade into obscurity . . . until the 2010s when it inexplicably became popular on the internet. No one in America cared a single thing about city pop in the eighties; what explains its current resurgence in popularity if not nostalgia for Japan? For the idea of Japan, as a country and culture quite “other” but also “the same” as America . . . and the source of much American pop culture from the eighties and onward. Think of it—legions of American young adults remembering how they used to play Nintendo games, watch anime, and collect Pokémon cards, and wondering about what culture produced this stuff. Consequently they started listening to city pop.

There’s something both familiar and unsettling about city pop. The music sounds like a mirror image of the easy listening music of the eighties that was playing on American FM radio at the time; but the lyrics are unintelligible. Every once in a while a word or phrase of English with surface through the liquid swirl of all those rounded Japanese vowels, but even if that doesn’t happen the mellow crooning of the singers still communicates the emotion in the songs: happy times, let’s hang out, young love. City Pop exists in America, not as a genre made of specific songs, but as a vehicle for an entire vibe—a mood of groovy calm and wonder, like a tropical vacation where everything is working out all right. It’s a different kind of nostalgia than that of vaporwave: nostalgia for a parallel present, existing in a different place but at the same time. Vaporwave is concerned with alternate pasts; City Pop’s American iteration is concerned with the fascination of the Other—an Other with the edges rubbed off.

Let’s get our nostalgia-filter out again and run city pop through it. What do we get? Future funk. This genre is like a freakishly overgrown exaggeration of all the tropes of city pop—the Japanese crooners, the slick production, the perky mood—set to sugary, bubbly beats. If the American interest in city pop reflects a curiosity about a foreign culture, then future funk represents a fascination with some of the products of that culture, divorced from their original context. The nostalgia-for-the-other which makes up such a huge part of city pop is also present in future funk, but it seems to be directed to an idea of Japan that doesn’t exactly match the reality, just as vaporwave reflects a falsified and distorted view of the eighties. The music sounds gorgeous, but there is something uncanny about future funk, just as there is with city pop and with vaporwave sensu stricto; as if the whole story isn’t being told, as if we’re missing important contextual information.

All these vaporwave-adjacent musics are also heavily visual productions. A quick YouTube search will yield piles of vaporwave, city pop, and future funk mixes with distinctive visuals: the cliché purple sunset with palm trees; video loops of malls in the eighties or coke ads from Japan; in the case of future funk, particular emphasis is placed on anime imagery. It could probably be said of most people that their idea of how they fit into the broader culture and society is made up of half-remembered bits and pieces that they don’t fully understand. Some of this is called nostalgia; other parts are explained by hauntology—the idea that the reality we see around us is resonant with deeper meanings, throbbing and glowing with implications and subtexts that lie just below the surface. Hence the visuals: ten-year-old millennial kids were being taken to malls and hotel pools, and in time those images were cemented in their minds as a key part of their identity. They grew a bit older and spent huge amounts of time watching anime of scantily-clad superheroes and that also got mixed up in their memories.

Mark Fisher, in the essay quoted above, laments electronica’s inability to usher in the next wave of musical expression. “Twenty-first-century electronic music had failed to progress beyond what had been recorded in the twentieth century: practically anything produced in the 2000s could have been recorded in the 1990s. Electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia and retrospection. There was no leading edge of innovation anymore. In music, as elsewhere in culture, we were living after the future.” What Fisher didn’t seem to recognize is that music has a powerful ability to evoke; to comment on the past; and to puzzle over the meaning of the past simply by dwelling on the artifacts which remain from previous times. Thus, after electronica came vaporwave; after vaporwave came future funk. What is just around the corner, coming to the fore now that future funk’s peak has passed? Why, it would appear to be . . . hyperpop!

What is hyperpop? For a very closely-reasoned and granular look into the genre, I suggest you read Mo Diggs’ excellent reportage on the genre. Hyperpop seems to be the absolute bleeding edge, the wave of the future; what would Mark Fisher think about it, I wonder? If Mo Diggs is correct, hyperpop will replace rock as the dominant musical art form of the next decade. If you want to listen to some hyperpop, here is a good non-algorithmically-generated Spotify playlist you can check out. Get ready! hold on—it’s a wild ride! Be prepared for relentlessly pounding beats, heavily pitch-shifted gender-bending vocals, an enormous amount of glitchy noises, and lots of blood. Yes, hyperpop is obsessed with gore and horror.

Like the genres we’ve been discussing so far, hyperpop is sample-heavy and dependent on electronic manipulation. It is a visual style as well. It’s more self-conscious and more pointedly earnest than the vaporwaves; it deals specifically and directly with the state of current culture, as opposed to being haunted by blurry misremebered pieces of the past like vaporwave. If vaporwave was the sound of millennials thinking about their own memories, hyperpop is the sound of Gen Z trying to come to terms with the world the millennials are handing over to them. And they aren’t comfortable with it. The conclusion I draw after listening to this music is this: the hyperpop kids are not alright.

The kids in the sixties weren’t alright either, feeling each other in the back seats of cars and confused about relationships yet with a whole teenage-culture-industrial complex telling them they couldn’t trust their parents to steer them right because their parents were too old; but the difference between the sixties and today is that in the sixties there were also kids writing about the whole business, analyzing it and commenting on it . . . and by doing so, legitimizing it. No matter what kind of weirdness you are involved in, you will be more likely to think you are doing the right thing if your peers are cheering you on. The baby boom generation wrote their own mythos and believed, deep in their hearts, that they were, in fact, alright.

No one is doing that for the hyperpop generation. Most millennial music critics aren’t even thinking about hyperpop. Absent a robust culture of critical and curatorial support for the arts—absent a thriving music magazine industry and a network of record shops employing knowledgeable gurus—absent a healthy commentary apparatus, no one will construct a narrative for the hyperpop generation; no one will tell these kids they are alright and they are the wave of the future. The kids are constructing these songs on their laptops in their bedrooms and putting them on SoundCloud and YouTube, and every once in a while a brave and bold soul like Mo Diggs will venture in there and give us a scene report—but no one from the inside is talking about the alienation and despair, the discomfort within their own bodies, of the hyperpop generation.²

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And now I can get to the whole point of why I’m talking about any of this.

Vaporwave doesn’t matter on its own. Neither does hyperpop. No work of art, no style, no genre, has intrinsic value; they all have contingent value and are free to be forgotten, discarded, ignored by anyone who doesn’t care for them . . . but they do communicate truths about their practitioners, truths which ought to be noticed.

Allow me to bring into the conversation a song called “As We See the World” by Stoneleigh Worship Band. This song contains a lyric which, although it has its inaccuracies, is a generally correct account of the state of current secular culture:

As we see the world in tatters
As we watch their dreams break down
We can hear their quiet anguish:
“Come and help us!”

As a whole, the song is vaguely militaristic in a manner which feels “off” in an undefined way . . . but I’m appreciative of the idea that the secular world is in trouble and needs the help of Christians. I don’t believe the song is correct when it states that the culture is crying out to Christians, specifically, for help; in fact, I would argue that the culture is hostile to the message of Christianity (which is: what makes us broken is the sin in our heart, and that we need a savior—specifically, Jesus the Christ—to heal us of our sin and make us whole). But the song is accurate in describing the anguish and despair which are encountered in the secular world when it takes a good hard look at itself, an honest look, and is candid about itself. This is what is represented in the “everything is haunted” angst of hyperpop: it’s not quiet, but it is anguish.

No Christian who desires to be a beacon of truth and hope in the culture ought to ignore this: we cannot ignore the anguish of culture, we cannot merely present the happy side without addressing the sad side. There is plenty of Christian art which presents the “Christian life” as one of pure bliss and joy; this is good, but it is not enough. There needs to be more art, by and about Christians, which confronts the realities of the current moment in culture—flaws, rough spots, and all. No Christian artist or cultural ambassador who ignores the plight of a godless world can ever be treated as serious by that world; their unwillingness to address the anguish, whether it be loud or quiet, will be seen by the world as an inability to speak to that anguish, and the Christians’ promise of joy will be seen as founded on nothing.

But the only way to be able to speak to that anguish is to listen to it.

Therefore: Any Christian who desires to take seriously the biblical mandate to minister to the culture MUST make it their duty to understand that culture. If, as a Christian, you wish to do the work of pointing a lost and fallen culture towards its only savior, you must own the responsibility of listening to what that culture is saying—and that culture won’t be looking for you to tell its problems to; you will have to look for it yourself. The culture will talk privately all day long about its problems, but it won’t come to you and say “come and help us.” YOU, Christian—YOU must listen to the statements of the culture and give help where you can; and you can’t do that if you are ignoring what the culture is saying or if you consider the doings of pop culture to be somehow beneath your notice. You must become fluent in the language of that culture; you must BE IN that culture—

—even if that means paying attention to crazy music like this:

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1. Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, v. 66, n. 1 (Fall 2012). Accessible via JSTOR here.

2. As a primer to some of the music discussed in this essay I prepared this Spotify playlist. I’d like to call your attention to a few tracks on it:

The music by George Clanton (“Whispers.Wav” and “Warmpop”) are not made out of samples like most vaporwave tracks are; Clanton (and several other vaporwave artists, such as Windows96 and 2814) compose their own songs and play them on real instruments in the style of the sample-based music commonly found in the genre.

I absolutely love the vocal sample which appears at the end of “All Eyez on Me” by Luci4—the voice which says “no one gets it.” To me this represents the entire ethos of hyperpop. It’s a cry of angsty dissilusionment; the sound of a generation covering their eyes with their palms and crying.

Vertigoaway’s “Break This The Breaking Point 2” is a hyperpop symphony. It has repeated themes, different movements, and everything. I love it.