Jess' Cool Forum

I feel like vaporwave is largely overlooked as a meme just because that's how most people on the internet were introduced to it. There are actually many people who take vaporwave seriously, myself included. Even though I never really got into vaporwave until it blew up in popularity years ago, I totally fell in love with it and still do to this day. It evokes such a strong sense of wistful nostalgia and comfort. Memories of simpler, close yet indescribably distant times, back when all I had to think about was what the latest meme was or whatever. Probably not the nostalgia most songs intend to evoke, but nostalgia nonetheless.

One of my favourite things to do on a Friday night is to put on Nightwave Plaza and get completely lost in the feels. Which I may or may not be doing as I write this.

I don't know if I myself take it seriously or not; all I know is I love the aesthetic part and share the nostalgia, but I also laugh at it often, so (???)
anyway, I made this last year out of some stolen pictures

Efi wrote: ↑Fri Oct 20, 2023 9:57 pm

anyway, I made this last year [image]

That looks great!! I love the colours you used. I like both the visual and musical parts of vaporwave, but I don't get nearly enough of the former. Vaporwave art is very underrated in my opinion.

Efi wrote: ↑Fri Oct 20, 2023 9:57 pm

I don't know if I myself take it seriously or not; all I know is I love the aesthetic part and share the nostalgia, but I also laugh at it often, so (???)

When I say people don't "take it seriously" I mean they don't see it as anything more than a meme or a bad joke. It's unfortunately very common in music circles for "weird" genres to be seen as jokes; people assume it must be ironic because they can't see how someone would like it unironically. Look at what happened at Death Grips' latest show; they ended up walking offstage and ending the show early because some dipshits were messing around in the crowd and throwing stuff at them.

How I feel about vaporwave can be summarized by Shield Cat's end demo screen hehe

There's a lot to unpack when talking about "taking things seriously". It feels like the extremes are pretty simple to talk about; you can be dour or stern or sombre about something and that's completely serious through and through, or you can laugh at something and dismiss and not care about it and that's taking something completely unseriously.

But Vapourwave is somewhere in the complex middle, where aspects of it are taken seriously and others aren't. It feels to me like the process of creation, and the emotions in the nostalgia being explored, are the parts taken seriously here, whereas the influences and representation of things, by nature of many of them existing only to get us to spend money and us now having grown up into a world where we're disillusioned to that, are definitely not taken seriously, and that's what many outsiders get hung up on. It treats those parts of our childhood that naively brought us comfort or excitement but didn't really care about us in return with flippancy, although in a way which still carries that same deep childlike feeling of comfort or excitement.

It's not "serious", but it is sincere.
But there are sadly a lot of people who don't seem to understand sincerity.

I'm not a vapourwave fan myself heh, but it's really neat. I can absolutely appreciate scratching incredibly niche itches brought about by the highly specific peculiarities of our experiences, hehe.

this one's from when I tried to make a driving game

but I spent more time making the sky than designing the idea, so I forgot about roads

the cloud-lookig things in the sky are actually a hexagon grid texture that gets shown in waves on it randomly, but I need to find a video to show that

Tael: I gotta say Vaporwaves is only one of my favorite genres and aesthetics out there for a while now. It's really got a calming feel to it, making it great to relax to. and yeah the Vaporwave style of art is great too.
While I'm at it here's a few albums I love.

Y'all ever heard of George Clanton? He's an artist who makes electronic music that takes quite a bit from the reverb drenched stuff in Vaporwave.

His album Slide is a great example of that Vaporwave influence:

Tael: a friend showed us this awesome online radio station for vaporwave and even the site's presentation hits that vaporwave feel just right. I definitely recommend it.

Check it out when you can, they even have a nice mobile app version! https://plaza.one/