Let’s admit it, we all know that vaporwave started as a really focused conceptual production (aka artists dealing with topics such as corporate culture, retro paraphernalia through a futuristic hypothetical development of the 80’s decade, the cheesy generic music created for commercials, elevators, lounges…). We also know that some of them approached this music genre critically -the clearest example being James Ferraro- and some of them dealt with how this culture (technology, virtual reality, Late Capitalism) have shaped us and made us what we are. The clearest example of this idea is Vektroid, as she has stated in her most recent interview, finding in transhumanism (the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology) the answer for liberation and making a sense out of New Age Culture.

Then, in a random scrolling in this social media era, one sees: the lights of a street light (“is this aesthetics?”), a pink greek statue with the word “LOVE”, a pink beach, a random suburban street in VHS filter with the sentence “Don’t leave,” and the distorted picture of a cat, just to give some examples.

Where is the concept? Where is plastic aloe vera as, at the same time, the promise of eternal life through Beauty Products™ and the emptiness of plastic life? Where is elevator music as, at the same time, music as prefabricated emptiness but also as the ultimate sound of our redemption? Where is the fake enthusiasm of 90s internet commercials, all that rhetoric of possibility invented by marketing, as the parody vaporwave made of it? (Entering the workplace, Corporate Vibes…)? Where is the total disorientation of mallsoft, the repetition of an environment atmospherically designed for eternal consumerism?

Where is Ecco the Dolphin? Where is hypnagogic pop? Where is the critical approach, the Late Capitalism dialectics between what we hate and what we are? It seems it’s lost in a genre that has been reduced to its “aesthetics,” especially in places like tumblr, where a conceptual genre developed pretty soon into just blue-purpleish sunsets. Even when lots of synthwave artists were dealing with cyberpunk scenarios of antagonism between the marginalized mutants and the clean 1% living in closed communities, these people managed somehow to just get the aesthetics out of it, bringing their neon memes while forgetting the historical use of cyberpunk as a dystopia that deals with political topics of the present (technology, exclusion of mutants, AI, pollution, class antagonism, etc).