Vaporwave makes a game of referentials, so I start with Borges and his hybrid essay/story “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote”. The piece, about a fictional author who re-writes, line by line, Miguel Cervantes’s
Don Quixote, both anticipates and lampoons postmodern literary theory and its obsession with “decentralizing” the text. As in:
“It is a revelation to compare Menard's
Don Quixote with Cervantes's. The latter, for example, wrote:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
Written in the seventeenth century by the 'lay genius' Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.”
You get the idea. The two excerpts are identical but one is apparently lent gravity by its historical and social context, enter Jacques Derrida, and so forth. This also happens to be the critical process behind vaporwave, which is only like its fellow “hip” subgenres chillwave and witch house in its ostensible “hip”-ness and subgenre-ness. Whereas those two flash-in-the-pan trends drew upon musical motifs of past to create something nonetheless deeply
contemporary, vaporwave is often a mirror image of the influences upon which it draws. This is especially true of
*幌コンテンポラリー , the fantastic, beguiling debut album by 情*デスクVIRTUAL--it doesn’t just sound “like” early ‘90s video game music and stock hotel lobby jams; it
is those things. Anyone who dares praise this zeitgeist-y, 70-minute mess of an album is thus put in the position of Borges’s nameless critic, commending what would have been panned years ago simply because it happened
now--because any simulacrum mirroring the cultural motions of the past must come packaged with some sort of biting commentary on its subject, right?
This is what allows Tiny Mix Tapes’s “Mr P” to excoriate the majority of
*幌コンテンポラリー for being “cheesy and bad” before blithely slapping a 4-star rating on the thing; he ends his review typically, with rhetorical questions about capitalism and technology. That’s all well and good; this album certainly invites that type of discussion, prodding away at cultural signifiers (Japanese characters everywhere, Windows ‘97, “Shop@Home Network”), the stuff of vaporwave thinkpieces the world over. But
*幌コンテンポラリー is only interesting--only worth picking out in a sea of releases with similar titles and album covers--because it is good. I mean that this album is
good good, and not good in a sort of distanced, subversive way (i.e., “bad, but rendered good because it is aware of its own badness”). It's undeniably cheesy, yes, but it is also catchy and funny and often weirdly beautiful. Examples abound: “街へSAPPORO NiGHTS BRINGiN IT BACC ✔✔✔ #WEEDBREAK” is funky and fresh; “XX ‘RUBY DUSK ON A 2ND LIFE NUDE BEACH'’ ☯ . . . の生活・・・「*ベルタ」” is a majestic skewering-of-slash-homage-to Kenny G’s smooth jazz; “MARBLE白鳥” is so perfectly evocative of childhood it makes me want to cry.
Let me be clear: to ignore what this and many other albums of its ilk are “saying” about simulation and commercialization and to take this vaporwave trend at its aesthetic face value (“s
hit just
slays, bro”) would be foolish. This is undoubtedly music
about something, a something which might be most coherently summed up as the attempt to mirror capitalist culture’s own attempts to mirror reality--to interrogate the space between the real world and its cultural representation, especially within the context of the '90s' commercial environment. All this doesn’t mean, however, that the listener must engage in some artificial mind-game to enjoy an album like this fully;
*幌コンテンポラリー is not good because it’s bad. To frame the album as the product of trading off aesthetic and concept would be to completely miss the point. That space marks the difference between Leyland Kirby’s V/Vm and The Caretaker, or between The Hood Internet and The Avalanches. This is not an album that merely laughs at its subject matter but rather one that treats it with the utmost attention and respect. The result is perhaps the defining statement of vaporwave as it exists right now, and a great debut album to boot. Skeptics may scowl, because even the best of this genre’s work still resembles that of a Pierre Menard, “good” only with loads of contextual weight on its shoulders. But for as long as the albums are this satisfying, I’m still listening.
