Review Summary: vaporwave for boomers
I recently replayed Super Mario 64 - the first video game I ever played apart from the OG Pokémon on my green fluo GameBoy Color - and realised how comforting its soundtrack's aquatic synth lines now sound to my late-twenties ass. Nostalgia is pouring out of these chords, sure, but they also heavily carry optimism - because we all know Mario will win in the end, right? It feels both extremely distant and virulently positive.
George Clanton makes me feel that way too.
Maybe it's because his music invokes atmospheric nostalgia in a way that is as much an homage as it is deeply rooted in its epoch's zeitgeist. That specific balance mainly concerns how much Clanton embraces vaporwave as a cultural phenomenon more than a musical genre. If some (righteous? nah) naysayers may say that vaporwave only is
slowed-down 80s muzak, Clanton is one of those that see it more as an "aesthetic wrapper than a set of tempo and instrumentation rules". Kinda like djent then (lol)? It depends: the genre's early
"hey guyz let's slow down 80s hits" approach sure was more a glossy coat than an actual persona. Clanton's vaporwave, however, goes halfway between synthpop and downtempo to
sound like the kind of music you
thought the 80s were made of.
This "aesthetic wrapper" approach shines on his first two "Clanton-labeled" albums.
100% Electronica (also the name of his label) was full of his now-trademark "seagull-sounding synth", accompanied by
those Nintendo 64 aquatic synth lines and an impressive succession of
hooks delivered by a Tears for Fears-inspired voice. This formula shook the vaporwave scene because Clanton did not indulge in picking cool 80s vocals to slow them down but instead adapted delivery and pitch to accompany his
whatever prefixwave with his own take on the cocaine-decade vocals. He then slightly relinquished chillwave on
Slide to go towards a poppier approach while still very much relying on the typically vaporwave
atmospheric nostalgia vibe to drive the record's sonic palette.
Ooh Rap I Ya continues this trend by being less chillwave and even more inspired by late 80s/early 90s music. Most infamously, baggy's kickspinning its way into high fashion in the first half in a way that ties 2010s internet electronica with 80s stadium-pop and 90s British alternative rock. It now becomes evident why Clanton used baggy to complement his recipe: his music points too much towards the joyful exuberance and youthful hedonism of rave parties to ignore the importance of Madchester. "I Been Young" thus fuses baggy percussions with Clanton's traditional chillwave aesthetic, but contrary to his previous output, the POP elements are taking center stage to offer the anthemic chorus his soundscape always deserved. Not that his previous POP songs weren't POP, but never before has he sounded so confidently chart-ready in a chorus of his. Likewise, "Justify Your Life" features trip-hop beats, slabs of chillwave layers, and a reverb-full soundscape in an uncompromisingly banging way. More importantly, it testifies to Clanton's newfound existentialist ethos:
"sometimes you've got to take your leave and start all over [...] justify your life" is the most straightforward way of championing self-realisation. It's pretty fitting Clanton goes that blunt on one of the poppier tracks of his poppiest album.
This existentialism rubs shoulders with
the biggest contradiction shown throughout art (maybe? am no art historian but think
Madame Bovary kind of stuff).
Ooh Rap I Ya bleeds hedonism despite the overarching melancholia that is inherent to the genres he's drawing from - opener "Everything I Want" points out that without
the one and only loved one, material belongings do not matter much. Clanton is ostensibly wearing his heart on his sleeves, and his touching sincerity sometimes goes to the point of doing him a disservice - "Punching Down" is a musically gorgeous but lyrically ridiculous song whose content boils down to "you suck so much I had to write a song about how much you suck lol rekt". In this case, Clanton ambushed himself in the self-parodying quagmires of both synthpop and chillwave he never really managed to stay away from in his corpus. This is ultimately an inevitable issue - lyrically, synthpop is too genuine and vaporwave is too ironic in the same way that dance-pop is shallow and grindcore is anarchist.
It needs to be pointed out that
Ooh Rap I Ya is only sometimes working towards the
poppiest of the poppiest; some tunes rather delve into a triphoppy-fuelled rave with progressive linings. This genre-blending mixture was already present on
Slide, especially in the centerpiece title track, but this time Clanton pushes this aesthetic up a notch in the second half. "Vapor King / SubReal" acts as a trippy centerpiece that ties the first half's more bomb-ass-thicc approach to the second one's contemplation. This contemplative aesthetic shown in the second half is not always a winner: the lack of recognizable beat on "You Hold the Key and I Found It" makes it oddly downtempo compared to the rest of the tunes.
Despite that slight stumble,
Ooh Rap I Ya thus features the kind of music that
should be big - my parents loved the singles! That's what I mean by "vaporwave for boomers" - we internet music nerdz can immediately pinpoint Clanton's music as part of the vaporwave spectrum, yet any of our progenitors would love it for the throwback it procures them. What other than Clanton's blend of 80s poptimism and 2010s hauntology could provide the same level of nostalgia to two different generations in 2023? It's easy to understand why this record would work on boomers: the POP tracks here surely remind them of when they were young and wild and free, without carrying vaporwave's early copy-pastism and overreliance on slowed-down samples.
What about me though? Sure, songs about love, excesses, and self-realisation are as contemporary as they are timeless, but what makes Clanton's nostalgia specifically resonate with my millennial ass? I wasn't alive to appreciate the genres he's drawing from, neither for synthpop's victory lap nor for the Second Summer of Love.
I was born in 1994, and the world advertised to me still has to come to fruition. The continuous rise of income inequality, repeating cycles of boom and bust, and capitalism's contributions to the acceleration of climate change sure aren't going alongside the post-capitalist, automated society that was apparently
the end goal of our politics. It is becoming more apparent that our direct ancestors' vision of the future has utterly failed - humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while robots write poetry and paint was different than the future that was either expected or advertised. As cultural theorist and music critic Mark Fisher stated:
" when the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past" . Maybe that's why
Ooh Rap I Ya works so much on me: I associate big pop choruses and Mario 64's synths with the golden age of being young, dumb, and ignorant. What a fucking time that was.
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