Cities Without History

This article was commissioned by erdjohann , and would not be possible without the knowledge and contributions of Cacola .

(The death of) vaporwave ideology and the schism of artistry.

We walk amidst the ruins of Vaporwave Statues, wrapped in plastic of azure and pink gradient, which encase the souls of those Tormented Angels whose cries are never heard, for they are silenced out by the cacophony of the Cloud of Midges above, chattering away in mediocrity, forming ever stronger, ensuring the Vapor Tetsuo grows and grows. Infinite growth in a finite reality. What motive the Tetsuo has, it is unclear, however we believe we may find an escape route. Rather than looking outwards, we look in and open our eyes to the grotesque horror show of Vaporhell, embrace its sick landscape for what it is. There, standing miles away, beyond the purple clouds of neon rain in Dreampunk Valley, through the krokodil dens of Hardvapour Village, beyond the anime girls forced to dance in perpetual submission to mindless, repetitive, bland house music down the Future Funk Highway, across the checkerboard floors of Classical Vaporwave Town Hall, and through into Vaporwave City itself, a fortress lays, a great pyramid of evil, the colour of baby pink, its teal capstone hosting VR Vaporwave Parties that never end, just keep getting slower and slower and slower.”

Thus reads part of a retrospective blurb added to the Bandcamp page for Vaporwave Is Dead sometime between late April and early May 2021. The album, which was originally released in December 2015 under the alias "Sandtimer", comes from vaporwave provocateur HKE, a man who has spent much of his career being the de-facto villain of the vaporwave community. Vaporwave Is Dead is not, as it was taken by many upon release, a straightforward pronouncement of death for a community which HKE had come to represent both the fundamental dissonance of and the endless infighting that had come to overshadow the music itself; presented as a tongue-in-cheek cyberpunk concept work about a dystopian society where an authoritarian government is fighting both an ideological and a literal war against vaporwave, the album is more of a goofy high-concept self-dissection of vaporwave culture than any kind of definitive statement.

While the album is assuredly a joke in hindsight - yet another in a pile of instances of HKE trolling a community obsessed with treating him like some kind of postmodern lolcow - the iconography that Vaporwave Is Dead wields is undoubtedly provocative. Presented up-front with the now-infamous image of a Greco-Roman statue (perhaps vaporwave's most iconic piece of non-genericized iconography) crumbling under a shower, you can imagine how someone who was taking vaporwave way too seriously would react overdramatically to seeing a guy known for flashily rejecting and anchoring himself to the community in equal measure put out an album where he destroys a charged symbol of vaporwave’s absurdist aestheticism and declares the genre to be "dead".

But while Vaporwave Is Dead isn't really the self-serious statement people acted like it was, the world that is presented in the 2021 blurb acts as an evocative metaphor for the split in how people perceived vaporwave's "purpose" as an artform. Vaporwave's originators came from scattered backgrounds, but a postmodernist approach to recontextualizing mid-to-late 20th century mass culture aesthetics was pretty broadly shared between them, and the resulting music was at the time much closer to the ideals of vaporwave as a form of meta-criticism than was true when that narrative actually became popular a couple years later.

Vaporwave became not only more widespread but more divorced from those experimental roots over time, and with that emerged an increasingly large portion of the vaporwave community - one consisting of not only listeners but musicians and labels - that viewed vaporwave not as a commentary on late 80s and early 90s consumer culture, but as a glorification of it. Many casual vaporwave fans are at least vaguely aware of "hardvapour", an ideological movement masquerading as a musical genre that embraced aggressive electronic music stylistics and a grimy, unfocused aesthetic drawing on drug, militant, political, second and third world, and absurdist imagery in varying forms as a way of rejecting traditional vaporwave characteristics. Many fewer know about "softvapour", the term used semi-jokingly in hardvapour circles to distinguish this component of the vaporwave community that lacked the ideological component: pure ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ bliss, unburdened by criticism of the culture it depicted.

It's fascinating reading people talk about what they actually listen to vaporwave for; over the years, about a million different "why do you like vaporwave?" threads have been posted to /r/Vaporwave, and almost invariably people reply in a mix of the same few common ways. Most simply and obviously, you have the people for whom vaporwave directly appeals to their childhood: "I was born in 1982, I grew up with the weather channel and all the beautiful commercial and fashion ads", says /u/jawnstein82 in a November 2011 thread. But for many, it’s not nostalgia but anemoia: nostalgia for a time they never truly experienced. It’s not at all uncommon to see people credit vaporwave as a portal into a time they uncritically yearn for; consider the following comment from /u/kaho9639 on the same thread:

They're not the only one either who seems to believe in the idea that vaporwave represents a period that was genuinely carefree in comparison to our own. /u/Hellenic_91 writes in a 2023 thread that it "reminds me of how the world in the 90s was. It wasn’t over saturated with technology but just enough"; in the 2021 thread, /u/wretzkyy self-awarely writes that "I also have to add that I was born in 2000, growing up with people and culture praising 90s in a lot of different ways, so I ended being « nostalgic » of an era I didn't even lived" and wryly asks "how sad it is that since many years a huge part of the way we see future is APOCALYPTIC. We literally have to go in the PAST to believe in better visions for the FUTURE. It’s philosophically terrifying isn’t it ?"

This optimistic overview of the past is even directly called out in the same thread. As /u/Internal-End-9037 argues in a reply to the aforementioned /u/kaho9639 post:

Some of the most interesting responses come from a 2015 thread on the same topic , where a smaller community seems a little more nuanced in their understanding of the "point" of vaporwave. In this thread, there's a little bit more recognition that the world vaporwave presents isn’t real. The thread’s poster, whose account is now deleted, describes vaporwave as a "slightly-dystopian 'What if'? style of music" which "sets something off in us that makes us groove and dance and relax and all makes us wish we could be in that non-existant period of time". /u/DasModernist presents a fairly lengthy analysis, claiming that "the genre resonates a great deal with my generation's ambivalent relationship to the hyper-real, consumer-driven world of the early 21st century" and that "for many of us, this was a relationship that was built on the technological utopianism of '90s culture, but one that has now been challenged by the global recession and by the resultant collapse of the ideals of the free market, corporate power, and technological progress that so defined the '90s." Ultimately, in their words, "the music appears at first like an accurate recreation of that lost '90s world, but it gradually comes to feel like an imperfect, decaying copy." One of my favourite responses that I found while trawling these threads is a 2023 comment from /u/According-Value-6227 that goes so far as to argue that vaporwave depicts a sort of parallel timeline where trickle-down economics worked, ushering in a "capitalist utopia" where unchecked consumerism and a post-need society weren't fundamentally incompatible.

This conflict between two different views of what vaporwave depicts - an utopian society where capitalism was gentle and uncomplicated, and a dystopian society where economic mechanics were as incomprehensible as they are in real life and the hyper-commercialization of daily life was more unnerving than exciting - seems to be the fundamental issue that fractured vaporwave, and in the long run, it's not hard to argue that the "softvapour" side emerged victorious. Few of vaporwave's ideological standardbearers are still active in 2025; instead, vaporwave in 2025 is stuff like utopic.dreamer - a channel which uploads 5 hour long ambient mixes almost certainly made entirely with AI, accompanied by trite Tumblr moodboard-level titles written in ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ text and generic images of liminal spaces or dudes sitting in offices - or the more recent output of DMT Tapes FL , whose massive catalogue of music has been nearly doubled in the last 4 years by a slew of AI-generated releases with a mix of generic vaporwave symbology and vague Christian themes. Perhaps it's unfair to characterize the entire non-ideological side of vaporwave as "slop", but this certainly fits the definition.

Music does not need to be culturally critical, obviously. Art may be inherently political, but that doesn't mean that it needs to be consciously, overtly focused on political themes. This is not a takedown of vaporwave as a concept, and certainly not a declaration that the only good vaporwave is the ideological kind. But the question has to be asked: what does it mean that so many people are obsessed with music that uncritically glorifies late 80s capitalism? It's obviously a form of escapism, but the 80s are so similar to our own time that it almost doesn’t make sense to "escape" there.

A few months ago, I was scrolling through my YouTube shorts feed when I came across what was effectively a "nostalgia montage" for the year 2016. It was pretty clearly aimed at a slightly younger audience than myself, but even still I found it incredibly confusing; maybe this wasn't the case for people who were younger than me at the time, but pretty much everyone I knew immediately recognized 2016 as one of the worst years in recently memory even before it was over, and in the wake of the increasingly terrible 2020s, it remains probably the one "terrible year" of the 2010s to still be remembered as truly godawful. But to those who were too young to understand why it sucked, 2016 is a halcyon time, clearly superior to the current terrible times. I get that! The recession years of the late 2000s aren't exactly fondly remembered by most, but for a girl who was still in elementary school, it feels like uncomplicated days of uncomplicated living and games and movies and books and trips that all make me nostalgic. But that doesn't mean this era was actually good, only that I just remember the things I liked, and not all the terrible shit that wasn't directly visible to me.

It's easy to look at vaporwave as operating on the same mechanism, but it ignores an important fact: most of vaporwave's audience doesn't actually remember the era it revives. Not to say that there aren't people in the space who were actually around for the general late 80s to mid 90s period most vaporwave imagery is based on, but many more vaporwave listeners and artists postdate this era entirely - that aforementioned concept of anemoia. In a way, the 80s are the perfect period for this; a sort of proto-contemporary time, where things like TV and video games and modern-looking cities existed, but in pleasantly "retro" forms, pre-burdened with the kinds of lovable flaws that immediately become desirable artistic aesthetics the second they were iterated out of relevance. In a conversation with my friend Cacola, she referred to it as feeling "present in a way the 70s and prior do not"; they represent a time far enough back to feel fundamentally different from ours, but also similar enough to feel very familiar and inhabitable without the cultural context of having actually lived through them. And while the 80s weren't even vaguely free of troubles (especially if you weren't a rich, white, cishet man), I think it's notable that they feel more stable than something like the 60s; the Cold War was winding down, and what problems did exist felt a lot more distant from an American or European perspective, whether that was because they were happening in countries on the other side of the world or because they were intentionally suppressed and made to feel irrelevant to the demographics favoured by the US government.

Glorification of the past can be dangerous whether it's based on a lived nostalgia or not, but vaporwave's methodology feels particularly insidious because of what it misses and what people are escaping from. While few would deny that the last decade has been pretty dire no matter their political views, there's a lot of disagreement on why things are terrible right now (i.e. is it because people have had their liberties junked in favour of an endlessly accelerating postcapitalist society where corporations have turned every single part of life into a form of continuous wealth extraction, or is it because queer people and brown people decided they deserve basic human rights), and the way someone looks at the Reagan era says a lot about their values; the portrait of this era that the "vibes" end of vaporwave presents is one that is almost without-caveat better than our own, despite the fact that a huge amount of what makes it awful to live in America today traces back to trickle-down economics, the gutting of government services, the war on drugs, the AIDS crisis, and a million other evils the Reagan administration gleefully enacted in the midst of vaporwave's "utopian" past. Capitalism made no sudden magic transformation between 1989 and 2010.

I don't want to shame anyone for finding solace in the world that vaporwave presents. Commercials are made to be pleasant, popular music is made to be enjoyable, consumerism is made to appeal to your wants, and a lot of 80s culture is legitimately very cool. But is it really any wonder that a community full of people who view the era vaporwave revives as an utopian escape from our current reality would also have a bunch of dipshits who think that their life sucks because DEI stole all their opportunities and if we just roll back all our corporate regulations then eggs will magically stop getting price gouged?

The retrospective blurb for Vaporwave Is Dead imagines a world where all the different subsets of vaporwave are reduced to locales defined by genericized aesthetics, subsumed into a culture that devours everything in its path, even that which was created to escape it eventually becoming another hollow aspect of it. At its evil heart, you party endlessly into infinity - a dull euphoria sealed off from the outside world by the muted musical ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ.

Maybe this was always the intent; for every instance of Daniel Lopatin talking about his Eccojams as "a cathartic and subversive response to an overly anaesthetised, commercial music landscape" or HKE summarizing his view on vaporwave as a "recontextualization of past music" that "could elicit new feelings from sounds that were unexpected" with "a certain uneasiness and anxiety about it in its undercurrent", you can point to similarly popular and influential vaporwave veterans describing their fascination with the genre with much less critical intent, like Nmesh straightforwardly saying that "there was a certain commercial magic that I just can't see in TV shows/games/toys of this generation" and that, in large part, the point of at least some of his music "was being able to revisit my childhood to some degree". And if you really wanna get in the weeds about it, even this essay is, in its own way, a reactionary perspective on vaporwave; just because the things I think are missing from vaporwave in 2025 are largely its anticapitalist (or in the case of an artist like HKE at least capitalism-recontextualizing) and more broadly ideological components doesn't mean that I'm not still venerating the past. Who am I to call out the flatly 80s-glorifying end of vaporwave for not really having a point in such a manner?

But even if vaporwave doesn't need to have a point, I think that looking at it (or any other retro nostalgia genre - most of these same arguments can be cut and paste into an analysis of synthwave) as a genuine vessel of a "better time" is near antisocial, not to mention effectively self-defacing. This may be odd to say about a genre that has always obscured the artists to the degree vaporwave has, but with how many people treat vaporwave as pure background music for productivity or mood-setting or contextualize it not as a modern artform but as simply a reflection of a time they wish they lived in, it's not surprising that vaporwave these days seems to care so little about the artistry of those who make it or what those people have to say about the aesthetics (musical, visual, and thematic) that they are objectively recontextualizing. Who can be satisfied with a state of the community where literally the only notable artistic voice to both emerge and find any widespread popularity in the last half a decade is desert sand feels warm at night , a project effectively based on the idea of being nostalgic about vaporwave itself? We don't need to bring back the torturously elitist "softvapour" designation, but the artistic stagnation of modern vaporwave and the continued popularity of high-concept projects like Vektroid, Chuck Person, 2814, and James Ferraro proves that "ideological vaporwave" - vaporwave that actually has something to say about capitalism and disposable culture - is an important and beloved presence in the community even to those who have little interest in the actual ideological components being expressed. Vaporwave is a real genre that was invented by real people with real ideas about what it meant; it deserves to be treated as something more than revisionist escapism.