The time is out of joint
It’s amazing how one line from a play written 400 years ago manages to perfectly encapsulate the landscape of the modern day. But it’s the truth. And it was inevitable. When Fukiyama declared the Neu as the end of history, he was dooming us to a life of eternal recursion, where there’s no escape from our chains of produxion.
In this way, it was only a matter of time and a truly deadly shock that would lock us forever in this state. For America and the rest of the world, this was the 2008 financial crisis. It was a demonstration that though the status quo would remain the same, nothing would ever improve, there was no hope of reaching our lost futures.
Out of the ashes of Obama and 2008, Vaporwave emerged, not as a hopeful answer to our lost futures, as some other genres of the time tried, and indeed much of the past of electronica stood for, but as a mournful reminder of what we could have had. Haunted by the past and the potential future, Vaporwave grew to become a shining representation of our times. In much the same way Baudrillard defined the simulacra as a simulation based upon a simulation, a representation of a representation, Vaporwave represented our new meta-nostalghia, a nostalghia for a time dreamt but not one that ever happened, a longing for a lost future, or a constructed past, a mourning of wasted potential, nostalghia for the feeling of nostalghia itself.
In the song that defines the 2000s and onwards, “Losing my Edge” by LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy describes music as longing for “the un-remembered 80s”. Even in the early onset of this disease, he recognised this meta-nostalghia as an eternal haunt over the culture, a way to cope with everything lost.
Now we live in the meta times. The nostalghic times. We live with plastered tombstones over billboards and walls and walking zombies in movies on tv. We are as much the ghosts as those we worship, and every aspect of our life and culture is controlled by some Geschichtsgeist that we may not even know. Many youths of today never knew the Soviet Union or the US conception of it at the height of the war, yet their whole existence is indebted to such an idea. Many young people never lived in the 80s, or the 90s, or perhaps even the early 2000s, yet now it's the place where they feel most safe because this popular conception parroted by our media has sanitised and whitewashed all the problems, building this un-remembered as lost utopia, distilling the time into a pure nostalghic-syrup, as is popular with cultural recursion.
We live now in a time of memories. Memories that are often not our own. We have memories on loan as a soma to cope with the harsh realities of the Neu. It’s our cure to living at the end of history.
For Fisher, this recursion took place in the personal (Japan style) Ghosts of His Life, mainly those of Joy Division and the late 70s, which he then ascribed as an ailment to culture at large--though I would argue partially over-prescriptively. Heidentified this hauntological music as sharing a host of characteristics that overlapped with broader culture, mainly the time out of joint that reflected an era trapped between irreconcilable futures and un-remembered pasts, and its characteristic tool in music: the crackle.
The crackle, in Ghosts of my Life, is the facsimilous analogue, the construxion of antiquity which separates a piece from its facticity, and it’s very literal. This was, this is the vinyl popping put over tracks to age them and remove the digital gloss of modern produxion. It’s the slow decay featured, as Fisher points out, in the work of Basinski or The Caretaker. At the time of his analysis, looking more over the 2000s as a full bodied decade reaching its conclusion, Fisher naturally saw this as the remnants of former inspiration: the 70s, Joy Division, Al Bowley, and the various other sources of samples. However, all of this predates Vaporwave and the financial crisis, a moment when the crackle changed into something less literal, something more liminal and encoded within the very composition of the music.
Floral Shoppe by Vektroid was released in 2011. This is the watershed moment. This is where the un-remembered pasts coalesced with the confluence of unreachable futures, where melancholia and alienation emerged in the faux-pop stylings of synthwave’s Romantic sibling. The sound was familiar. It drew out, almost literally, the greatest Geschichtsgeist of the culture, pulled from an outline enframing to an observable sculpture. Here on display was the spectre of the un-remembered past, exorcised, behind glass in a Warren-esque museum, a blend of not-80s, not-90s, with the produxion of the late 2000s, but drowsed in this new immaterial crackle. This was the cure for the ailment of meta-nostalghia. It was a way to feel a reverence and remembrance for things never past, finding time again in a world where it had been stopped. This was a rumination on the future that might have been if those whitewashed utopias did exist and if time went on in its natural sense, not having reached history’s end. It was the soundtrack to the Neu.
Though its audience then, and even now, was predominantly adolescence, that is people who were less directly concerned with the financial crisis, the decay of the world, the end of history, Vaporwave still offered them an escape from a world they knew was haunted on the periphery. It offered them an alternative. A way to remember the past as having reached its proper zenith and continued along without Shakespearean intervention.
Equally important to this appeal was the visual Aesthetics of the genre. It flourished in this same un-remembered past and with this same metaphysical crackle. There were repetitions in the images and videos. Colours that evoked happy pasts, synth-heavy utopias, and fallen empires--in the case of the bust of Helios. There was the ever present vhs lines, a kind of visual crackle that quickly spread to other genres and mediums. All were paramount in crafting the distilled nostalghia as a remedy to society’s sickness. Rather than remembering Sisyphus happy, one could now imagine themselves happy, imagine the future as happy, or live in the future that might have been.
The optimism of mainstream bourgeois culture in the 90s, the economic prosperity of corporations and aristocrats in the 80s, the rebellious spirit of the underground in the 70s, the plastic vapidness of predominant forces in the 00s. All came together under one genre. Vaporwave became the soundtrack of the Neu because it was the only genre that allowed for the multitemporality we’ve come to expect from the technological age. When any question can be answered in a second, when visions from any point in linear history can be conjured, when incantations written in any millennium can be read, when the day can passed and be fulfilled without having to get out of bed, what use is music that sits so firmly in one place in time? How can something so isolated satiate the hungry souls of nonlinear humans? It’s only natural that a new genre would step out of time, just as culture has. Vaporwave was this evolution.
Now, like most things, the genre has been commodified beyond recognition--perhaps an ironic death to the only offered alternative future. It exists now more in the form of ‘lofi studybeats’, which bring back the literal crackle and low frequency mastering which reflects a piece lost to our history, not a piece which belongs to a future we’ll never see. The vhs mastering and synthetic neon-Cartesian elements have been debased into meta-ironic satires so devoid of original earnestness that they parody only the genre of parody to which they belong, an oft without direct intention. Even the giants of the genre, the aforementioned Floral Shoppe and others, have become the buds of jokes or easy atrocities to exhibit as a means of pointing to our callous past, which remains our present, and will stay to be our future. Time will not be cured of its Geschichtsgeist through nostalghia and less so through commercial commodified pandering, praying on the memories of the nearly senile so as to construct un-remember pasts as a distraxion from presents (see Top Gun: Maverick). Instead, the only way to repair time is through genuine passion, through hunger, through recognition of meta-nostalghia and similar projects which seek to imagine pasts beyond our own history and futures beyond our own present, which can play in the arena of optimism, or at least pragmatism as a means of escaping the nihilistic tendencies brought on by the death of time.
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