Filling "empty" space: Vaporwave as a placeholder for silence

Filling empty space means populating the airwaves

Below is the expanded version of an article I wrote for The Strand - Victoria College’s student newspaper in 2021.

I had a hard time studying without listening to music, but I also had a hard time studying while listening to music with lyrics. The empty space that is left in my mind while studying and trying to concentrate is usually filled with thoughts that are distracting to me. They usually pertain to things that I have to do later that day, thoughts that are only remotely related to the topic I am reading about, or a funny TikTok that I saw, prompting me to abandon any work that I am doing and go watch it again. The silence that concentration allows in my mind, also allows for it to wander. I listen to lyricless music to help fill this space. I have found Vaporwave particularly attractive in filling this space, and this weird micro-genre of electronic music has since exposed me to the history of internet microgenres but also the history of vaporwave.

Vaporwave, sometimes stylized as ‘v a p o r w a v e’, rose to popular as a Tumblr microgenre in the late 2000s and early 2010s as a recontextualization of corporate music. (Lhooq 2013) It specifically focuses on the interpretation of elevator music, Muzak, and background music. It interpolates the commercials and the blandness of corporate music. (Lhooq 2013) A good example of a sample used in vaporwave music is the hold music that plays while you are waiting for the bank to pick-up your call. I began listening to Vaporwave due my interest in electronic music, but also its history as a meme, due to its spaced-out stylization, the sort of weird 3D graphics emblematic of the late 1990s that make you feel somewhat uncomfortable. Think bowling alley score graphics (see below).  The futuristic aesthetic of vaporwave’s graphics are both nostalgic in that they reference early computer culture with the aforementioned 3D graphics that promised economic prosperity and a departure from the limitations of the physical world, and intriguing for their imagination of the future. This is particularly interesting to me, as I feel nostalgia listening to samples from popular music, mall music, video games, and computers from the 1980s and 1990s, decades that I was not even (or barely) alive in.

Picture from The Arctic Archive on Youtube

An example of weird 90s (photo: The Next Web)

Vektroid’s Floral Shoppe Album is one of the most well-known vaporwave albums and its artwork utilizes much of the aesthetics that are emblematic of vaporwave (Photo: Wikipedia)

Vaporwave is particularly intriguing because it is extremely cognizant of these associations of nostalgia, sampling of corporate music, and its use of graphics in its recontextualization, as it is meant as a critique of capitalism. I think that the description of the r/Vaporwave subreddit serves as a great description of Vaporwave’s relationship to capitalism:

“Global capitalism is nearly there. At the end of the world there will only be liquid advertisement and gaseous desire. Sublimated from our bodies, our untethered senses will endlessly ride escalators through pristine artificial environments, more and less than human, drugged-up and drugged down, catalysed, consuming and consumed by a relentlessly rich economy of sensory information, valued by the pixel. The Virtual Plaza welcomes you, and you will welcome it too.”

Vaporwave, then, can either be viewed as the rot that is capitalism, as its soundtrack is reinterpreted, warped, and destroyed, while keeping some semblance of nostalgia or it can be seen as the final transcendence into nothingness emblemized by vaporwave’s spacey, reverb-loaded sounds. The ties to nostalgia here are very important. I mentioned briefly the importance of technology, computers, and the virtual world as a hope for prosperity. This comment by Redditor DasModernist perfectly encapsulates this idea:

“Vaporwave, I think, taps into a nostalgia that our generation - threatened by the alienating prospect of market crises, ecological collapse, and general social decay - has unconsciously developed for the optimistic, techno-utopian ideals that defined much of the popular culture of the late '80s and early '90s. That these ideals were, for the most part, fraudulent and masked the bitter social and political realities of that period is, perhaps, a sign of how similarly-desperate our own nostalgia for that period is.”

This discussion of vaporwave and its relationship to capitalism has been abstract thus far, but my relationship to vaporwave provides a good example of this relationship. Above I mentioned that I cannot work in silence, as my thoughts are too distracting, and listening to genres such as vaporwave has helped me to bring my concentration back to what I am doing, as it fills empty space. When I learned that vaporwave was a recontextualization of elevator music, hold music, and mall music, (see the micro-genre of MallSoft) I quickly realized that my association between filling space and vaporwave’s sampling of this music is not unrelated.

Muzak®, now held by Mood Media, is a company that sold a large amount of background music. (Baumgarten 2013) Particularly, Muzak was sold as a type of technical managerial solution, intended to generate a type of feeling or a certain atmosphere. Indeed consumer-culture literature has identified the importance of creating these atmospheres in stores, restaurants, and malls, as background in “enhancing their ‘purchase probability.’” Alan Bradshaw and Morris B. Holbrook have identified multiple studies in which consumer responsiveness to “sonic stimuli in the servicescape” has been measured, particularly examining sales rates. (Bradshaw & Holbrook 2008, 27) They also identified studies in which music has shown to increase the amount of time that shoppers have spent in stores. This loss of temporality, and the inducement of certain moods distracts shoppers who are not consciously listening to this “music.” (Bradshaw & Holbrook 2008, 28)   Fittingly, Muzak’s original slogan was: “Music is there to be listened to, but Muzak is there to be heard.” (In Beckwith 2013) The point of filling otherwise empty space is to distract from any other thoughts that consumers may have that are unrelated to shopping and consumption. This explains r/Vaporwave’s description that “At the end of the world there will only be liquid advertisement and gaseous desire.” Gaseous desire is quite literally the population of sound waves travelling through the air to reach our minds, acting as a type of advertisement. Empty space cannot be permitted because other thoughts, critiques, or obligations will creep into our mind and disengage us from consumption. Background music must be entertaining, but not too entertaining, so as not to grab too much attention to it. Muzak® has been described as being “hollow” and has proclaimed itself as “not being art.” (Glitsos 2017, 108; Beckwtih 2013) Indeed, it has no cultural significance and even degrades music as culture. (Bradshaw & Holbrook 2008, 26-27)  Even though background music is there to fill empty space, it has no meaning. It is devoid of anything and is simply there to displace other thoughts that we may have.

We must remember, however, that Vaporwave is not simply a reproduction of background music and Muzak®. It is a recontextualization. It is both there to mock the emptiness of background music and its relationship to capitalism, while embracing it. It interpolates all of the sounds of advertising, corporatization, and the glamour of consumption while showcasing the emptiness of a consumption centric world. Indeed, it is meant to fill a space that was previously ‘empty’ with background music and Muzak® with critique. Laura Glitsos contends that “the genre satirises the aesthetic of muzak in order to excavate the uneasy feelings that commercial culture seeks to repress and silence.” (Glitsos 2017, 109)

For me, vaporwave still fades into the background, while sometimes piquing my interest with out-of-place samples of advertisements that remind me of its critiques. It has forced me to reckon with the role of music in creating environments of consumption and the rooting of capitalism in different parts of my life, even though it may go unnoticed sometimes. Vaporwave’s soothing nostalgia and creeping anxiety has provided me with hours of study music, largely uninterrupted, but regularly chiming in to remind me that the world I live in largely upheld by constant advertisement, productivity culture, and the abstraction of sense and memory through manufactured nostalgia and manufactured environment to gloss over these social and economic insecurities.

Vaporwave playlists:

Notable Vaporwave Artists:

18 Carat Affair

Vektroid

Blank Banshee

Luxury Elite

Bibliography

Baumgarten, Luke. “Elevator Going Down: The Story of Muzak.” Red Bull Music Academy (blog), 2012. https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2012/09/history-of-muzak.

Beckwith, John. “Muzak.” The Canadian Encyclopeida (blog), December 11, 2013. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/muzak-emc.

Bradshaw, Alan, and Morris B. Holbrook. “Must We Have Muzak Wherever We Go? A Critical Consideration of the Consumer Culture.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 11, no. 1 (2008): 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253860701799959.

Glitsos, Laura. “Vaporwave, or Music Optimised for Abandoned Malls.” Popular Music 37, no. 1 (2017): 100–118. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599.

Lhooq, Michelle. “Is Vaporwave The Next Seapunk?” Thump (blog), December 27, 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20140426034616/http://thump.vice.com/words/is-vaporwave-the-next-seapunk.