Vaporwave, PC Music and Return Of The Idiot
Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 11:39 am
It's nearly been a decade, and once again we've gone full circle. Nathan Barley was 2005, and now with the vaporwave tsunami upon us, it seems that art has imitated life imitating art once again. Right back where we started.
Adam Harper can't be held entirely responsible for this, but I think Dummy mag proudly holds it's sugaRAPE flag aloft in encouraging this sort of shit.
Not least for the follow up article from Harper on more of the same. It just doesn't sit right. The idea of aging it brings upon...that the emperor's new clothes are only visible to the younger generation, and those of us that remember when the Black Eyed Peas didn't make you want to vomit are behind the trend of what's considered cool.
QT only served to provide a focus point for that silent wave of digital laziness. A boil on an already dirty arse cheek that the collective music press gather round to rub ahead of it's inevitable lancing. In contrast with a lot of the current vaporwave output, QT is actually produced to a fairly high standard, and has a stronger structure to it than most, elevating it to something above corporate loading screen muzak.
I'm not against initiative, or inventive sampling of old material. Reinterpreting the past is what has brought us to the present. I get that. Take what you used to like, trim off the bits that don't appeal to you anymore and improve on the bits that do.
Harper is still spewing his underground baiting rhetoric;
I've never been one for gimmicks or personas (the irony I'm saying that on a forum isn't lost on me, don't worry). Making music that is deliberately shit and then railing on people who don't appreciate it for 'not understanding' is such a bait way of trying to raise your profile it's untrue. PC Music shouldn't especially know better, as they're just trying to do whatever it is that digital labels do in this day and age. The focus on internet numerology - fans, followers, listens.
Read the articles. Listen to the tunes. Download the Ben Aqua RA mix. Decide whether you're cool enough to enjoy it, with an cheeky wink to your peers with the cool retro sneakers that suggests even if you don't, you're willing to pretend.
I'll probably still be here.
Adam Harper can't be held entirely responsible for this, but I think Dummy mag proudly holds it's sugaRAPE flag aloft in encouraging this sort of shit.
Not least for the follow up article from Harper on more of the same. It just doesn't sit right. The idea of aging it brings upon...that the emperor's new clothes are only visible to the younger generation, and those of us that remember when the Black Eyed Peas didn't make you want to vomit are behind the trend of what's considered cool.
QT only served to provide a focus point for that silent wave of digital laziness. A boil on an already dirty arse cheek that the collective music press gather round to rub ahead of it's inevitable lancing. In contrast with a lot of the current vaporwave output, QT is actually produced to a fairly high standard, and has a stronger structure to it than most, elevating it to something above corporate loading screen muzak.
I'm not against initiative, or inventive sampling of old material. Reinterpreting the past is what has brought us to the present. I get that. Take what you used to like, trim off the bits that don't appeal to you anymore and improve on the bits that do.
Harper is still spewing his underground baiting rhetoric;
As someone in the ever insightful RA comments has pointed out, by this definition anyone using a custom HTML template on their MySpace page was punk. The focus on composition rather than output...the idea that how the music was produced is more of a statement to what it represents than whether it's actually any good is just laughable to me.Just like the classic punks, PC Music can be heard as dramatizing the decline of good taste at the hands of modernity, and in 2014 that means noble underground traditions like all that monochrome club/post-club music that rakes reverentially and melancholically through 30 years of analogue production all being displaced by digital decadence, rampant excess and fucking children. PC Music are trolling old ravers, the generation that built the hardcore continuum; they're trolling old punks and their insistence on realism. They're saying, "We might as well sound like this. In a world of gloss and accelerated desire, this is what society made us." And in this regard, they're punks.
I've never been one for gimmicks or personas (the irony I'm saying that on a forum isn't lost on me, don't worry). Making music that is deliberately shit and then railing on people who don't appreciate it for 'not understanding' is such a bait way of trying to raise your profile it's untrue. PC Music shouldn't especially know better, as they're just trying to do whatever it is that digital labels do in this day and age. The focus on internet numerology - fans, followers, listens.
Read the articles. Listen to the tunes. Download the Ben Aqua RA mix. Decide whether you're cool enough to enjoy it, with an cheeky wink to your peers with the cool retro sneakers that suggests even if you don't, you're willing to pretend.
I'll probably still be here.
