Vaporwave: musical memes and audiovisual culture on the Internet

Abstract

This article analyzes the musical phenomenon called Vaporwave from the point of view of remix theory, both in the musical and audiovisual aspects, as well as its relationship with visual culture and contemporary aesthetic forms. Vaporwave is a musical and audiovisual phenomenon of the 21st century, which emerged more than 10 years ago. It is a subgenre of popular electronic music, which remixes fragments of musical pieces from the 1980s and 1990s, reaffirming its decadence or the passage of time through editing and sound filters. In the same way, Vaporwave uses a visual aesthetic that mixes elements of the past and present, imitating the decline of capitalism and cyberpunk. Vaporwave is considered to share elements of reproducibility, intertextuality and fecundity similar to that of internet memes.