Filling space “empty:” Vaporwave as a placeholder for silence

I have a hard time studying without listening to music, but I also have a hard time studying while listening to music with lyrics. The empty space left in my mind while studying and trying to concentrate is usually filled with thoughts that distract me. They usually pertain to things that I have to do later that day or thoughts that are only remotely related to the topic I am reading about, prompting me to abandon any work that I am doing. The silence that concentration allows in my mind, also allows for it to wander. I listen to lyric-less music to help fill this space. I have found Vaporwave music to be particularly attractive in filling this space.

Vaporwave, sometimes stylized as “v a p o r w a v e,” rose to popularity as a Tumblr microgenre in the late 2000s and early 2010s as a recontextualization of corporate music. Some of the genre’s most notable names are 18 Carat Affair, Vektroid, Blank Banshee, and Luxury Elite. It specifically focuses on the interpretation of elevator music, Muzak, and background music, and interpolates the commercials and the blandness of corporate music. 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 to my interest in electronic music, but also because of its history as a meme, due to its spaced-out stylization. Also, because of 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 is nostalgic: they reference early computer culture that promised economic prosperity and a departure from the limitations of the physical world. I feel nostalgic listening to samples from popular music, mall music, video games, and computers from the 1980s and 1990s, decades that I was not (or barely) alive in.

Vaporwave is particularly intriguing because of its associations with nostalgia, sampling of corporate music, ts use of graphics in its recontextualization and as a critique of capitalism. It can be viewed as a product of 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.

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. Particularly, Muzak was sold as a type of technical managerial solution, intended to generate a type of feeling or a certain atmosphere. 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. They also identified studies in which music has shown to increase the amount of time that shoppers spend in stores. This loss of temporality, and the inducement of certain moods distracts shoppers who are not consciously listening to this “music.” Fittingly, Muzak’s original slogan was: “Music is there to be listened to, but Muzak is there to be heard.” The point of filling otherwise empty space is to distract from any thoughts that consumers may have that are unrelated to shopping.

Gaseous desire is quite literally the population of sound waves travelling through the air to reach our minds, acting as an 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 distinctly not being art. Indeed, it has no cultural significance and even degrades music as culture. 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.

However, 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 simultaneously embracing it. It interpolates all the sounds of advertising, corporatization, and the glamour of consumption while showcasing the emptiness of a consumption centric world. 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.”

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 of some truths about the world we live in: constant advertisement, productivity culture, and the abstraction of sense and memory through manufactured nostalgia and manufactured environment to gloss over social and economic insecurities.

Recommended Vaporwave playlists:

Vaporwave

Vaporwave Classics