Anemoia and the Vaporwave Phenomenon: the ‘New’ Aesthetic of an Imagined Nostalgia

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show how vaporwave music, which emerged exclusively through the Internet in the beginning of the 2010s, embodies the longing of a generation born in the 1990s and the 2000s for a time they hardly knew – if at all. Vaporwave music is a microgenre, a concept which, according to Anne H. Stevens and Molly C. O’Donnell, can refer to “digital musical phenomena” catering to a “niche” audience (2020: 1). Vaporwave relies heavily on sampling musical genres ranging from 1970s’ smooth jazz to 1980s’ Japanese city pop, and on drawing visual inspiration from the digital landscape of the 1990s. It cannot and should not be defined as a purely musical phenomenon; it is also an aesthetic and a language–as Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth explain, vaporwave “circulates more like a ‘meme’ than a music genre” (Born and Haworth, 2017: 80) and is “embraced not only as a cultural and social but as an aesthetic medium, visual as much as musical” (ibid 79). Vaporwave plays on different aspects of nostalgia – such as reflective and restorative nostalgia, two concepts defined by Svetlana Boym – and on an ambiguous rejection of the present. Through the case study of “mallsoft” music, a subgenre of vaporwave recreating as a nostalgic bubble the soundscape of the American mall of the 1980s and 1990s, this paper will develop the concept of “anemoia,” defined by John Koenig in a 2014 YouTube video entitled “Anemoia: Nostalgia For A Time You’ve Never Known.”