However, I think there have been three cases in total where vaporwave artists/labels have had to pull albums. There`s not a lot of money in Vaporwave, so there`s not a lot of lawsuits. The interrupted transmission (or signal wave) moves abruptly through samples and loops of advertisements to evoke surfing the channel and endless bombardment with advertising, as a full-fledged critique of thoughtless (un)ethical consumption under capitalism and a reversal of the utopian virtual. And finally, there`s late-night lo-fi, a vaporwave counterpart to the lo-fi house and lo-fi hip-hop genres. All of these genres work more or less with the same sample base of 1980s songs, but there has been a remarkable shift towards original melodic composition and not just sampling. This explosion of genre mixing is considered the “second wave” of the steam wave. In 2011, a year in which technology and social media helped host large rallies like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, a new type of protest emerged on the internet. This type of audiovisual expression was authentic, ironic and stimulating. Vaporwave is believed to have begun as an Internet music subculture with the release of “New Dreams LTD., a lo-fi hypnagogic pop album” (Galil, 2013) in 2011. The album, recorded by Laserdisc Visions, contains a song of the same name that sums up the characteristics of what is now known as vaporwave. The music is a combination of electronic music, smooth jazz, chillout tracks and many samples. The result is then modified according to the artist`s will with processing software. The accompanying videos are probably even more interesting because they complement the aesthetics of the genre with an eclectic vision created by mixing advertising from the 80s and 90s, images with computers of the time, and Japanese art and culture.
In late 2011, after taking a closer look at Laserdisc Visions, “producer Will Burnett (aka Internet Club and Ecco Unlimited) added the term vaporwave” (Galil, 2013). I`m not aware of any good royalty-free vaporwave music, to be honest. The reason producers create and sell royalty-free music is to earn income, and you can only do that if you own the copyright to the work you`re creating. Vaporwave is based on samples of older electronic music or sounds that are still protected by copyright, so the ability to sell it is a legal nightmare for creators and producers of royalty-free music. I don`t know of any in the big music libraries or music producers who create this genre. There`s a current trend to downgrade lo-fi music to give it an aged effect, but this doesn`t quite fit with Vaporwave, as vaporwave relies heavily on handling old recorded documents like Kmart tapes digitized from the internet. Don`t sell it unless it`s made from scratch or the samples are removed. But in general, if your samples aren`t published, it`s usually illegal, even if you don`t charge any fees for it. Original Vaporwave is of course legal, but even there are exceptions, as many people use hacked DAWs and plugins. Aesthetically, vaporwave incorporates a flood of advertising iconography and slogans from the 1990s alongside images of buildings, beaches, and other signs of opulence littered with free Japanese (and later other languages).
Many albums envision other worlds, usually shaped by seminal CG animations like the series The Mind`s Eye. Beach resorts on sunny beaches, landscapes with alien geometries, and an endless shopping mall (often referred to as a “virtual square”) are common. Some artists even imagine noble concepts; Replica Federation, for example, imagines their music as the soundtrack of a hitman and super spy who records his adventures. The use of copy and paste languages gives Vaporwave a sense of globalization with all the pros and cons that come with it, and can give the feeling of a falsely dark and peacefully dystopian future where Japan takes over the world and everyone controls from the videophone on their takeaway boats. Despite speculative journalism calling vaporwave a deconstruction of American capitalism, the genre signals complete ambivalence (a typical example: 猫シCorp.`s Mall`s Mall Mall Mall sounds quiet consumerism while using the exact font of Pall Mall brand cigarettes on the album cover).