Vapor as industrial

Is vaporwave the industrial music of 21st century culture?
                                

Much has been made out of how vaporwave is the sound of capitalism and rightly so: the subversive, ironic 'yielding' to corporate aesthetics is refreshing, enjoyable and rich with potential (Check out Eyeliner's terrific album High Fashion Mood Music). The mall is to vaporwave what the Norwegian forest is to Black Metal.
  

We're invited to experience said malls in Metallic Ghosts' recent The Pleasure Centre, wait patiently for our call to connect throughout 회사AUTO's excellent カスタマーサービス Line✆NE or, with the genre's vibrant Ur-text Farside Virtual, allow our weary avatars to relax and luxuriate over Second Life sushi to the tune of ringtone symphonies.

Embracing the lush, easy fruits of capitalism (however ironically) is the order of the day because, lets face it, most of us in the West have computers, internet access, televisions and smartphones (to the students I teach, the iPhone 4 is old tech, and we have a large number of students from areas of high social deprivation i.e. relative poverty) which are luxuries of relative wonder to earlier eras; economic crisis or not, many people are comfy.

So, it's natural that music should reflect accurately our conditions, even if it is a winkingly self-aware one that appears to mix fuzzed-out VHS nostalgia with HD optimism rather too blithely. The re-appropriation of principally 80s pop, soul and funk songs that are smooth, easy-going hymns to the commerce of comfort and  torrid extravagance as valid self-expression, only seems to add credibility to the idea in that the chopping and skrewing of these peons to luxury appears to serve the function of acknowledging forebears, ancestors or even a 'better time', aesthetically; nostalgia for what the crop of young producers never actually experienced first hand.

While having these thoughts, I was reminded of the great cataclysmic activities of Throbbing Gristle, SPK and other progenitors of 'Industrial Music'. Now, Industrial music is my rock n' roll: Cabaret Voltaire are my Beatles, Throbbing Gristle my Rolling Stones and the likes of NON my Dylan. It struck a clangorous and memorable chord with me when I discovered these artists and, especially, the use of the term 'Industrial'.

Rather than simply imply a connection between their noisy, droning, grinding compositions and mere factory machinery (a mistake to do so), they instead referenced the culture of the industrial age: "it was unhip to glorify mass production" recalled Genesis P-Orridge of the generation of their chosen genre descriptor, also remarking that "We used to make joke comments like 'We churn out records like Ford make motor cars'" (October, 1980)*. Similarly, the music vapor artists use as their raw material is about as unhip (and less prankishly contrary than TG) as you can possibly get.

Whereas the name referenced socio-cultural conditions, the music produced under the Industrial banner was deliberately unpleasant and challenging, reflecting what TG saw as "vivid and accurate reportage"** of their conditions, their world. So, if the world was filled (which it was) with economic decline, serial killers, burns victims, crypto-fascism and pornography then, well, their music ought to reflect that. The result was hard upon the ears of many but a balm and rousing inspiration to generations since.

Vaporwave, similarly, has an element of reportage to it. We're visiting temple-like malls regularly, soaking up the latest fashions, unconsciously surfing new developments in technology, entertainment and social interaction, enduring (to the point of numb acceptance) hold music, retro-reactivations of decades past, corporation-compiled 'indie/alternative' music playlists and gorging ourselves on such a variety of gastronomical experiences that would constitute high luxury in TG's joyless 70s Britain.

I'm not criticizing. This is is life. I like my laptop, sushi, gym and iPhone. What I want to emphasise is that vaporwave's utilisation of stock sound, corporate muzak or high-gloss pop (which, to the stereotypical 'music lover', is intended to be unpleasant or unmusical) parallels TG's appropriation of feedback, tape noise,   samples and general unpleasantness as they're not intended to be music, not intended to be pleasurable artistic statements but at best byproducts of actual entertainment (parts of TG were often described as sounding like a Pink Floyd soundcheck). The sound of industrial activity, factories and forges, did seep into TG and other like-minded bands consciousness (Richard H Kirk once remarked how the drop forges of Sheffield could be heard around the clock and, as a result, in their music) just as Skype's functional plops and wheezes have seeped in James Ferraro's.
      회사AUTO includes telephone hold messages as intervals -blandly polite, empty facsimiles of genuine sentiments, not intended for aesthetic consumption, just as the feedback that TG foregrounded was once a side-effect of live rock music -not the main attraction, just a byproduct.

There are more superficial comparisons to be made between vaporwave and industrial: the repetitive nature, electronic manipulation of sounds, the use of found/re-appropriated sounds as mischievous juxtaposition, experiments with sound quality and, well, that vaporwave has realised better than TG ever could the idea of producing records "like Ford make motor cars". 회사AUTO has released an album a month since November, of excellent quality I might add, and the prolificacy of other vaporwave artists is not to be sniffed at.

For me, at least, who feels that vaporwave actually exists along the continuum of noise music (specifically the American noise tradition), I get a similar perverse kick out of listening to a morbidly slowed n' slurred version of Berlin's Take My Breath Away (by MJ Linckoln) as I did first hearing Throbbing Gristle holler and wail about the Moors Murders (Very Friendly from First Annual Report). Both were well known, even unconsciously embedded, parts of my culture of which I and others took a dim view of (admittedly comparing murder to Top Gun is still stretch for some), re-contextualized for a new purpose.

Any thoughts or opinions greatly appreciated to further the discussion.


*Quotations from P-Orridge taken from 'Wreckers of Civilisation' by Simon Ford.
*Also from Ford's book, p7.17