Vaporwave

Vaporwave is an internet musicmicrogenre, aesthetic, and meme that emerged in the early 2010s. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, digital technology, and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates 1990s web design and imagery, glitch art, anime, stylized Ancient Greek or Roman sculptures, Memphis Design geometric shapes, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.

Vaporwave originated as an ironic variant of chillwave, which was one of the first music genres to develop primarily through the internet. The style also evolved from 2000s post-noise and hypnagogic pop trends as well as similar retro-revivalist and post-internet motifs that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the era, such as Tumblr's seapunk. The genre was pioneered by producers such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin, and Ramona Langley, who each used various pseudonyms. Preceded by Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 and Ferraro's Far Side Virtual, Langley's 2011 album Floral Shoppe established a blueprint for the genre, and the movement subsequently built an audience on sites such as Last.fm, Reddit, and 4chan, while a flood of new acts, also operating under online pseudonyms, turned to Bandcamp for distribution.

Following the wider exposure of vaporwave in 2012, a wealth of subgenres and offshoots emerged, such as future funk, mallsoft, signalwave, vapornoise, utopian virtual, late night lo-fi, vaportrap, slushwave, and hardvapour, although most have waned in popularity. The genre also intersected with fashion trends such as streetwear and various political movements. After the mid-2010s, vaporwave was frequently described as a "dead" genre. The general public came to view it as a facetious internet meme, a notion that frustrated some producers who wished to be recognized as serious artists. While claims that vaporwave is dead have followed the genre since its inception, the musical style continues to evolve and branch and maintains healthy album sales well into the 2020s.

Later in the 2010s, the genre spawned a viral internet trend known as Simpsonwave along with a revival of interest in Japanese ambient music and city pop. Political offshoots of the style, such as fashwave and juchewave emerged, while in the early 2020s, styles such as "barber beats" gained popularity.