What (Non Hip Hop) Are You Listening To?

love that track/everything they did.

One day I am going to kill myself listening to this song. Jim Morrison is god

ha, that's great - always enjoyed me some vaporwave, despite widespread derision.

Is the song above vaporwave? It sounds like 90s 'new wave' lol. Why does every minor variance of sound effect choice become it's own genre? Unless of course that's not vaporware

ha, who knows really, genre distinctions for that kind of music are pretty meaningless. the track jasper posted track fits the bill of what people call vaporwave to me; i wasn't saying that Beach Fossils track was, i just posted it because i'm enjoying the album. I believe, if one was to be technical and faggoty about it, you might call that BF track "lo-fi jangle pop rock"... or just pop-rock.

i feel like all that "wave" stuff has its sonic roots in late 70s and 80s stuff like New Wave, as you noted, and more broadly Synth Pop (Tangerine Dream epitomised its nascent form). In the 2000s "synthwave" and "chillwave" gained prominence in electronic music and have spawned various offshoot "wave" genre since then, that all sound similar.

Vaporwave is hard to separate from previous iterations, i suppose the main difference is an emphasis on tying the music to a visual aesthetic (see Simpsonwave) and it's association with 90s related nostalgia, particularly visual media like video games and tv/movies. to me it also has a lurid tinge where everything is oversaturated/overdone.



i'd consider it all pretty much one genre with the main features being lo-fi synths, pitch shifted vocals and often reworks/edits of 80s/90s pop, rnb or electro house.

this album is acknowledged by nerds who coin genres as the beginning of Vaporwave, but it's hard to distinguish it from a lot of music which came before it.



if you're interested in delving deeper, 4chan music nerds are obsessed with making autistic charts listing essential albums:

https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net...20140807172003

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/c...ultra_edition/

chillwave was probably my favourite era of this kind of music, but i was more into it back then, in addition to being into a lot of synth driven electro.

these are two of the definitive (but not the best imo) chillwave tracks i'd say, but they shares many elements of the associated genres. the main difference are just tempo and sampled vs live vocals (and the distortion levels)





since the advent of the internet there has been so much cross pollination in electronic music, that i think people just like to use genres more so to delineate periods of time, rather than as a way of categorising "a sound".

just my opinion though, i'm not really across a lot of newer synthy stuff.

listening to the beach fossils track again, it does sound a lot like Toro Y Moi's earlier music (although less electronic), which was considered 'chillwave' at the time of it's release. i notice in the comment of the video, lots of people refer to it as New Wave (but no New Wave bands from the 80s really sounded like that, imo).



i suppose everything comes full circle - i've always just looked at genres as reference points which are useful when trying to talk about music.

the rest of the BF album doesn't really sound like that track, for what it's worth, and that guys older stuff was more guitar heavy/overtly "pop rock".



older stuff

I can't believe there is a genre of music called simpsonswave lol I need to discover more of that

ha, yeah, it's mostly just downtempo, synthy instrumental hip hop, but it's all pretty chillll









there are a few other similar things, like spongewave and rickandmortywave smh