I’m curious to know whether the people who wax nostalgic over this aesthetic and ones like it are the same people who condemn the reactionary politics that aim to restore the climate that allowed these aesthetics to blossom.
Sounds like bullshit to me, the early 90s seem in essence more liberal then today generally. Lgbt etc rights were not quite there in some places maybe but it was moving toward the right direction.
I've been around the vaporwave scene (of which these other nostalgic aesthetics are adjacent) for years and let me tell you... for an art movement which seems to celebrate the consumerist childhood of millennials exploring shopping malls, the early(ish) HTML web, cable TV and 8 to 32 bit video gaming, there are a lot of vocal leftists who seem to abhor all of the things which made the aesthetic what it is.
The originators of vaporwave - like James Ferraro, Lopatin, Vektroid/Macintosh Plus - didn't exactly "celebrate" uncritically that feel-good phase of capitalism, their takes on the plundered material featured quite a bit of darkness, eeriness and liminal feels in between the cracks... which may seem non-inexistent or sanitized with other vaporwave producers who followed, but make no mistake... Early on, music journalists framed vaporwave as implicitly an ambivalent critique of the '80s-90s, where: 1) as a child, that era seemed to be so exciting; 2) as an adult now, not only that culture did turn out to be an empty promise, but also a lot of it is dying or dead by now. In the US there are even dying shopping malls right now, which might seem weird in other countries, but that might partly explain the minor popularity of vaporwave in the US among Internet youth - even young people who aren't very "woke" can tell something's wrong at the heart of capitalism. Current techbro capitalism? Who really likes it?
Being nostalgic is one thing, endorsing "fashwave" - which not for nothing was just a microniche within vaporwave - is another. Long story short, if you go past the surface fascination with the products of 80s consumerism, vaporwave is generally not really in praise of consumerism and it most certainly disrespects copyright, which is that fundamental to that economy, isn't it?
The leap from a leftist take on vaporwave straight to "fashwave", as if it is a binary, is certainly something.
> even young people who aren't very "woke" can tell something's wrong at the heart of capitalism. Current techbro capitalism? Who really likes it?
There's (valid) critique of the current economic status quo, and then there's "Ugh, Capitalism": https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism - and from my time in the scene (several ElectroniCons, Neo Gaia shows in Tokyo, a dozen or so Discord servers, etc.) the trend seems to be disillusioned millennials rather than diehard illiberals (although I may be wrong; this is anecdotes rather than evidence)
What really takes me back is that if an art movement uses the imagery of a particular trope, be it fascism or communism or anti-colonialism or environmentalism or anything else, it almost always assumes an endorsement of that movement. You don't see many artists put up images of mustache man without it being seen as support. Same with Michael Jackson's Earth Song, no one concluded that MJ was in favor of environmental deconstruction.
The copyright angle is right on the money - anti-copyright views are rife inside the scene for obvious reasons. Whether it was central to the 80s-90s economy is another question. In that time, FLOSS was not prevalent as it is now. It wouldn't be for a decade or so afterwards.
> 1) as a child, that era seemed to be so exciting; 2) as an adult now, not only that culture did turn out to be an empty promise, but also a lot of it is dying or dead by now.
This is the crux, and I do want to address it: maybe the "lost hope" of my generation does see the Palm Mall as something to be mourned rather than something to be celebrated (that's my own bias - maybe others wished it never existed at all) but when I'm in a random Queens bar while Lux or Cars is playing 80s Japanese "City pop" with a projection of Asahi beer commercials on the back wall, I don't think it's a dunk on Reagan or Clinton-era capitalism leading up to the dot-com bust or 9/11 so much as a longing for it.
