Satisfaction Guaranteed: Techno-Orientalism in Vaporwave

Abstract

A characteristic frequently glossed over in scholarly examinations of the online electronic music genre vaporwave is its use of East Asian cultural imagery in its paratexts. One exception is a piece by musicologist Ken McLeod, who connects vaporwave’s use of visual references to Japanese culture to techno-Orientalism, a term that describes how paranoia around Japanese economic expansion in the late twentieth century manifested in American and European cultural products. This article extends McLeod's argument to show how the uses and reproductions of East Asian cultural elements in vaporwave serve to reinforce stereotypes consistent with histories of techno-Orientalist representations, particularly with regard to gender. This article elaborates on the anonymous nature of the vaporwave scene to complicate approaches to techno-Orientalist analyses of digital artifacts. In doing so, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarly literature addressing the roles representation, aesthetics, and affect play in the formation of communities around music genres online.

Megadungeon

“…If the neoliberal evolution of urban spaces pushed musicians to socialize into dungeon-like virtual spaces, on the one hand, the proliferation of '-wave', '-core', and '-punk' aesthetics has since the 2010s generated new online-based underground genres and publics such as vaporwave, seapunk and glitchcore, reflecting peculiar niche aesthetic and a group of paratextual references bearing different political and apolitical meanings (March 2022). Influenced by the Internet's capability of increasing the complexity and influence of niche market consumer networks (Broman, Söderlindh 2009, 6), the phenomenon of online microgenres has intensified and saturated on platforms such as SoundCloud thanks to the Internet as a decentralizing Uniting this description with talpah's conceptions of virtual place, I argue that the already noticeable spatial connotations of the underground -something that is beneath the ground and must be dug and unearthed -have increased with the use of the Internet by the contemporary digital underground.…”