Vaporwave and Personal Relationship with Music
Tags: Book Review, Grafton Tanner, Consumerism, Vaporwave

I never really think hard about my relationship with music. Generally, I just see music as a creative product that owns various qualities in itself that was meant to connect to a certain type of person, in any kind of way, and then become something to that person. For example like how we corelate a place from our past with a song we listened to or simply heard at that time. To me, taste is of something that don't matter much when it comes to a person's choice of music. Taste, in my own conclusion, is a result of a person's luck or unluckiness in gaining a good education, and his/her family influences growing up. Not everyone has the freedom of defining their own taste, and I am calmed by this idea; that I can look at music simply as something that feels good or not, a result based on a choice-making process that I don't need to think hard the how of.

music and random encounter

Chance encounter with new music has become easier through music app like Spotify or platform like Youtube. With their personalized algorithm, each time when we access their service, a set of 'curated based on my interest' contents are already presented neatly for my pleasure. And by the nature of Internet Age, the supply of contents never runs out; there will always be something new I haven't heard of. Most of the time, I'd found one or two songs amidst a 20 songs choice that caught my ear and really perked my interest. I would then keep them in my favourite list and keep them for later. Sometimes I place them into separate playlists made to be listened for specific events, such as road trips, study, or relaxing.

I seldom read music criticism or journalism. Growing up with my mom’s teaching, I always know what I like and I don’t need more explanation, especially the complicated ones, about them. Simply put, I trust my feelings. Although sometimes joining a deeper discussion about the music I listened to and the musicians behind them that I admire felt like necessary thing to do, especially to get deeper understanding about the songs, I still would choose to just absorb the basic information to keep the songs simple. Simple is good, it has more space.

a critic to the system

When I chose to read about vaporwave through Grafton Tanner’s book, I ventured into it blindly just out of curiosity. I’ve heard the term a few times in college and some seniors use them as their artwork’s subject matter. I only know that vaporwave is strongly linked to music because of reading the book.

Important note to make about the book is it is also a media analysis of the Western society — I was a little reluctant in using this terminology, but Tanner himself used this term repeatedly in his book. The main problem, like a cancer within a body, discussed in Tanner’s book is how internet, late-capitalism, and ubiquitous technology manipulates in the 21st century. In this book he exposed the darker side of our current age that was hidden behind our phone’s bright screen. Reading this has been an unsettling journey. It was not fun at all. But I have come to think of unpleasant things sometimes as stuffs that are simply that way because they are unfamiliar to me, or sometimes stuffs that bears some truths, or is a representation of a reality unknown to me, that don’t always brighten the image of the world I have in my head.

Politics has never been of much interest to me. News about politics in my country, Indonesia, are near a perfect one hundred percent sad, or lies. I have come to grow a sort of helpless feeling whenever political topics were mentioned because, in a country heavily saturated with corruption and selfish leaders, I know there is nothing of immediate effect that I could do. Same applies for talks about global destruction. Always, I would settle with the conclusion that I can only manage me and the people close to me. So I would apply the important messages from intellectual politics criticism and apply it into my daily life with only myself and some people around me as the subject. Influencing has never been my good trait. I assume almost the same stance when I’m reading Babbling Corpse, I noted its important reveals and points and treat them as a puzzle piece in the borderless puzzle of the world I’m bit by bit trying to put together in my head.

bitter and cynical but true

I do not completely understand the whole points presented in the book. I skipped many parts. This is one part because I do not have direct experience to some topics it discussed, one part because I didn’t listen to the songs being referenced and many parts of the book are a description of the songs, and another part is because the writer’s narrative style with heavy cynical tone. For example is this tail of a paragraph in chapter four:

"Our present situation in the United States – with systemic racial violence, right-wing terrorism, ecological destruction, and economic turmoil – is becoming too volatile to ignore, yet the culture industry still peddles ludicrous, infantile fantasies and has done so for decades.”

The strong criticism style of Tanner is unfamiliar to me, so sometimes his arguments would sound too harsh, although what he say sometimes ring true with me. But this is part of the result because I don’t have enough understanding about the American society he is criticizing about and he don’t do much basics explaining in this book.

limitlessness and nostalgia

The fourth, and last, chapter of the book was the most interesting to me. Tanner dived into this simple fact that I also think of sometimes: isn’t there too much music out there? He brought up important discussion about music industry and wider society’s interaction with music in these days. He brought questions that has begun to surface, such as 'do you ever just get sick of music?' and about the damage of easy access digital consumption to how people nowadays approach music. I think it’s true that sometimes meanings are lost when something starts to exists in abundance. When something become 'too much’, it also become a burden. I always feel this kind of thing as something that invites me to just push it aside and go back to the bright space of my happy and simple world.

The growing amount of songs released everyday, how increasingly easy it is to produce one with only simple equiptments and minimum talent right now, Tanner deems as alarming. But more alarming than that is pop music’s influence over the majority of American citizen-scape. There is a side-effect in mindless consumption, moreover the ones we didn’t realize were forced on our plates, songs heavily commercialized by giant music agencies. Tanner’s interesting argument about this is presented through Taylor Swift’s album 1989. But none of the bad side of scarily popular pop songs would matter once we "…slap a filter over it all. Our limitless nostalgia, our willingness to subscribe to an ideology that scrambles our codes of meaning in exchange for material pleasure, our addiction to information, and our distracted, regressive tendencies form the base of a greater societal crisis", in summary, the ghosts from the past and the commodification of them.

Tanner wrote about how America is never the same after the event of 9/11 and the following behavioral change after it. The one he mainly focuses his eyes on is how the desire to 'go back to the past' grows and took roots deeply in many Americans. This is interestingly discussed with Killer's Brandon Flower's 2015 song music video titled Lonely Town. And this is where I can finally understand his main argument about 'commodification of ghost' as mentioned in the book's title.

I made temporary conclusion after finishing the book. Some of the things I already believed are reinforced in this book, and one of them is how knowing how to measure proportion of what we consume is important and healthy to our mind. I’ve quit instagram for almost a year now. But that decision come with rational reasoning based on my own understanding of my needs. Knowing what I need helps me a lot to be calmer, especially in the face of limitless information and countless other stuffs available for me to access every time every day. There was once a time when I felt somehow left behind, there is just too much out there to keep up to. But I figured it could be made simpler by knowing and defining what I need and what I feel towards a certain types of digital services.

Tanner ended the book with a short description of hikikomori. And I agreed. Maybe a lot of us are, in each our own unique way, trying to solve our own case of loneliness. I felt most grateful when I realize how lucky I am to own a set of tools that made me able to view the things I have right now as the biggest gift I’d ever receive: my family, my small circle friendships, all the connections and bonds I have formed over the years.

I am nowhere near to knowing all the answers to even my own worries and fears. I am afraid of being lonely, somewhere in my deepest thought I know this. And this is one of the reason why I want music to stay simple to me. I want it to be simply a beautiful composition of melodies and clever combination of skills that amazes me and accompanies me through mundane moments in my everyday.

21/12/2020