Disposable

I've been wanting to get around to writing an entry about some of the concepts that have enthralled me the most recently. I'm aware that any of you reading this are already quite familiar with some of these ideas and motifs because, if you've lived on the Internet even for a small space over the last seven or eight years, there's no way you could have missed this, or some iteration upon it:

Vaporwave is an aesthetic and a kind of music that features outdated, goofy computer graphics and marketing images, slowed down and heavily distorted forgotten hits, as well as elevator/mall music from the 1980s and 1990s. The most famous example of these is the oft-cited Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus, also known as Vektroid. The track, roughly translated as Lisa Frank 420, is the standout here, creating images of an abandoned mall playing Diana Ross's "It's Your Move"  over its PA system as it skips, slows, and eventually breaks down. Jesus--does anyone remember Lisa Frank? The notebooks, pencils, their own version of beanie babies, clothes, lunchboxes, etc.? The late nineties, which I spent in elementary school, were overloaded with the paraphernalia. You hardly ever see it now, because it dwells in a dusty corner under your bed or your closet and in your mind. If, of course, it hasn't been sold off or given away in a yard sale yet.

Vaporwave, for me (and some others), is a commentary and indictment upon the throwaway market-driven culture of the aforementioned era as well as its current iteration. It never really ended. Marketers never really intended for this material to be remembered that far past its creation and implementation. So it's all the more unsettling that vaporwave drags it out of our cultural landfill and exposes it for what it is: the refuse of a pretend culture based on neoliberal values.

Neoliberal values which have, through deregulation of industry, privatization of more and more of the commons, and reducing taxes on corporations and the already quite well-off, gutted, drained, and ravaged the middle class and ground the poor even further into the dirt.

Why should the thieves have all of the fun
Selling us water by the river
They don't speak for everyone
I'm ready to run and you're making me crawl
Selling me water by the river
They don't speak for me at all 

Yeah, you can tell that this thing pisses me off.

Listening to vaporwave brings home how much money, resources, and time were poured into distracting the public from regime change, austerity, and deregulatory policy. While corporations pulled up stakes and descended upon poor countries like Vietnam and Mexico in pursuit of cheaper labor, they tried to lull workers into a dream state fueled by celebrity drama, pop music, and fast food. Think of the 1950's hopped up on steroids and sugar, throw in some pastels and heavy synth, and you've got it.

Vaporwave, in repackaging the sounds of the eighties and early nineties, not only mocks neoliberalism's attempts at its own repackaging of art and culture into something cheaper, more marketable, and consumable, but also reveals it all to be fraudulent, designed to placate and deceive. Which would explain its tendency towards sounding like muzak.

It is, as aforementioned, the muzak continuing to play over the PA system of a darkened, abandoned mall, skipping, repeating, and running out of battery power.

These distorted lines from "Lisa Frank 420," previously Diana Ross's, reflect how neoliberalism is itself disintegrating:

I'm giving up
On trying to sell you things
That you ain't buying

Toys R Us is closing its stores worldwide. KB Toys no longer exists. Malls, fortresses of consumer capitalism, lie dead and dying across the nation. Workers in the 99% aren't putting their money back into the economy like they used to because they can't afford what they used to. So the malls empty, darken, and deteriorate. Instead of paying workers more so they, too, can make more money, the neoliberal elite are just investing more in surveillance technology, very likely gearing up to stop anything that exudes even the barest whiff of uprising against them. Jeff Bezos has a $600 million contract with the CIA. The corporate government from the canceled Canadian science fiction show, Continuum, seems almost inevitable at this point.

They're giving up on selling us things that we aren't buying--economically and politically. When capitalism has no recourse, it resorts to fascism. The neoliberal elite, like Chris Hedges writes, has lost all credibility. Their moral bankruptcy is revealed for all to see, and now people know not to trust them. And that definitely manifested itself in a significant part of the country's population's rejection of Hillary Clinton.

Only 58% of voters showed up to desultorily vote for two nearly identical candidates--and got a neoliberal vaporwave presidency anyway.

Trump's election indicated voters' incredible resentment and rejection of the establishment and their economic policies. Trump, being quite a marketer himself, rode straight to the White House on that pent-up rage, and, eerily, like Obama, immediately reneged on his promises. Then, like a simpering little doggie, hopped into the lap of the 1% and obediently continued the status quo. 

People are waking up and they're not happy with the abuse neoliberalism has been serving up for the last forty-five years. I often wonder when the revolution will occur, or if there will even be one at all, considering the ubiquity of distracting entertainments. I mean--who's got time to organize and revolt when there's a new Samsung Galaxy phone on the horizon? When the bills need to be paid? When your thoughts focus solely on debt and where your next meal will come from?

America is a dead mall. And vaporwave, the broken-down resurrection of tired siren songs, provides the soundtrack to its madness.