Summary generated from the transcript with Claude.ai:
Adam Neely’s video explores the musical and cultural origins of vaporwave, an experimental electronic music genre that emerged in the early 2010s. He traces vaporwave’s roots to plunderphonics, a technique developed in the 1980s that involves sampling and manipulating existing recordings to create new music.
Neely demonstrates how vaporwave artists take smooth jazz, funk, and soul tracks from the 80s and 90s and slow them down, creating a chopped and screwed, hypnotic aesthetic. This plunderphonic approach, coupled with the heavy use of nostalgic pop culture sounds from the 90s like Windows startup noises, forms the basis of vaporwave’s style.
Beyond just repurposing old music, Neely argues vaporwave provides cultural critique and commentary by evoking consumer capitalism and Internet culture of the 90s. While difficult to analyze with traditional music theory, the video examines vaporwave through the lens of timbre, sound quality, and phenomenology, asserting that the nostalgic sounds themselves are more important than the melodies or harmonies.
After unpacking the genre’s origins and aesthetic, Neely makes his own vaporwave track using old Kmart background music samples to demonstrate the creative process behind the enigmatic genre.
