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Thursday, September 13, 2018 — 5B
YouTube.
It’s
big.
It’s
bad. It’s been integral to the
discovery,
incubation
and
popularity of some of today’s
most relevant musical artists.
Justin Bieber was discovered
on YouTube and some of
his music videos are now
among the most viewed on
the platform. As a student at
New York University’s Clive
Davis Institute of Recorded
Music, Maggie Rogers rose
to fame when a video of her
masterclass
with
Pharrell
went viral, which resulted in
what is now “Alaska,” her most
popular single with over 61
million plays on Spotify. Troye
Sivan, an international LGBTQ
icon, was a YouTuber before
his fame. In fact, if you scroll
to five years ago, before he
collabed with Ariana Grande,
before he came out and before
he released TRXYE and Blue
Neighborhood, his channel still
has relics of his past, including
two self-created songs: “We’re
My OTP” and “The Fault In
Our Stars.”
What do these three artists
share? They’re almost the same
age. They’ve all reached the
level of fame where Billboard
has
written
articles
about
them. But perhaps the greatest
hallmark of their talent is that
all three of them currently
use music as their careers.
Sivan in particular gained a
following from the vlogs and
music covers he posted on his
channel, which propelled him
to develop a career outside of
the YouTube space. In recent
years, however, there’s been
a new category of YouTube
music — releases that are
often nowhere near the same
level of artistry and skill
that Sivan embodies in his
songs, often by creators with
channels that cover everything
except music or singing. And
interests are subjective, sure,
but some of these creations are
unequivocally bad; autotune
can
help
immensely
with
overall sound and key, as can
production quality, but neither
will ever truly replace a gifted
voice.
It makes sense why vloggers
would start making songs. For
one, they’re a relatively low-
effort way to rake in more
money, as music videos tend to
offer not only a departure from
the creator’s norm but also a
way to hook in new viewers,
both of which boost views.
Jake
Paul’s
“It’s
Everyday
Bro” ticks pretty much all of
the standard boxes, except
it also emphasizes the idea
that just because you can do
something doesn’t mean you
should. With a ratio of 3.8
million likes to 2.5 million
dislikes, it’s evident that I’m
not the only one who feels
that way. From an annoying
chorus (“It’s every day bro!”
repeated three times, followed
by a single “I said it’s everyday
bro!” which originates from
how Paul ends his vlogs) to
lyrics about dropping merch,
flaunting a Rolex and a jab at
PewDiePie, “It’s Everyday Bro”
boils the bougie lives of high-
earning YouTubers down to an
essence and unpleasantly force
feeds it to viewers. It’s genius,
in a way — by making a song
flaunting his success, Paul is
essentially capitalizing on it to
become even more successful,
regardless of whether or not
the song is good. And who’s
to say that he didn’t make it
bad on purpose? Despite the
uneven like-ratio, the music
video currently has 210,632,789
views,
which
according
to
tubecalculator.com equates to
around 390 thousand dollars in
revenue.
Perhaps one of the most
significant
differences
between YouTubers making
music
and
“real
world”
musicians is that there might
be more of an expectation
for
YouTubers
to
produce
videos that are truly over-
the-top — the whole label of
being a YouTuber relies on
them producing video content
creators, after all. As a general
rule of thumb, I can usually
figure out whether or not I’m
going to end up liking a song
from the first 10 seconds. But
listening to music put out by
a YouTuber means I’m more
likely to watch the music
video first rather than audio
only, and my initial judgment
hinges much more heavily
on how good the video is.
Guy Tang, a YouTuber and
hairstylist
known
for
his
colorful hair transformations,
recently released a music video
for “#Naked2U,” a remixed
version of his single. Upon my
first watchthrough, I caught
myself cringing at everything
from the neon paint smothered
on the dancers to Tang’s ultra-
dramatic
facial
expressions
and awkward dancing. But
on my second and third run, I
began to pick up little details
that I hadn’t noticed before.
Unlike “It’s Everyday Bro,”
Guy Tang’s creation preached
a message of honesty, self-love
and confidence: One of the
most significant lyrics in the
piece is “There’s no regrets /
I’m proud of who I am.” None
of this made the choreography
any less clumsy or the acting
any better, but I realized that
most of my negative reaction
was almost entirely based on
the visuals rather than the
audio; although Tang’s vocals
weren’t record-breaking, they
weren’t as bad as they could
have been, and I actually liked
the instrumental hook. Still, if
not for this article, I can’t say
that I would have willingly
listened to “#Naked2U” for
fun.
What does it mean to go
viral in the modern age? At one
point in time, the Cinnamon
Challenge was revolutionary,
and one of the reasons it
spread so quickly was because
of how reproducible it was —
everyone has a spoon and a vial
of cinnamon in their cabinets.
But as we graduated from
eating cinnamon to chugging
gallons of milk and eating Tide
pods, what qualifies as unique
enough
to
grab
attention
has become more and more
extreme. Before, it was sucking
on shot glasses to get Kylie
Jenner’s lips. Now, Internet
creators — the very people who
jump-started the “challenge”
trends that ruled the web five
years ago — are going to absurd
lengths in their attempts to
stay relevant.
One of YouTube’s calling
cards is its bite-sized content
and
the
variety
of
styles
available. Movies demand at
least an hour and a half of
sustained attention in order for
all the plot devices to hit where
it counts while TV shows
require even more of a time
commitment
from
viewers,
not to mention that episodes
usually follow a strict linearity.
For now, YouTube music is
just another way the platform
has
evolved
to
assimilate
new versions of media. But as
with nearly all trends in the
world, there will be a point of
oversaturation, which raises
the question of what comes
next. Then again, there was a
time where it was impossible to
make a career out of recording
your everyday life — and if
something as banal as vlogging
can become mainstream, then
so can anything else, really.
In
the
early
2010s,
electronic
music
producer
Vektroid — operating under
the
alias
Macintosh
Plus
— released Floral Shoppe, a
full-length studio album that
pioneered a new sound in
electronic music. The album
was coated from front to
back in ’80s nostalgia, from
the abundant use of sampled
lounge music, smooth jazz and
elevator music to the bright
pink album cover emblazoned
with Japanese characters, tile
flooring and a bust of the Greek
god Helios. Over the course
of the album, Vektroid would
conjure a veritable menagerie
of
conflicting
feelings,
at
once both warmly nostalgic
and deeply unsettling. The
release
and
circulation
of
Floral Shoppe would mark the
beginning of a new subgenre
within electronic music, a
subgenre that would rapidly
grow into an entire artistic
movement.
“Well that’s all well and
good, but what exactly is
Vaporwave?” you might ask.
Keeping
things
(relatively)
simple,
Vaporwave
is
a
millennial art movement that
seeks to convey the angsts
and joys of the “Internet
Generation” by appropriating
old tropes to create new
statements and
speculations on
millennial
life.
It’s inextricably
tied
to
the
past
—
more
specifically
to
the
’80s
and
’90s,
decades
that
saw
the
emergence
of
the information
age as a part of
everyday
life.
The
advent
of
personal
computing
made the world
smaller
than
ever before, and
a technological
boom courtesy
of Japanese tech
companies saw
the
aesthetic
fixations
of
American
society
shift
away from the
lava lamps and
shag
carpets
of the ’70s to
a
decade
that
was
all
about
the future. A far cry from
the
sleek,
all-American
retrofuturist stylings of the
1950s, the future of the 1980s
was all about neon pinks,
Japanese
characters
and
aviator sunglasses. By this
time, many of these aesthetic
concepts had already begun to
manifest themselves in films
like “Blade Runner,” and later
“Ghost in the Shell.” Deemed
“Cyberpunk,” this type of art
would come to exemplify the
speculations and musings of
a society on the cusp of an
information explosion.
Fast-forward to the 2010s,
and the children of this era
have now grown up and are
creating art of their own.
The Information Age has not
only made the world more
connected, but it has made
companies more connected
to consumers. Marketing has
become less about what the
consumer thinks and more
about what they feel. The
early days of this trend would
serve as the artistic muse for
the
Vaporwave
movement,
which seeks to expose the
complicated
and
often
contradictory
relationships
that millennials share with
the internet age. The images
associated with Vaporwave
— from the pixelated look
of the early-internet to the
generic sounds of elevator
music — all share one thing in
common. They evoke a sense
of the uncanny valley, or the
unsettling effect of seeing
something almost human, but
not quite. While it typically
refers to robots, animations
and other would-be-humans,
it applies to many Vaporwave
tropes. These artifacts are
products of a time when
companies sought to make
their consumers feel very
specific ways. Elevator music,
for example, is meant to make
you feel calm and at ease — so
why doesn’t it?
It’s by exposing this chink
in
our
understanding
of
pop culture that Vaporwave
manages to make us feel
both at ease and on edge,
simultaneously
filled
with
nostalgia and angst. It is
at once about our past and
our future. As Vaporwave
matured
and
developed,
it began to grow further
into the realms of science
fiction,
speculative
fiction
and surrealism. Vaporwave
artists were fascinated by
just how powerfully evocative
these artifacts could be. The
movement
exposed
deeper
questions about the effects of
digitization on our society:
Why does the soft glow of
neon make you feel wistful?
What about a crackling record
or a Coca-Cola jingle evokes
such strong feelings when
placed in the right context?
Why can a computer glitch
feel gut-wrenching?
For an artistic
movement
that’s so fixated
on the passage
of time and the
creation of new
from
the
old,
it should come
as no surprise
that Vaporwave
is in fact the
reincarnation
of a much older
idea. I speak,
of
course,
of
Dada,
the
avant-garde art
movement that
brought
forth
artists like Max
Ernst,
Marcel
Duchamp
and
Otto Dix. The
gathering
of
Dada
artists
in New York’s
Cabaret
Voltaire would
birth
some
of
the
Lost
Generation’s
most
identifiable
visual
motifs.
Deemed “anti-art,” the goal
of Dada was to expose the
consumerist values of post-
war society and convey them
through
repurposing
the
ordinary and familiar into the
bizarre and unsettling. If the
ideological core of Vaporwave
now sounds familiar, that’s
because it is. Both movements
were brought about by critical
minds observing the society
in which they lived, both are
viciously
anti-consumerist,
and both serve as a cultural
snapshot of a generation.
While it may be jumping
the gun to assign the same
level of cultural significance
to Vaporwave as one would
to
Dada,
the
ideological
and conceptual similarities
between the two movements
are
striking.
Vaporwave’s
circulation
as
an
internet
meme adds an entirely new
facet to the discussion, as
the cultural clout of memes
in the context of the arts has
yet to be formally established.
While it may be tempting
to dismiss the significance
of memes due to their often
ridiculous nature, one could
also view the medium as a
unique form of sharing ideas,
one that no prior generation
has used. Only time will tell
where Vaporwave lands in
our cultural lexicon, but until
then artists like Vektroid will
keep on cruising down the
sonic highways of yesteryear.
Vaporwave and
the “New Dada”
MAX MICHALSKY
Daily Arts Writer
CAPITAL RECORDS
MUSIC NOTEBOOK
Justin Bieber, Troye Sivan and the
mainstream rise of the internet star
SAMANTHA LU
Daily Arts Writer
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
For an artistic
movement that’s
so fixated on the
passage of time
and the creation
of new from the
old, it should come
as no surprise
that Vaporwave
is in fact the
reincarnation of a
much older idea
MUSIC NOTEBOOK