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One of the assertions I see people make when discussing the viability of vaporwave as a genre of music is that it’s comparatively very easy for people to produce tracks, and it’s often heavily based on sampling, so it’s “less music,” basically. The exact argument tends to differ right there, but that ends up being the gist of it.
The gist behind the gist is basically, “If anyone can do it pretty easily, than it’s not really good, is it?” and that’s often pointed at some fundamental degree of musical value or worth.
Like, this is actually a pretty common argument if we look at other fields. Digital art versus physical mediums, or say, photography, live music versus studio music, or craft art versus “high” art. You get into issues of complexity with the written word, too.
I wanna say that a lot of this is just about class, ultimately. That capitalism is what it is, and does what it does so well is more or less just a refinement of that in terms of method, you know? There’s a virtue in physical mediums and kinds of technical skill (of which there are different kinds - I know some very sophisticated musicians who can barely answer their email, so they’d be useless with a digital music studio - so what’s “easy” is clearly relative), but only insofar as you get the “product” you want out of the application of that skill.
So, with vaporwave, the critique that it’s easy and very accessible to people who might not have been able to make music before simply makes it very democratic along one axis.
But the argument that it’s worth less because lots of people can do it, in this environment, is made so much worse with capitalism. The reason why is pretty straightforward - we view something easy to get as comparatively cheap (in terms of access, if not money) because of skewed (or overly simplistic) notions of supply and demand. Normally you might suppose that lots of people being able to write or make music would be good, because now there’s more writing and music! Yay! But music in that mode becomes valueless (even less so because sampling issues make it almost impossible to sell, sometimes).
Thus, you know, the perverse as hell incentive to make music making harder, to keep it “valuable.” We see this in the field of education, too - you would expect that you’d want a very educated group of people and as a society, you do! But as an individual, you don’t, because that means what you can do is less valuable. It creates a sick situation where you want to be educated, and more people are getting educated, so the value of the education drops, but demand for education is very high so the price rises.
According to some crude theories of capitalism and market dynamics, this will level out when the value of education drops and people stop, say, enrolling in college because it’s not worth their time. But why do we want that? In the same way, why would we ask people to stop producing music, or make it more difficult - on the whole, doesn’t it make all of our lives better? The argument against the relative valuelessness of vaporwave is a little sick, isn’t it?
The gist behind the gist is basically, “If anyone can do it pretty easily, than it’s not really good, is it?” and that’s often pointed at some fundamental degree of musical value or worth.
Like, this is actually a pretty common argument if we look at other fields. Digital art versus physical mediums, or say, photography, live music versus studio music, or craft art versus “high” art. You get into issues of complexity with the written word, too.
I wanna say that a lot of this is just about class, ultimately. That capitalism is what it is, and does what it does so well is more or less just a refinement of that in terms of method, you know? There’s a virtue in physical mediums and kinds of technical skill (of which there are different kinds - I know some very sophisticated musicians who can barely answer their email, so they’d be useless with a digital music studio - so what’s “easy” is clearly relative), but only insofar as you get the “product” you want out of the application of that skill.
So, with vaporwave, the critique that it’s easy and very accessible to people who might not have been able to make music before simply makes it very democratic along one axis.
But the argument that it’s worth less because lots of people can do it, in this environment, is made so much worse with capitalism. The reason why is pretty straightforward - we view something easy to get as comparatively cheap (in terms of access, if not money) because of skewed (or overly simplistic) notions of supply and demand. Normally you might suppose that lots of people being able to write or make music would be good, because now there’s more writing and music! Yay! But music in that mode becomes valueless (even less so because sampling issues make it almost impossible to sell, sometimes).
Thus, you know, the perverse as hell incentive to make music making harder, to keep it “valuable.” We see this in the field of education, too - you would expect that you’d want a very educated group of people and as a society, you do! But as an individual, you don’t, because that means what you can do is less valuable. It creates a sick situation where you want to be educated, and more people are getting educated, so the value of the education drops, but demand for education is very high so the price rises.
According to some crude theories of capitalism and market dynamics, this will level out when the value of education drops and people stop, say, enrolling in college because it’s not worth their time. But why do we want that? In the same way, why would we ask people to stop producing music, or make it more difficult - on the whole, doesn’t it make all of our lives better? The argument against the relative valuelessness of vaporwave is a little sick, isn’t it?