What do you think of vaporwave enthusiasts that never experienced the 80s/90s?

IlluminatiPirate

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With vaporwave being a recent genre in the grand scheme of things, it is logical that some people born in the 2000s, such as me, would discover and enjoy vaporwave. But at its core, vaporwave is a nostalgic genre, nostalgic for something we simply can't have nostalgia for. Do you think it legitimate to enjoy vaporwave even without having experienced the time where the sampled songs came out?
 
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Anyone who would argue that you can't enjoy a generation of music because of your age is ageist and wrong.

Same goes for people who denounce vaporwave songs that AREN'T particularly sampled. It's a constantly evolving genre.
 
People keep mentioning constantly how the Millenial generation spans from 1980-2000 when in reality it's true span was from 1975-1994. The reason why is because when we are born we are not immediately part of the collective that participates in the experience of the zeitgeist, infant amnesia leaves a person without proper participation and representation until the age of 5, with that in mind, someone born in 1995 will begin their proper participation in the year 2000 and thus never truly experience what the 90s were like to begin with [same for anyone born in 1975 not experiencing the 70s for the aforementioned reason].

To this stands the case that although Vaporwave was created by the Millenial generation to express their nostalgia this is in fact not limited only to this group of individuals, the Millenial Generation is not the last generation before the rise of the Monoculture we all experience around the world today, the Centennial generation is. This means we still have a group that has the potential to bring the content they are truly nostalgic about instead of what the genre's time period was based on.
I am not a Millenial, by the time I was conscious of what I liked plastic clothing and straight hair was all the rage, not high waisted pants and hairspray. Due to this the content I create reflects how I feel about my past and what I find nostalgic because even though the music from the previous century has a feel that nobody can reproduce anymore due to the lack of soul in the industry, it was not what I experienced to my day to day basis.

I leave by stating the following: Vaporwave will not die if the medium is not stubborn to evolve towards the needs of everyones nostalgia and amazing content can await all of us if we don't become purists for the sake of staying close to the classics. I hope you have a nice day <3 ;)
 
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I think that the past is always a construct made by our (collective) minds, and as such any notion of an era or "generation" is just a fabrication. I was born in 1976 and I was a teen in the early 90's, and that's what I feel is "my era", but when I was living it, it was just "life". Now 25 years later, I think this is the shortest time frame that the cultural hivemind needs to start building a coherent picture of the "90's" as an era with it's own aesthetics and music etc. The 00's are still "in the making" I would say.

The Wikipedia article about "Hauntology" had these nice lines:"In the 2000s, the term was taken up by critics in reference to paradoxes found in late modernity, particularly contemporary culture's persistent recycling of retro aesthetics and incapacity to escape old social forms.[3] Critics such as Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term to describe art preoccupied with this temporal disjunction and defined by a "nostalgia for lost futures."[2]" So that made me think that the need to have retro-sentiments is some basic (post-modern Western) human need maybe? Overall I don't feel that Vaporwave's fetishization of the 80's is about a particular generation's nostalgia, but it's an emotional cultural structure filling some need of ours to feel certain kinds of feelings about the "Now" by filtering our experience through a mental construct projected into an imagined past.

SO to answer your original question, I don't believe it makes any difference when you were born, in regards to being "entitled" to feel certain way about Vaporwave, or anything else in this world for that matter. :) I've always felt the same way about the (late) 60's; for me and my teenage friends that was the era we idolized and felt bad that we weren't alive then. Well, I gotta run now but this is a very interesting subject..!
 

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