Where Have All of the (good) Vaporwave Artists Gone?

In May 2020 SPAM zine released their very last printed issue, and I was somehow lucky enough to have my long and strange poem featured among the very exclusive pages of SPAM #10 Millennium Mega(bus). I highly recommend buying the zine and having a read through if you are a lover of post internet poetry, or if you have a tingling interest in the sound of such a world. It is well worth the money as it is essentially a small book's worth of content.

spamzine.co.uk/shop

Do not fear though because SPAM zine and press are still around, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. They’ve been releasing new collections of poetry in an online format, featuring a wide variety of uniquely talented individuals. I can’t recommend enough that you should give the SPAM Press website a thorough perusal.

spamzine.co.uk

My featured piece with them is titled: "Where Have All of the (good) Vaporwave Artists Gone?". It is a transcendental dive into the world of public transport seat art, an area of cushiony aesthetics and culture that has fascinated me since I was riding the seatbelt-less express to school. Pre-covid, when travelling was still a thing, and when I was living closer to more places to travel to, I would get a little excited each time that I boarded a new bus or train, because I knew that I was going to see a new and exotic, tacky seat pattern. I actually had already been thinking about, and even brainstorming creative project ideas around public transport seat art, well before the opportunity to enter a submission to SPAM zine’s, public transport themed, Millennium Mega(bus) issue presented itself. In hidden away computer files I had a catalogue of links to obscure, seat-documenting travel blogs, discussion articles, as well as a vast array of seat pattern photography from around the world, both taken by myself, and others. I even found websites that advertised and sold their “modern” versions of public transport textiles in varying forms, from classic to crazy.

I don’t know who first decided to go with the hyper colourful, urban-modern tacky, yet somehow 80s styled designs of what we know today as our ordinary public transport seat covers, but it has gripped me as a quirk of metropolitan life, or a maybe even a glitch in the matrix of our mundane world. As a vaporwave fan, and a man who loves the aesthetic irony of colourful socks and crocs I knew that I had to be the one to draw this perfect marriage piece between SPAM’s unique take on language, and public transport’s spectacular samplings of everyday art. So that is how the idea and the title of the poem came about, in short - I had been noticing a consistent trend in modern vaporwave art, essentially a lot of it fell into its own genre trap that had been created by the people themselves. Recreations of older aesthetics, mainly macintosh plus, and Blank Banshee inspired - splashed with more pink and modern 3D stylings. But what had happened to those old album covers that looked like postcards or magazine, cut out, collages of pop culture gore? This led to my imagining of these older, and subjectively “good” vaporwave artists to have been recruited into the public transport sector as designers for seat covers. Thus they are committing themselves completely to their criticisms and nostalgia for capitalism - giving back to the everyday, participating, societal folks through new art, without adding to the capitalist monolith directly. These imagined actions I thought of as a completely selfless growth of the artists individually, they have finally given back to society with colourful, everyday amusement for all to enjoy on their way to work and school, instead of music for the depressed and nostalgic daydreamers online.

With all of that being said it is almost time for me to present you with the poem itself, I also want to add though that I did a reading of it in June 2020 on an episode of SPAM’s podcast:

URL SONATA #4
SPAM #10, Millennium Mega(bus)

Which you can find here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/01LXmJ5zSIxdfJ8vyZ8l0g?si=6iy6rdfNQde-6G2-6vLRCQ&nd=1

I really respect SPAM Press for creating a podcast for poetry and discussions. Listening to it definitely helped inspire me to come up with a concrete concept for my own podcast too. They have so many good poets reading out their work there so you should most certainly check it out if you are interested. Also ignore my bio introduction because I thought it would be good to do a funny one but it seems like no one else went for that idea so I look like a very silly boy indeed.

Where Have All of the (good) Vaporwave Artists Gone?
A discussion, by Torkel Tennberg

Fellow readers, humble surveyors of art and culture. I am addressing you now, for today I wish to present to you a theory. If you are uneducated on what vaporwave is, as a culture, a deceased social movement, then I suggest that you return to this discussion at a later date.

“helipads, beach houses, champagne and blue skies - white clothes on white faces with black sunglasses and pretty smiles”
(heavily edited photo of water with light reflections through it)

As I begin to write this deeply opinionated, and fictional discussion piece, I have surrounded myself in an aura of consciousness, random vaporwave artists play through my bluetooth speakers, my pc hums a soft static as the RGB lights pulsate from the keyboard, resting atop a pink - palm tree decorated tabletop. The essential viewing of a pro table tennis match has already taken place and I am now all the more prepared to shine a much needed (metaphorical) light on the ever evolving community that is perhaps quite largely responsible for my lack of interest in the physical world.

“so desperate that you have to hit the vape at every stop”
(image of a man on a train, standing at the carriage doors - vape in hand)

Now for the elephant in the room - “vaporwave”. Unquestionably the modern embodiment of the great 1970s punk music movement, with influences from all relevant aspects of our present day society as we know it; consumerism, false news, technology, marketing, media, aesthetic beauty, nature, city living, self help, the internet and its infinite subcultures, etc. This form of anti-pop, digital remixes and mashups, transformed into an entire self-sustaining, ambient, aesthetic, auditory and visual ecosystem. The teachings were either immediately understood and embraced by individuals, or utterly cast aside in a state of flustered confusion.

Joey from the hit tv show: “Friends”, stars in his “Ichiban”, lipstick for men, Japanese commercial - played on repeat, dubbed over with the distorted sounds of Winston Churchill speeches until conclusion.

Public transport - the breeding ground of all good 20th century creatives worth their name. You can read a thousand futures just by looking around at the herd;

1. The good people dressed in black and white business attire playing Candy Crush on their new iphones.

2. The young traveller with a puffy beanie on their head and a book in hand.

3. The mother with a pram and a baby, and another baby, and an aneurysm waiting to happen.

4. That one guy with some sort of an energy drink and a weird cap that used to be fashionable in the early 2000s.

Then there are the seats, those fateful little butt cushions which we sometimes do not sit on, just to avoid being in too close of a proximity to another human being. Those seats are the defiantly subtle glimpses of artistic vision aboard the many different modes of moving steel carriages. They are an occasional discussion piece of a small number of twitter and instagram users alike, even going so far as to be featured in several written articles over the years, attempting to decipher the Dan Brown-esque mystery.

Let me tell you right here right goddam now: these vaporwave artists in their self-loathing, espresso depresso, dopamine seeking, fucc boi, sad boi, smoke woke, narcissistic tendencies towards artistic expression have led them evermore into the abyss. The ones who are most honest to their adopted list of principles are those who have given up on the digital and audio life, sacrificing themselves to society in its rawest, and most physical form. A promise and a commitment to the public service sector, through seat designs on; buses, trains, trams, maybe other things too idk. Ferries?

Chaotic patterns, contrasting colour choices, stories of a mind unleashed, flickering visions into madness, local vibes materialised through fabric, permanent beings of absolute and optimal form, deliverers of minimal comfort, commuting vessels for the “everyday people” - the nine to five freak show, the educated, educating and the uneducated. These noble objects of childlike wonder, Rorschach tests for free thinkers, epileptic mayhems, closed-eye hallucinations realised.

“I give you this gift, and I dare not take it from you, there is nothing that I would not do for a friend unknown.”