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rayninsyde · 6 years

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Simpsonwave: the inkblot of a generation - by reddit poster NME24

Link to original post: HERE

It is a dark room, with a single-cushion sofa.

A sullen man walks in. Wearing a robe and a large pair of headphones, he sits and clicks his Walkman. As the camera slowly pans into his face – Homer Simpson’s face – melancholic synth chords usher us into a glitchy VHS world of shooting stars, childhood memories, frantic running, and unreal colours.

To the 3 million YouTube viewers of C R I S I S – even the hundreds in the comments who professed to crying – this so-called genre of Simpsonwave almost feels like a joke. And that’s because to anyone who knows its parent genre, Vaporwave, it is a joke. Isn’t it?

Origins

“Writing about vaporwave in 2016 is almost impossible” Scott Beauchamp would lament within a few months of C R I S I S being posted. Indeed, for the first web-grown genre to scratch mainstream recognition in music history, it remains awkward to write about. Critics such as Simon Chandler (2016) are prone to forgetting that Vaporwave the EDM movement is only half the story; vaporwave the meme is its other half.

In February of 2012, MACINTOSH PLUS released the online album Floral Shoppe, and with 10 million views in its first year, one song would become synonymous with the genre:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE

The out-of-place Japanese title, the cover art’s surreal juxtaposition of ancient and digital, and most importantly, the soulless, disfigured Muzak-like samples left an impression on critics. To Jonathon Dean (2012), this was “one of the best single documents of the vaporwave scene yet”, which “carefully constructs its own meditative headspace through the careful accretion of defamiliarized memory triggers”. Critical theorists such as Grafton Tanner (2013) quickly saw more than a “meditative headspace”. As a trend of combining such eerie samples with grainy commercials was popularized by Saint Pepsi’s Enjoy Yourself and Private Caller, such critics saw an unspoken anti-capitalist satire, drowning the listener in Reagan-era consumer culture to subvert its appeal.

“Why any confusion?” you ask. Just interview MACINTOSH PLUS or Saint Pepsi and their motivations should be clear. Then you run into another uncanny aspect: the alien distance between the artists and their listeners. Vaporwave artists use corporate-inspired pseudonyms, avoid interviews, and make no effort to show their faces, let alone promote themselves. When Bandcamp finally got a hold of Ramona Xavier (Chandler, 2016), who used MACINTOSH PLUS as a one-time alias, she responded “the ideological and philosophical themes behind my work come from a personal place – kind of a quarantine zone in my brain that I don’t let people into”. Each artist is a ghost on the internet, the “non-place” so many of us were raised in, which like a shopping mall, looks similar wherever in the world you go. That they refuse to be more than avatars indeed suggests deliberate alienation.

If that was the intent, you wouldn’t know it from the comments either. With its S P A C E D O U T T I T L E S, grainy Japanese commercials and faceless marble statues, it’s only fair that an aesthetic intended to leave the listener empty, confused and nostalgic was ripe for being mocked. It was, as Sam Sutherland acknowledges, endless second-hand parodying of this aesthetic across Reddit, YouTube and 4chan, as much as Vaporwave’s first-hand parody of consumerism, that propelled it into virality.

The undercurrent

It needn’t be said that postmodernism, parody and self-parody go hand-in-hand. A complete scepticism of grand narratives leads to deconstructing the “sincere” into the detached or comedic, leaving irony as the only means of expression. This scepticism lends itself to (though is not limited to) globalization, pop culture, and the worship of laissez-faire capitalism that emerged in the 1980s. Such songs as MACINTOSH PLUS’s リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー are a thorough exercise in deconstruction. The song samples Diana Ross’s Make Your Move, and with it, the synth sounds, motorik pulse, and cutesy lyrics emblematic of an 80s pop song. Ross’s voice is then pitched down to become ostensibly male, and the song is slowed down to assume an air of mediocrity. The lyrics are chopped and repeated ad nausem until they take on different meanings: “do you understand that it’s all in your hands?” becomes “do you understand that it’s all in your head?”

Much as a song about serious love is undermined to become one about solitude and solipsism in the digital “non-place”, the seriousness of vaporwave is undermined by internet users who, in the spirit of irony and sarcasm, refuse to take it seriously. Thus the saying “vaporwave is dead – long live vaporwave” (Beauchamp, 2016).

“Postmodernism feeds off distance,” Seth Abramson observed in 2014. “Radios, and even the early years of technological industrialization, emphasized distance in a way that was unmistakable. The internet, by comparison, is a strange mix of distance and closeness, detachment and immediacy – our sense of ourselves and strangers’ varying senses of us – that postmodernism doesn’t really seem to describe well”.

The shift

What then, given the history of Vaporwave, is so significant about an edited Homer Simpson listening to Resonance on his Walkman?

That it reconstructs the comedic and the detached into the sincere.

The Simpsonwave subgenre is best explained by YouTube user JavCee (2016): “take footage of early episodes of the Simpsons… now edit some wavy music to the footage…next, add a dream-like filter and VHS distortion to the entire video to represent the adult longing for a childhood they thought they had… even alternative scenes to better showcase the brain synapses sometimes crossing in memories…creating phantoms of times that probably never existed in the first place.”

This is quite a turn to take from Vaporwave’s agenda as we’ve described it. There is, as Sutherland (2016) points out: “something to be said about a new emotional resonance being added to a genre of music that I would argue exists specifically to mock the commercial and corporate vibe of mall-type music”.

As Homer sits like us – alone at night, ears plugged, facial expression vacant – we enter his mind to find something different to the cartoon caricature of an overweight, suburban dad. We’re suddenly thrust in memories of Marge as a teenager, Homer driving alone, his mother embracing him in a dream – Homer bowling alone – visions of his children – Homer running alone – his wife in bed. The second memory Homer thinks about, perhaps his most recent, is him sitting on bed with a strange woman, and bursting into tears.

The unexpected pain of watching this is both generational and personal; in the days that we curled up on the couch to watch The Simpsons after school, masculinity dictated that this was a side rarely acknowledged of not just cartoon fathers, but of our own fathers as well. Now, in one surreal moment, Homer Simpson runs through the woods from his thoughts, a tender victim of the passage of time.

In uploading this video, Lucian Hughes has injected meaning into not just a comedic cartoon, but a satirical genre that deliberately robs the listener of comfort. But should we allow him?

In 1993, author David Foster Wallace was a generation early in heralding “new sincerity”: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles”

Such a feeling steps away from presenting the meaninglessness of the society we have, and instead focuses on meaning at either the personal level, or in the societal future or past. To Vermeulen (2010), this is termed “meta-modernism”, something which “acknowledges that history's purpose will never be fulfilled because it does not exist. Critically, however, it nevertheless takes toward it as if it does exist. Inspired by a modern naïveté yet informed by postmodern scepticism, the metamodern discourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility.” Simpsonwave acknowledges the fakeness of the series, and brings that fakeness up a notch through the creation of alternate scenes.

Such videos as C R I S I S and W H E R E A M I G O I N G? both admit their manufactured nature and press on in pursuit of emotion. They are beyond political agendas and seek to quench, rather than solely bring attention to, a deep generational starvation of meaning.

And that is for better or for worse.

#simpsonwave #vaporwave #a e s t h e t i c

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wrestlewriting · 7 years

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#10 [Seth Rollins]

Requested, #10: “The ladies love a guy who’s good with kids.” (Prompt from here.)

Author note: This is some straight up angst/drama.

@superkixbaybay @hiitsmecharlie @ihtscuddlesbeeetchx3 @valeonmars @pjanina13

And the award for, the best lie goes to you. For making me believe, that you could be faithful to me….

Regret was not an emotion you were used to feeling, not truly anyways. You often thought ‘maybe I shouldn’t have done that’ or ‘I wish that hadn’t happened’, but chalked all things up to learning experiences.

Right now though, as you surveyed the backyard full of your coworkers, you regretted bringing yourself here.

At first, you had flat turned down the invitation to come to the house of Cesaro and Sonya, his long-term girlfriend and a close friend of yours. But Sonya had kept on. And on. She kept stating this was the perfect time for a backyard BBQ, as the weather was still spring-warm and not summer-sweltering. There was also mention of how you didn’t go out much anymore, to see anyone, and that you needed to stop that behavior.

You quickly located the reason you hadn’t wanted to come. He was stood further back in the yard, in a black t-shirt and gym shorts. His hair was pulled back in his typical messy bun, a stupid brimmed-hat askew on his head.

It was the first time you’d been in a social setting with him since your break-up three months ago. You’d managed to avoid him backstage for the most part. And if you were in the same room or near one another, there were always other people around to keep you distracted and distanced.

You’d successfully avoided any speaking since the day you’d left him. Since the day you’d found out he had cheated on you.

You felt so stupid to think that history wouldn’t repeat itself. Every person that told you the old adage ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’, you had blocked out in the beginning. He was so kind, charming, funny, supportive…you thought he’d learned from his past mistakes, made himself a better person from them.

How wrong you’d been to think you would be any different from the woman he’d been with for multiple years.

“LOVE!” Sonya’s voice broke your wretched trip down memory lane. You plastered on a smile, accepting her into your arms, sharing a tight hug. “I’m so glad you came.”

“Yea, me too,” you replied, trying to muster up some sincerity in your statement, as you parted from your friend’s embrace. “I left the wine I brought in the kitchen.”

“Oh, good! Well come on, let’s get you a drink and food and enjoy this beautiful day,” Sonya planned, looping her arm through yours, giving you no choice in the matter. Despite all the emotions that were weighing down on your body, you couldn’t help but feel lightened some by Sonya’s positivity and happiness. She was nothing if not infectious with her personality.

Hours later, you’d eaten more food than you should have and drank a few cocktails. You’d played a couple horrible games of cornhole, your throws being nothing to be at all proud of. Laughter had been shared with various coworkers and significant others, reminiscing and story-telling, and catching up on life outside the WWE machine.

Deciding to open the wine you brought, you wandered in to the kitchen, continuing your conversation with Dean on the way. He was telling you about his plans to take Renee on a surprise trip, and asking your advice on every single part of it. Dean was, admittedly, not a big romantic, but he wanted to do something, and wanted it to be completely right. You had all but swooned at him over the plan.

After you both got drinks, you sat down at the counter and continued to chat. It wasn’t long before the hair on the back of your neck stood up, as you heard the voice of your ex-boyfriend getting closer and closer. He finally entered the area, with two people you only knew as coworkers of Sonya’s.

You didn’t know what they were talking about, but they were animated as they made their own drinks at the counter. You kept your eyes downcast, Dean silent beside you.

“The ladies love a guy who’s good with kids,” Seth maintained, obviously in response to whatever they were discussing.

“The ladies love a guy who can stay faithful,” you muttered, rolling your eyes to yourself.

The entire room went silent. It took you a moment to notice, but when you did, you slowly looked up from your glass, finding everyone’s stares on you.

And that was when you realized you had said that out loud. That wasn’t just in your head. People had heard that. Seth had heard that.

“What?”

Yea, Seth had definitely heard that.

“Er…uh…just talking to myself,” you awkwardly tried to explain away your comment, picking up your drink and taking a slow sip from it, avoiding eye contact with everyone.

“You wanted me to hear that,” Seth accused.

Dean quickly scrambled from the room at that point, hastily squeezing your shoulder as he passed. The others, more subtly, slid from the area as well, leaving you and Seth alone in the kitchen.

“I didn’t,” you insisted. And you really hadn’t. You’d successfully avoided him up until this point. This was basically the last thing you’d wanted to happen. Why did you have such little control over your brain-to-mouth behaviors sometimes?

“If you have something to say to me, you’ve lost your chance to.”

“Excuse me?”

“I tried to talk to you for weeks, and you ignored me. You’ve avoided me for months now,” Seth highlighted. “So you don’t get to make snarky comments now. Your time has passed.”

“…are you…you’re fucking serious,” you realized as you finally looked at him, genuinely astonished he had the audacity to say these things to you. He had been the one to ruin your relationship, not you.

“Of course I’m fucking serious,” he stated. “You walked out on me.”

“YOU CHEATED ON ME!” you shrieked, standing up abruptly from the counter, your barstool sliding precariously backwards. “How in the hell can you think you get to be the one mad here?!”

“Oh, I’m not mad. Irritated, maybe, that you can’t let it go. And annoyed that you treat me like a leper and make things awkward for everyone around us. But not mad.”

Your jaw was slack, mouth opening ever so slightly as he spoke.

“You need to grow up,” Seth decided. “I fucked up, and I know that. And I was willing to work past it, with you, in whatever way you would have let me. But instead, you cut me off completely, never gave me a chance to make anything right. So, all of your righteous indignation is bullshit. Because it doesn’t need to exist, if you’d only gone about this differently.”

There were no words you could come up at the moment to rebut with. He was seriously blaming you right now, and you were in disbelief.

“I loved…love you,” Seth stated, his tone gentler. “I got caught up and stupid, and fell back in to old habits. I got scared of where things were going with us, so I sabotaged us instead. It wasn’t my best move, I admit. But you never let me tell you that.”

“I was hurt, Seth.”

“So was I! The woman I loved walked away without even trying to make things right.”

“Because I refuse to be yet another stupid girl who lets her boyfriend get away with things and stays with him after,” you avowed. “I’m worth more than that. I won’t be the fool.”

“You are worth more than that,” Seth concurred. “And if you let me, I’ll prove that you to, again and again and again.”

The way he was gazing at you…his eyes so soft…sincerity pouring from every part of him. You had to admit, prior to the end, you had some of the best times of your life with Seth. He was always up for adventure, travel, nights in and nights out. The conversations the two of you had could range from tear-inducing hilarious to heart-swelling profound.

Was he being genuine? Was this something you were willing to work past with him?

Should you have given him a chance to explain and atone before? Would things be different now?

“…I’m leaving,” you decided, sticking to your resolve. “This, us…it’s never going to be the same. I will never trust you again the way I once did.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“Not now I’m not. But back then, I did,” you agreed. “When I thought I was important to you.”

You felt justified in your choice to walk out of the kitchen. You didn’t need to be with a man you didn’t have confidence in. A man that felt running around with another woman was a forgivable offense. You were better than that; you deserved to be with someone who cherished you and showed it all the time. Your dignity didn’t need another blow to it, and your self-respect had to be your driving force.

That’s what you kept telling yourself with every step anyways.

Or else you’d turn around and be back at square one.

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn, but that’s alright because I like the way it hurts. Just gonna stand there and hear me cry, but that’s alright because I love the way you lie. I love the way you lie….

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