Looking into modern iterations of industrial music I was pointed to the political leanings of vaporwave. I had been into the genre for purely aesthetic reasons however seeing now it as a response to capitalism really make sme see it in a different light. I read through Charlie Jones comments on ‘Vaporwave and the pop-art of the virtual plaza’. I see the accelerationist elements as slightly defeatist, I think it is still powerful as an anti-capitalist genre, it points to the vapid nothingness of capitalism, the totally soullessness of it. One quote that stuck out to me in particular was:
“Since capitalism is so omnivorous that defending the authentic no longer feels possible, accelerationist pop is lo-fi and avant-garde going on the offensive.”
I disagree with this point. I think authenticity co-opted by capitalism merely is a facade of what it seems to adopt. True, human, authenticity and experience is unmarketable. Drawing from the idea of Queerness=failure I think that authenticity is dirty, and unpleasant and therefore unmarketable. I think a prime example is the self-censorship that now appears on tiktok, with words like “lesbian” being censored as “Le$bean”, or words like “kill” being changed to “unalive”. It is a corporate sanitisation of human language because that kind of dirt is unappealing to advertisers.
I want to make art that is unmarketable, I want to express myself in a way that cannot be packaged. I suppose this is one of the reasons I love making harsh noise as one example, it is hostile, angry and deeply cathartic to make. I want capitalists to turn their noses up at it and not even consider trying to make money off it. As a now deactivated tumblr account once put it:
