Anteater's Muzak 101: Legitimizing Smooth Jazz For The Unwashed Masses

Anteater · 02-14-2017, 08:23 PM

It's been a few years, but it's time to revive the smoothest journal this side of Kenny G's piehole and continue our journey into reviews, analyses and aspire to convince even the edgiest edgelord that everyone needs a little elevator muzak sometimes.

So let's break down what's coming up...and feel free to request a review or chime in with snark at any opportunity.

State Of The Smooth Union (2017)

Alive and relevant. Guys like Kamasi Washington and bands like Snarky Puppy walk that fine line between high-octane "fusion" while still touching upon the chillness that makes the best muzak engaging on it's own merits. Stalwarts in the genre such as Jeff Lorber, Paul Hardcastle, guitar god Pat Metheny and keyboard guru Jeff Lorber all continue to record and bring in big audiences. Vaporwave, a genre that started off as a joke nearly seven years ago, continues to bring new younger audiences to the 80's and 90's classic muzak that fuels the genre's underlying ideas and has continued it's steady takeover of certain fringes of popular culture.

What's Coming Up Ant-man?

Vaporwave: The Modern Smooth Jazz (2008 - Present Day)
Classic Reviews: T-Square, Dancing Fantasy, Yellowjackets, etc.
The Best (And Worst) Smooth Jazz Music Videos
Artist / Band Spotlights
Weird stuff about smooth / contemporary jazz that'll blow your mind
....and more!

Thanks for tuning in...watch this space!

Anteater · 04-09-2017, 04:51 PM

Vaporwave: Smoov Jazz For Memeboys and Memegurls

Before we dive into a beautiful sea of Fiji Water, let's lay some definitions on the table:

Quote:

Vaporwave is an electronic music microgenre from the early 2010s. Its stylistic influences include chillwave, smooth jazz, chopped and screwed, new-age, and pop.

The subculture associated with vaporwave sets out to satirize consumer capitalism and popular culture and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of the 1980s and 1990s. It also incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes.

To explain it in words kind of ruins the point. Vaporwave is the muzak that plays in an elevator in a mall in a futuristic Japanese cyberpunk dystopia.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Vaporwave is that while it is very easy to define it, the genre has split and morphed and been contributed to by so many people over the last five years that the above description is really just a small river that empties out into a much bigger Windows 95 colored sea.

There are two or three key albums that served as a starting point to the world's first genre birthed entirely by the World Wide Web (in the metal world, djent would come into its own a year or two later). Those three albums are:

Chuck Person - Eccojams Vol. 1
James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual
Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe

In these three albums you see all the hallmarks that filthy casuals associate with this genre: slowed down, chopped/screwed samples of smooth jazz or R&B you probably saw featured earlier in my Smooth Jazz journal here, plus other techniques you normally see in plunderphonics or experimental ambient.

Of the three, Floral Shoppe is considered to be the first "real" vaporwave record while Chuck Person and James Ferraro are considered to be proto-vaporwave. Kind of like how The Beatles and Beach Boys have have some influence on progressive rock, but In The Court Of The Crimson King by King Crimson is considered to be the prog's real beginning.

Floral Shoppe is interesting in particular. Look how many millions of views it has. Trying to seriously analyze something that sounds like it was crafted as a living meme might seem ridiculous, but you could write thesis papers just on the song 'リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー ', with how it took a random mid 80's Diana Ross sample and turned it into the anti-capitalist elevator soundtrack to hell.

Starting from late 2011 and beyond though, what started off as an elaborate joke started to splinter off into multiple subgenres (future funk and hardvapor, among others) and diversity took over. Blank Banshee, for instance, fused vaporwave-styled sampling with Trap and became instant hits with early vaporwave audiences seemingly overnight. Or take electronic musician Ryan DeRobertis, who in late 2012 started a vaporwave / Future Funk project called Saint Pepsi and eventually entered the mainstream as Skylar Spence. His hallmarks involved heavy sampling of Japanese City Pop, Funk and R&B to often entertaining results.

For those looking for the "diamonds" in the rough in a vast genre sea that is technically already "dead" (or is it?), the online label Dream Catalogue features dozens of amazing albums from artists all over the world who create the dreamy soundtracks to your cybernetic nightmares, such as the mysterious 2814. The label's output on Bandcamp can be found here.

In conclusion, I've merely touched the surface on both vaporwave's nascent history and how it continues to interact with pop culture and beyond, but the main thing to take away here is that there are a lot of people who enjoy this music unironically and sometimes seek deeper meaning from it. Which means, in essence, they are enjoying smooth jazz as well...albeit in a more cynical post-modern fashion.

**Frownland** · 04-09-2017, 04:59 PM

Meh, smooth jazz is one of many influences on part of the very diverse genre, but that doesn't exactly make vaporwave smooth jazz.

Also never understood how Eccojams gets more credibility than OPN. That's when Lopatin started to really make the genre interesting.

04-09-2017, 04:59 PM	#33 (permalink)
Frownland SOPHIE FOREVER Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: East of the Southern North American West Posts: 35,541	Meh, smooth jazz is one of many influences on part of the very diverse genre, but that doesn't exactly make vaporwave smooth jazz. Also never understood how Eccojams gets more credibility than OPN. That's when Lopatin started to really make the genre interesting. __________________ Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth. d e a f b o x