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Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts
by
In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry.
Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as med ...more
Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as med ...more
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Paperback, 104 pages
Published
June 24th 2016
by Zero Books
(first published 2016)
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Start your review of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts
More like three and a half. The author is clearly very young, and offers an intelligent and worthwhile critical analysis on a hyperniche musical movement within the accelerated culture that deserves such academic attention. As a gateway into the analysis of hauntological scholastic studies, it is valuable if only as a summation of its sources.
BUT
As someone who has suffered from depression for a decade plus now, what I took as the author's tacit admission of being a fellow sufferer in the acknow ...more
BUT
As someone who has suffered from depression for a decade plus now, what I took as the author's tacit admission of being a fellow sufferer in the acknow ...more
a great first (real!) published book to come out on vaporwave! it touches enough on the subject independently, but is mainly concerned with the cultural concerns that surround it (which is, in my opinion, totally relevant and okay! he seems to know everything that is important, but i think gives too much credit to graham harman and pitchfork [possibly TMT])
the most obvious flaw above my critique of OOO is that he rips into "avengers" as drivel cinema, while praising "cabin in the woods" as some ...more
the most obvious flaw above my critique of OOO is that he rips into "avengers" as drivel cinema, while praising "cabin in the woods" as some ...more
"For now, we live in the mall, but I think it's closing soon"
Few words can truly capture how impactful this work was. Grafton Tanner, in his debut work, has given me a vocabulary with which to speak about ideas that I had long held yet had no way to express. Aside from providing a wonderful guide to those seeking to "get" vaporwave, this also provides a nice little introduction to OOO and musicology. Tanner, while unloading heavy concepts, is also a master of writing - in particular, the last pa ...more
Few words can truly capture how impactful this work was. Grafton Tanner, in his debut work, has given me a vocabulary with which to speak about ideas that I had long held yet had no way to express. Aside from providing a wonderful guide to those seeking to "get" vaporwave, this also provides a nice little introduction to OOO and musicology. Tanner, while unloading heavy concepts, is also a master of writing - in particular, the last pa ...more
I’m not sure why I decided to read a book about vaporwave in 2019 since, as I understand it, the genre has long been dead. I’d considered reading Babbling Corpse when it first came out, but synopses I read lent the impression that whatever passingly interesting while more or less straightforward takes on the music and its aesthetics it contained would be saddled down with too much over-simplistic anti-capitalism fluff to ultimately warrant a read. So I passed.
Only to pick it up a couple years la ...more
Only to pick it up a couple years la ...more
really didnt expect a book on vaporwave to blow me away this much but i am thoroughly impressed.
the book feels sort of pretentious, but thats a problem that all music writers seem to have. theres no good way to discuss music without listening to it, without letting your audience hear it. you have to describe music, describe how it feels to listen to a song, and doing that work seems pretentious. theres no way around this. anyone who writes about music sounds like some smug /mu/ asshole without ...more
the book feels sort of pretentious, but thats a problem that all music writers seem to have. theres no good way to discuss music without listening to it, without letting your audience hear it. you have to describe music, describe how it feels to listen to a song, and doing that work seems pretentious. theres no way around this. anyone who writes about music sounds like some smug /mu/ asshole without ...more
Okay, I read this some time ago, but so far as I remember Tanner show us the basics arguments and interpretations of vaporwave as we understand it and as it became publicised as an artistic/well-thought genre of music, whose makers were over-cryptic bored young adults whose life had been made idle by the huge load of meaninglessness up their asses since birth. So it came to this: the delusional reverie as it loops over and over, the cramped up past vastly standardized, floating memories of artis
...more
Not a huge fan of vaporwave, but the prospect of reading about an essentially underground form of music put in the context of the sociopolitical state of its age seemed pretty promising, and it didn't dissappoint.
+I should read more Simon Reynolds. ...more
+I should read more Simon Reynolds. ...more
Apr 19, 2017
Adam
rated it
it was amazing
Recommended to Adam by:
the discourse collective
Shelves:
essays
For now, we live in the mall, but I think it’s closing soon.
Very hauntological.
Some good lines:
(view spoiler) ...more
Very hauntological.
Some good lines:
(view spoiler) ...more
Interesting discourse analysis of vaporwave music and visual aesthetics. Definitely worthwhile reading if you are into internet sub-cultures and micro-genres. It has a lot of references of audiovisual pop culture (it is handy while reading it to have a smartphone so you can search the examples mentioned). The concept of hauntology is beautiful used and illustrated.
excellent read
My experience reiterates the other reviews here. As someone who was already a fan of vapourwave, this book struck me as a timely and incisive meditation with an unusual relevance to my own listening habits. For this reason, I was delighted by the numerous references to vapourwave music and to other comparable aspects of internet culture that riddle the text. With my smartphone to hand, I could read the text while listening to the music that it was analysing, as if the book had its own soundtrack
...more
This slim non-fiction volume (what's the non-fiction equivalent of a novella? Should I just call it an essay?) seems at first to be almost absurdly niche: it sets out to examine modern ideas of 'hauntings', whether the incorporeality of our digital selves or what Tanner calls 'Western culture's preoccupation with the past', through the lens of musical microgenre vaporwave. But its scope becomes much broader than that, exploring contemporary notions of the uncanny and the fraught relationship bet
...more
I like the way how in the logic that Tanner appoints to vaporwave genre and the aesthetics that accompany it, the (re)surface of the uncanny occur in the form of a crisis in the otherwise seemingly natural workings of contemporary capitalism. vaporwave by taking its setting in non space and non time in turn defaces the non spatial and non durational character of capitalism. in a twist it creates a foil in which the nightmarish features of vaporwave fails to divide itself from reality. moreover b
...more
The author needs to get out more.
Fantastic book examining hauntology, our obsession with nostalgia as a means to cope with historical trauma, and the deconstruction of that nostalgia to tell us something about our present. Details examples of the musical genre as well as talking about how the music industry itself had a hand in the creation of the DIY and semi-anonymous aspects of the genre. The book brings the current cultural climate into focus in a way that I hadn't considered, talking about how the obsession with the just-d
...more
This book will quench your thirst if what you're looking for is a starting point from which to understand Vaporwave. On the other hand, the analysis is both uneven and seemingly arbitrary, at times (some people might find the comparisons to The Shining, or Jameson, or Derrida, more convincing than me), but it doesn't take away from the fact that it's an incredibly unique and interesting book. The discussion of Muzak, in particular, is excellent, as well as the discussions of "non-places." In con
...more
good writing abt music, amateur writing about postmodernism
Very weird reading about Vaporwave and Youtube Poops in an academic context, but interesting. While slightly overfilled with jargon, it makes me happy that somebody has written this book.
Easy to digest, well-rounded, and succinct analysis of the elements of vaporwave as a critic of capitalism in aesthetics, music, and culture as it presents itself in our lives. Wonderful book that explains more than any 4 hours of 'introduction to vaporwave' video series could ever explain to you.
...more
This was an interesting read. I don't know how much I got out of the actual thesis of vaporwave being a 'haunted' genre, but this book brought up quite a number of interesting thinking points to reflect on myself and my own relationship with the current 'nostalgia' culture. The popularity of 80s and 90s-themed music, TV and fashion at first seemed to me to be a similar reflection I experienced back in the 90s, when it was chic to wax nostalgic over a glossed-over, Vietnam War-less version of the
...more
Short, sharp, shiny.
Tanner was able to take Derrida's concepts of hauntology—which I have not attempted to after my failed attempt of reading Derrida earlier on in the year—and present them to the reader with ease and clarity in relation to his topic.
At times the book can be long winded—mostly towards the end when he begins to talk at length about some books, a film or Taylor Swift to make an analogy which could probably have been made shorter.
Other than that, very good read, and I would recom ...more
Tanner was able to take Derrida's concepts of hauntology—which I have not attempted to after my failed attempt of reading Derrida earlier on in the year—and present them to the reader with ease and clarity in relation to his topic.
At times the book can be long winded—mostly towards the end when he begins to talk at length about some books, a film or Taylor Swift to make an analogy which could probably have been made shorter.
Other than that, very good read, and I would recom ...more
Nov 24, 2016
Lara Corona
added it
I love Zero books & I love vaporwave.
Right until I read this book I was only a casual fan of the music genre but Tanner unpacks a lot more from this niche genre, more well-known for its aesthetics revolving around roman/greek sculptures, holographic palettes, glitches and its homage to Japanese anime.
He goes to talk about vaporwave as being a subversive movement to mainstream music, due to how it's created and its underground sensibilities. To make sense of vaporwave and its appeal, he explores postmodernist theories, making sense ...more
He goes to talk about vaporwave as being a subversive movement to mainstream music, due to how it's created and its underground sensibilities. To make sense of vaporwave and its appeal, he explores postmodernist theories, making sense ...more
It can be hard to find critical texts about internet culture, especially micro genres of internet art. Usually this is because they come and go so quickly, they are lost in the overall stream of digital communication. I was really excited to find this book about a genre that has fascinated me for a few years now. Vaporwave is a micro genre that was thought to be a joke or a passing fad. While it has grown and changed since its inception in the early 2010s, the cornerstone of Vaporwave is the rem
...more
Fun to read Maxist critical theory around a few of rather niche interest of my own, vaporwave and surreal internet humour. The analysis was generally thought provoking, although I remain to be totally convinced of the usefulness of the "Hauntology" as a concept/metaphor.
I would have liked to see the book talk more about vaporwave's visual a e s t h e t i c, which I think has turned out to be its biggest cultural export to the mainstream, something that only becomes clearer as time moves on and ...more
I would have liked to see the book talk more about vaporwave's visual a e s t h e t i c, which I think has turned out to be its biggest cultural export to the mainstream, something that only becomes clearer as time moves on and ...more
- Maybe we can wake up enough to instruct our children to never settle for life in the haunted mall.
This book does an amazing job at explaining vaporwave's brilliant critique of late capitalism. It shines especially when it elaborates on the concepts of postmodernism and hauntology taken from cultural theory. I loved the mention of non-places and non-times. Also the criticism of modern music industry is apt and utterly relatable. The inluence of Fisher is evident throughout the book which, like ...more
This book does an amazing job at explaining vaporwave's brilliant critique of late capitalism. It shines especially when it elaborates on the concepts of postmodernism and hauntology taken from cultural theory. I loved the mention of non-places and non-times. Also the criticism of modern music industry is apt and utterly relatable. The inluence of Fisher is evident throughout the book which, like ...more
Fascinating read all the way up to the halfway point of the last chapter. Then it becomes a “they don’t make music like they used to” rant, which kinda ruined it for me, but I am curious about wether or not Grafton still feels that way as this came out 5 years ago. I only wonder because the sentiment of “only shitty music on the radio” has, in my estimation, been thoroughly knocked down since then. I fully understand that this lil bit that sticks with me isn’t the point of the book, which I ador
...more
It's a brief work by a remarkably young man. His teenage immersion in this subterranean world where all thumb their nose at the machines while pretending to be machines, his presence in this revolt which takes place nowhere or anywhere, permits him to glimpse what others, pacified by the ossified behemoths of media messaging, can neither see nor comprehend.
The concept of vaporwave is something we're still working out, but it's a precious gift, a way of naming what has for so long gone unnamed. ...more
The concept of vaporwave is something we're still working out, but it's a precious gift, a way of naming what has for so long gone unnamed. ...more
I've had an enduring fascination with vaporwave ever since reading Adam Harper's article in Dummy Mag (which I was happy to see referenced here) on the genre some years back. It's been a lingering interest partly because the notions ascribed to it -- anti-capitalism, critique of consumerism, accelerationism, etc. -- but also partly because it has seemingly straddled the line between the underground and mainstream in recent years with the adoption of its sound and aesthetics by a wider array of b
...more
This book could only really have been written in 2015, a time just before the memetic explosion of the first year of the Trump Presidency and the absolute mainstreamification of the vaporwave musical and visual aesthetic, and in that way it is very much a product of its time. The ideas that Tanner presents here are well thought out and lays a good kind of framework for acceleration of culture through music. Though vaporwave has been (re)claimed by our corporate overlords, I think his ideas about
...more
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Grafton Tanner is a writer and musician from Athens, Georgia. His work has appeared in The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, We Are The Mutants, and other locations, and his debut book, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, was published with Zer0 Books in 2016. His forthcoming book is The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech, out Dec 11,
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“For now, we live in the mall, but I think it's closing soon.”
—
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“It is a confounding and eerie sensation to feel social while alone, thronged with invisible entities whose presence is felt yet who appear wholly absent. These entities are our twenty-first-century ghosts, shorn from their corporeal shells and set loose to glide through cyberspace at lightning speed and with startling precision. We call to one another in the darkness of the Internet, reuniting with hosts of friends and followers, but the act is all theater. There is nothing there in the dark except the dead gaze of a copy.”
—
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