His answer: “Both and neither.” 1 Posts on the subreddit r/vaporwave, the most active subforum on Reddit dedicated to the genre, point to the continued influence of this essay. Is vaporwave “a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it?” Harper asks. In December 2012, musicologist and critic Adam Harper published an article in the online music criticism magazine Dummy titled “Vaporwave and the Pop-Art of the Virtual Plaza,” in which he emphasizes the contradictory role of this newer genre of electronic music in relation to corporate-sponsored globalization.
In doing so, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarly literature addressing the roles representation, aesthetics, and affect play in the formation of communities around music genres online. This article elaborates on the anonymous nature of the vaporwave scene to complicate approaches to techno-Orientalist analyses of digital artifacts. This article extends McLeod's argument to show how the uses and reproductions of East Asian cultural elements in vaporwave serve to reinforce stereotypes consistent with histories of techno-Orientalist representations, particularly with regard to gender. One exception is a piece by musicologist Ken McLeod, who connects vaporwave’s use of visual references to Japanese culture to techno-Orientalism, a term that describes how paranoia around Japanese economic expansion in the late twentieth century manifested in American and European cultural products. ABSTRACT A characteristic frequently glossed over in scholarly examinations of the online electronic music genre vaporwave is its use of East Asian cultural imagery in its paratexts.