Vaporwave pedagogy: Multimodal learning with an internet music microgenre

This article describes how a form of pedagogy modeled on vaporwave musical and visual compositions can offer a strong contrast to simplified visions of students' positions vis-à-vis socioeconomic change. Vaporwave is a microgenre of music that emerged on the Internet in the 2010s. It is characterized by an extensive use of slowed-down audio loops sampled from kitschy sources, such as easy-listening and mall music. The microgenre's aesthetics are inspired by the early days of the Internet, as exemplified in the musical piece リサフランク 420 / 現代のコンピュ (Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing) by Macintosh Plus. This article rethinks teaching methods that rely on anti-rhetorical tropes such as irony, detachment, or appeals to authenticity to discuss philosophical concepts related to public discourse and consumerism. It shows instead that vaporwave creations do not suppress the intimate affective relationships students have developed with brands and consumption practices. This article then develops a vaporwave-informed pedagogy which allows teachers and students to investigate these socioeconomic connections and myths through creation, and productively considers their capacity to reshape local media ecologies.