Echelon wrote:rodox_head wrote:Something tells me that comparing BoC to vaporwave would be seen as a point against them, as genres like vaporwave, chillwave, and synthwave all kind of became oversaturated and not taken too seriously. That's just my impression, from an artistic perspective I love the concept of vaporwave. They were a stepping stone for sure, somewhere between acts like MBV or The Chameleons and the greater trip-hop/downtempo genre. Maybe nowadays it would be seen as a point towards it, but probably not ten years ago. It only took about 20 years for people to start looking fondly at eurodance.
Pitchfork also infamously slammed "Something To Write Home About" seemingly not even aware of the Emo genre, so.. yeah, if I were the bros I'd probably just laugh off whatever they have to say.
Actually, yeah, I get your point about not wanting to connect BOC with a genre that people are annoyed by or find tasteless. Though regardless, it's still a part of history, as much as emo is a far cheaper, lesser sub-division to eighties goth, or radio pop-punk to seventies OG Punk. It's hard to tell with Pitchfork though because they were upgrading all of Taylor Swift's albums to higher rankings, and she's hardly a groundbreaking indie band, unless you want to count sales and social impact.
Vaporwave certainly does earn its spot in music history IMO. I think it influenced how a lot of us view consumer culture and nostalgia currently, for better or worse, kind of like pop art. The problem is a lot of genres/artists get taken at face value and robbed of any deeper meaning or significance (I want "Depeche Mode are not a New Wave band" on my tombstone
).
A thought just occurred to me, with the ease of access to extremely niche genres (e.g. Japanese Disco, Slavic Post-Punk) and how much more likely any average Joe can stumble upon a band and fall in love with them, or how easily said average Joe can turn on the newest album from *insert big name artist here* and form their own opinion on it, would that make conventional reviews ultimately worthless? Not that they haven't been so before. Oingo Boingo put out a song trashing music critics back in '81.
Echelon wrote:I actually think that vaporwave is what caused BOC to pivot towards seventies electronic music with TH. Most vaporwave kids probably had no idea about those soundtrack composers or Tangerine Dream. If their next album is influenced by the music of Societas X Tape, imagine more music influenced by stuff that vaporwavers have never heard before.
Tomorrow's Harvest is more representative of the kind of stuff Vaporwavers should have tried to achieve, instead of nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. Maybe even kind of a "Take that!" in a sense. It's good that BoC have stuck to their guns and avoided falling into self parody, even if we have to wait...
*looks at calendar*
a whole decade for a release