Musings

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, a vaguely defined cluster of largely online art scenes coagulated themselves out of the rapidly evolving social media ecosystem, defined by a post-internet (the term that I will be describing, however inaccurately, to this scene/phenomena as a whole) aesthetic sensibility, awareness of and active usage of both the cutting edge digital mediums then available, a deliberately oblique usage of older cultural artifacts, and a Tumblr- or blogosphere-centric nature. I would describe vaporwave, seapunk, witch house, bloghouse, some aspects of what has been retroactively termed “indie sleaze," early epic collage, and bubblegum bass as various facets of this general nebulous trend.

I’ve spent my entire life basking in the echoes of this subculture, poorly defined as it might be. In spite of its ostensible current nonexistence - its inherently archived nature as opposed to a living phenomena or a scene one can now live through - even its echoes carried more vitality and light than almost anything happening at present in the form of a coherent large-scale “scene.” I’ve spent my entire life talking to digital ghosts - uploads from 2010, the remnants of tumblr blogs and subcultures that no longer exist, every piece of art with an implied “last online X years ago” tagged onto the end.

It’s hard to miss the fact that, in an attempt to seem cutting edge via the usage of then-relevant technological visuals and references, so many of these art pieces accidentally fossilized themselves within 201x permanently like a spider in amber. Glass Popcorn rapping about Google Plus in 2012 was a then-relevant, tongue-in-cheek reference to something that was ubiquitous and hypermodern, something that related to nothing but the immediate present; it’s important to realize that the post-internet scene was, at the time, completely of its era. The symbiotic relationship between the music scene and the blogosphere substrate it grew from in real-time is essential here; for every song, album, and musical trend, you have to imagine a cluster of dozens of blogs posting about it, a real-time conversation being had across now-obsolete or buried social networks.

In the screen-recordings that make their way into these videos and cover arts, they are permanently burned into their respective year, almost identifiable down to the month based on the webpage layout or MacOS edition being used. What was supposed to look like "now," like the then-present, like the real-time experience of watching teenagers and modern artists on tumblr run circles around establish magazines and build their own, cooler pop culture continuum, now just looks like November 2010. It now looks like a memory, and the infectious, enthusiastic vibrance of it, the incredibly aliveness of it, is poignant even despite the fact that its obviously just echoes, and that much of the metatextual part of the whole subculture (the surrounding substrate of Tumblr and music board posts) are now either buried or gone. Obviously, all past-decade subcultures and scenes were lived through in the moment, but they were lived IRL, sufficiently separated in time as to not fall into the uncanny valley of semi-relevance that the post-internet scene (2009-2016?) does, which was lived URL, and thus we can wander through it's ruins (and arguably do, every day, given that its influence is so omnipresent now as to be almost banal.) It feels like it was built to linger.

"deleted, hope you got what you needed"