I'm about to crack my knuckles and get autistic. I'm about to turn my e-peen into a Rob Liefeld masterpiece. No feet. Fox only. Final Destination. Counterpick Marth and I'll fucking rape you.
Vaporwave isn't fucking vaporwave. Let me explain. That song that you think is #aesthetic because it's funky and catchy isn't vaporwave. Neither is that song with the warm bassline and meaty snare/kick hits. Those are fundamentally different. Vaporwave is a unique genre in that it's identity was completely stolen from it by it's own visual design philosophy, and then that visual design philosophy bought a boat in Cancun on vaporwave's credit and named it The Synthwave. It completely makes sense when you think about it: Digital landscapes in pastel distorted by chromatic abberation and demanding symmetrical idols and statues. You give that kind of imagery to the untrained and the unknowing and they're going to assume it's some gay sequel to Washed Out with glittery synths and a TR-707. And that's exactly what happened.
Let me give you a strict definition of the vaporwave sound. It's ambient music if it was made by DJ Screw. You take a sample of something, you chop and screw it until you create a sonic landscape. It was hinted at by V/Vm's Sick Love, invented by MediaFired's The pathway to Whatever, popularized by Chuck Person's (Daniel Lopatin's) Eccojams, and killed by Mactinosh Plus' Floral Shoppe. That's a lifespan of around 2009-2012. Three years. It was alive three years. After that it was co-opted by fucking idiots who didn't understand the sound philosophy. There was a lot of factors at play here to turn people into fucking idiots, the afforementioned misappropriating of the visuals for starters. Another big one was the bleedover from mallsoft and seapunk and the other microgenres of the early 2010s which had way less concrete definitions, and that caused mass confusion. But the biggest reason of all was "killed by Mactintosh Plus' Floral Shoppe." Floral Shoppe became a meme. That was the nail in the penis. You know what? Floral Shoppe didn't even become a meme. The second fucking track from Floral Shoppe became a meme. No normie was going to sit through all 40 minutes of that shit. The album fucking sucks. The album set the precedent that vaporwave requires minimal effort. The t?r?a?n?n?y? ?f?r?e?a?k? intersectional hero who made the album even admitted that he didn't put any effort into it. But people believed him. They believed the dream that they too can do something difficult the easy way.
It turned into a game of the blind men and the FL Studio presets. If I remember correctly synthwave had already existed, but people started assigning that to vaporwave. Then because of the constant spamming of Japanese sentences from Google translate as song titles they started co-opting future funk. Future funk is especially eggregious because it's just French house with no effort put in. Can you sidechain a 4/4 kick to a sped up city pop song? You bet I can do that in twenty minutes. Give me half a day and I'll give you an album an hour and a half long.
So that's really it. I had something more profound in mind but it just turned into a rant. Who cares. Fuck future funk, fuck synthwave, fuck vaporwave. It's dead. Stop being retarded.