EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 15 - Dreampunk

Genre of the Day - Dreampunk

Album of the Day - 新しい日の誕生 (Birth of a New Day) by 2 8 1 4 (2015)

May 15, 2024

In 2019, one of my dear favorite pop musicians became the laughingstock of the Internet for a day. Ariana Grande, who has collected dozens of dainty little tattoos over the last decade, decided to expand her collection to her palm with some Japanese letters. She chose to commemorate her hit single “7 Rings” with a tattoo in Japanese, purely for aesthetic intrigue. 

Unfortunately, in a major linguistic backfire, Japanese speakers noted that the characters translated to seven small barbecues rather than seven rings. Upon thinking of this tidbit as the lede of this article, I decided to research to see if she ever covered it up or removed it. To my astoundment, Ariana has skillfully avoided using her left hand and has often worn gloves and jackets in music videos since: I wasted a concerning amount of time to find only one shot of the aforementioned hand. The shot still isn't clear enough to see if it has been covered up further from minor initial tweaks after she found out its true meaning or not. It’s not removed, though! Seven barbecues lives on.

All this to say that many American musicians have a strong, if at times surface-level-to-the-point-of-heinous-mistranslation, aesthetic fascination with Japan. This is particularly true with the online vaporwave movement that arose in the 2010s. Japan is perhaps the perfect choice for the musical component of vaporwave, as it relies on two counteracting tenets: futurism and nostalgia, and how the two interact via the exaltation of lost technology. Out of this, an imaginative nostalgia was born that yearned for visions of technological futurism like the neon brightness of 1980s Japan, while helping artists create an Internet-based anonymity through the use of Japanese for pseudonyms. 

While vaporwave aligned the use of those ‘80s Japanese presentation elements with the sampling of actual ‘80s songs, some producers began to gravitate away from those explicit nostalgic infusions and create something more ethereal and nostalgic via ambience. Dreampunk was born. The punk moniker is a bit misleading, although its official subreddit (where JSTOR helps me with folk genres, Reddit is my savior for all these little niche electronic genres) reveals its origin as “the soundtrack for the cyberpunk age.” Nevertheless, producers’ choice to co-opt Japanese words to add a mystique persists. More specific influences also pervade vaporpunk in particular, like the dark futurism of Blade Runner and the cyber-era anime cult classic film GHOST IN THE SHELL.

Even if you’re turned off by it aesthetically, I urge you to still give the music a chance. The decaying kicks and snares muffled under the airy synths struck me as producers musically imagining the contrast of Japan’s hyper-fast technological emphases and the reality of its aging population and continued economic ebb. The undulating, resonant synth waves of opener “恢复” evoke a dystopian vaporwave parallel of Goldie’s “Inner City Life.” The compositions are long and drawn out, and the pieces that add depth like the tiny sprinkles of dialogue and steps of the second track “遠くの愛好家” are restrained. The trap minimalism of “悲哀” is an ambience Take Care-era Drake would dream about.

It’s a hypnotic and gorgeous set, with soundscapes that bring the listener to a slowed-down vision of the technological rate of advancement that continues to overwhelm us as phenomena like AI veer off into increasingly perverse forms. Dreampunk is in equal measures a respite from it as it is an ode to its imagined possibilities.