The Reactionary Power of Vaporwave
A subtly reactionary aesthetic in and of itself, 'Fashwave' was unnecessary and counter-productive.
Walt Bismarck’s ‘Conservatives Suck at Art’ article got me thinking. In a comment underneath his article, I mentioned the hilariously bad film ‘My Son Hunter’ as personifying everything he was criticising about ‘conservative art’.
The film is a cross-Atlantic endeavour starring Laurence Fox, a British (mostly former) actor and right-wing political commentator, as Hunter Biden. I watched it one evening with a fellow right-wing uni flatmate over alcohol and a take-away, and was fun as a night-in, ‘so bad it’s good’, experience. The trailer is literally the whole movie, so just watch that if you want to have some laughs at the complete inability of right-wingers to understand subtlety.
What’s even more funny is that Breitbart distributed the film, and Andrew Breitbart’s famous line was ‘politics is downstream from culture’. This film encapsulates how hilariously they completely and entirely missed the point of their founder’s quote.
The Right is too often overtly political, which is extremely off-putting for those who don’t already agree with the message. What they don’t understand, or at least the Anglosphere Right doesn’t (Nouvelle Droite is another matter, hence the better situation in France) is the notion of ‘Metapolitics’. Metapolitics is a highly expansive subject that tackles virtually all aspects of life, down to the words we use, the aesthetics we like, and the lifestyle we live, as well as how everything has a political subtext. The Left won the culture war because they mastered Metapolitics, whereas the Right only saw things through ‘ordinary politics’.
Another example of this problem with being overtly political would be the Daily Wire’s ‘Lady Ballers’. Initially, the Daily Wire had a good idea of investing in movies that were more subtly metapolitical, like ‘Terror on the Prairie’ starring Gina Carrano, in an attempt to build a brand for quality movie-making outside right-wing circles. But the Daily Wire subscriber base wasn’t interested in that, they wanted culture war red-meat and they wanted it NOW. So, Daily Wire started moving to movies like ‘Lady Ballers’, which whilst being a huge hit among other right-wingers, is difficult to imagine persuading anybody not already in agreement with message, as they wouldn’t watch it to begin with.
Right-wingers actually sometimes shoot themselves in the foot by making things that already have a right-wing subtext too ‘on the nose’, and therefore alienate people who may have initially been receptive to the values the work promoted. It’s like telling somebody about to jump down the ‘Alt-Right Pipeline’ what lies at the end, causing them to run a mile.
Vaporwave and the 1980s
An example of this is the Vaporwave/Synthwave/Outrun aesthetic. Encapsulating the word ‘aesthetic’, this artistic movement transcended various art forms, being both a visual style and a genre of music.
One of the first explicitly internet-based genres of music, Vaporwave was built around 1980s nostalgia. It was initially spearheaded by leftists who wanted to ‘parody’ the ‘mass consumerism’ that defined the Reagan years, MacIntosh Plus being a tr00n. However, a bit like Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers film, what was intended as a parody of certain values ended up accidently celebrating them.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. In our Woke age, it is subconsciously reactionary, despite how much one, even the creator of the art or music, may insist it’s a ‘parody’ or ‘satire’. It is why they must debase historical drama by putting non-Whites in historically White roles (the Orwellianly named ‘colorblind casting’), for if people actually had an accurate image of the past, they would find it vastly preferable than the Woke present. It is why they are so up in arms about Tradwives and Pepe the Frog memes, it is because they know that when done subtly, the right CAN influence people away from Wokeism.
1980s nostalgia is a case in point. That decade was the age of Ronald Reagan, a time when it looked like the constant cultural leftist advance of the 1960s had halted for good. Whilst it did represent only ‘One Step Back’ if the 1960s had represented ‘Three Steps Forward’, there was a sense that the future belonged to the Right. And in fact, whilst the 1960s wasn’t reversed, America didn’t get very much ‘more’ culturally left-wing from 1980 to 2008.
In reaction to the 1960s, a lot of the media in the 1980s was ‘consciously apolitical’, a stance that is right-coded. American cinema went away from the social critique that had consumed it in the 60s and 70s, and towards the era of the Hollywood Blockbuster, with the celebration of traditional American values and the ‘radically unradical’.
Film series like Indiana Jones celebrated the masculine American hero taking native artifacts to put in American museums. Gremlins and Back to the Future romanticise the small American town. Top Gun celebrates the American military. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off celebrates the American individual and masculine vitalism. Family Ties makes a joke (boy, do I WISH this were true with Gen Z today) of young Gen Xers being more conservative, something that was true in various circles. And to top it all off, an old school Hollywood star was in the White House; which whilst lacking on the policy front, geared the ‘vibes’ of this decade towards an optimistic celebration of America’s pre-1960s past and the essential continuity with it.
During this time, public opinion on issues like crime and the death penalty was to the right of where it had been in the 1960s, including amongst the young. America did not follow Europe in abolishing the death penalty, and various states resumed executions in this period after having stopped. And the Equal Rights Amendment was NOT ratified, something that warms my heart with how much it must have shattered the feminists, a beautiful and nostalgic contrast to our own time, where they are able to smugly proclaim, with unfortunate accuracy, that young women are with them.
It was easy to conceptualise the cultural left as ‘not’ winning in the 1980s, with unapologetic American nationalism and jingoism the norm. I always like watching the opening ceremony of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, to get a feel for the ‘Reagan Era’. From the military marches, to the epic rendition of ‘Fame’ (57:47 - 58:46), to the goosebump-inducing way they sing ‘America the Beautiful’ at the end, it shows a spirit of conservative consensus which is completely lacking in America today.
And what Vaporwave does is remind one of that. A reminder of a time when it looked like the tide was finally turning. A time when the apolitical, ordinary, and ‘moderate majority’ was allowed to live their lives, to go to shopping malls, to have fun with the opposite sex, to not have odious cultural left radicals getting to set the agenda on everything and, no matter how evil and manipulative their tactics, always managing to beat the majority down in the end.
Video: A Vaporwave remix of Phoebe Cates’ famous ‘bikini out of water’ scene from the 1980s classic ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’
But in addition to reminding us of Western Civilisation’s brief flicker of life in the 1980 - 2008 period, before the fact that the 1960s had been a terminal illness had been fully understood, Vaporwave does not merely look backwards. It brings back memories of how one in the 1980s would have imagined the future, this vitalistic, otherworldly, techno-commercialist yet calm, soothing, and dreamlike presence. It was, in reaction to the 60s Counterculture, ‘radically unradical’. I heard it said that Vaporwave is like ‘remembering the future’, and indeed, the same kinds of sounds in the Blade Runner Vangelis score, which I mentioned in my article on that film’s setting, are used in Vaporwave.
Right-Wing Vaporwave
One of the first things that attracted me to Neoreactionary thought was its use of Vaporwave aesthetics. I had not really engaged with the Vaporwave scene when it was popular in the 2010s, but it’s usage by the Dissident Right made me associate the ideas with the aesthetic, and therefore attaching similar emotions of being futuristic and cutting edge. Vaporwave was the language of ‘Reactionary Modernism’.
Now, one can make the argument that the use of these aesthetics were arbitrary. Auron MacIntyre stopped using them on his video openings (I believe a mistake), though Alex Kaschuta still does. However, it does not stop the way ‘I interpreted’ the aesthetics, or make it illegitimate.
But, like with the depiction of the future in films like Blade Runner, the Vaporwave genre creates nostalgia for a future that never came to be.
So, it is very easy to attach a reactionary critique to Vaporwave aesthetics and music. It gives ample room to explore these themes of a lost future, of a desire to be free of the moralising scolding of Wokeism, and a romanticisation of the apolitical that is inherently right-coded.
However, like the Right always does, they had to ruin this by going way over the top, and inserting deliberate and obvious Neo-Nazi imagery into Vaporwave, an aesthetic which became known as ‘Fashwave’. Literally ALL you had to do was not have explicit Nazi imagery, the cryptic and mystical colouring and tones already creating a sense of a ‘lost world’, but they did it. And then, it was highlighted, and people in more artistic scenes became closed off to those ideas. Fashwave even has a whole page on Aesthetics Wiki guarding people away from it. It means that a lot of these scenes are constantly on the watch for any ‘right-wing infiltrators’, and therefore it is a lot harder to do in the future.
And this is the point I’m trying to make. Having subtle captions like ‘do not be ashamed of your history’ and ‘remember who you are’, are so much more powerful than having sonnenrads and pictures of Adolf Hitler. You can get the exact same anti-Woke message without needlessly alienating 99% of people by making it about Hitler and the Jews.
I think the specific Vaporwave aesthetic scene has mostly run its course. The friend who I came up with the idea for this Substack with, thought the style was ‘outdated’. But new aesthetics inspired by it but utilising AI, to create a similarly ambient and ‘future-nostalgia’ atmosphere, can absolutely be done. Right-wingers need to be artistic, they need to be making use of the ample opportunities that exist for subjects and themes that are right-coded, and therefore subtly influence the way people think in a far more effective way than ‘My Son Hunter’ and ‘Lady Ballers’.
For instance, the X account Bovril-Gesellschaft, a prolific right-wing poster on ‘Anglo-Twitter’, frequently uses Bing Image Creator to produce scenes of traditional English women in the Britain of a bygone age, particularly the 1960s. Over here the 1960s had a different feel, and wasn’t purely defined by radical cultural leftism, mostly because of the mod subculture (and the ‘female mod’ subculture that Rachel Haywire talks about, seen with actresses like Diana Rigg.) The art that Bovril posts has a metapolitical subtext, that is weakened whenever he makes it explicitly political, but also weakened when he makes it purely silly or ridiculous; to be subconsciously right-wing is a powerful thing that requires one to be serious, but not explicitly political. It is what makes Lord of the Rings such a work of genius, as it communicates right-wing themes in a way that is universally accessible, the very definition of ‘Metapolitics’.
A large part of the reason why I made this Substack, before it became a general Dissident Right blog, was because I wanted to make ‘Anglofuturism’ a distinct aesthetic style, using the gift of AI art, to create this metapolitical messaging. There is nothing explicitly anti-Woke about Anglofuturism, a left-winger could, in theory, be an Anglofuturist, but the nature of the aesthetic and the themes it subconsciously communicates make that unlikely. This is because it utilises symbolism like the union jack which, whilst not exclusively right-wing, are right-coded, as are scenes of the English countryside and a futuristic sheen to the Britain of previous ages.
I hope the Right can learn lessons from it’s successes and failures in the past. Apu the Frog is a work of genius, as he is far cuter and more relatable than Pepe. Pepe was funny and good as an identifying symbol, but also gave off ‘saddo 4Chan basement dweller’ vibes. In contrast, Apu/Helper, in addition to the fact that art involving him is usually a lot more detailed, is designed in a way that, not only has the cuteness factor, but makes him represent the ‘underdog’ and elicit a sense of concern and sympathy, in a way that Pepe never truly did.
Apu mostly became popular when the Vaporwave scene was dying down, but this montage, using the ‘Little Dark Age’ track that was a staple of ‘Late Vaporwave’, is an absolute masterpiece. Funny, sweet, charming, yet sad. So many emotions conveyed through a cartoon frog. It’s stuff like this we need.
Let’s embrace our creative side, and use the power of aesthetics, that we have vastly more opportunities to do than in the 2010s due to AI art, to present the kind of world we want to create!
Great insights here, I'm inclined to agree with the off-putting nature of overt messaging. Lord of the Rings continues to be such a Cultural Powerhouse of Roman Catholic Teachings specifically because it's not in your face about being Catholic Art telling a Catholic Story teaching Catholic Lessons, and yet it is still extremely Catholic when one steps back and evaluates it at a 30K ft view. I would argue that the Lord of The Rings is Right Wing Art at its finest
I’m an artist my whole life. While reading your essay, I thought immediately of a once-famous painting, “The Raft of the Medusa” by Géricault. A naval shipwreck that resulted in cannibalism as a result of deep-set corruption in the French government, it was VERY political and newsworthy. So the artist went to create it without a commission. At the first showing which caused huge stir, the subtext was clearly political. But, because he didn’t sacrifice the quality of art for politics, his painting still have legs today while those that were explicitly political become dated as the newspaper wrapping a fish dinner.
And that’s the key. Art is a emotional media. It tell its story indirectly. It seduce. It is not logical like an essay. It allows for ambiguity and tell much by implication. This is why girls love art and novel, it allows them to engage their imagination and their skill in reading between the lines. The story or art must stand on its legs alone. It must be a compelling story or image first. The characters should be easy for reader or viewers to invest themselves in to make it worth their hours of time. When picking the text or subtext, always go with the story first. If politics get in the way, cut it out. The subtext will find its way into it because politics is ultimately about the artist’s attitude toward life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raft_of_the_Medusa