Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts

Grafton Tanner

An odd little book on the rise of vaporwave and what it means for our current culture that some of the most subversive music being made in the 2010s was, basically, the hold music for 1980s corporate America.

I knew basically nothing about Vaporwave until long-time internet friends brought it (and this book) to my attention years after it was cool. I like it, but subversion today doesn’t mean what it did in my day, and that, my friends, is part of getting old.

Books like these can come off as too cute by half, but Tanner really deeply knows the genre and has the Marxian chops to put a gloss on it as a genre both haunted, and haunting, late capitalism. You gotta be a certain kind of person to like books like this, but I am that kind of person.

Recommended for the enthusiast of Marxian analysis of obscure musical genres