Everything Old is Regrooved Again: The Permanent Present and Vaporwave Aesthetics

On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

In this episode, I discuss late stage capitalism in 2021 through a look at innovation in music. We seem to be caught in a ‘permanent present’. This ‘permanent present’ is a place where we cannot imagine a radically different future for ourselves from the present that we inhabit now. We inhabit a failure of imagination. I borrow heavily on the work of Mark Fisher and his book Capitalist Realism and use his concept of lost futures to explain why there has been a possible lack of genre development in modern music. The music on the radio in 1985 sounded radically different than that of 1965 but a 20 year span between 2001 and 2021 would produce no such shock. I then explain how genres like vaporwave help fill the void of true innovation in an era of the permanent present.