Depending on how you look at it, this could very well be the chart that represents internet
culture the most.
It shows the birth, peak and ultimately the replacement of a meme.
These charts are from Google Trends. I got them by typing in seapunk and vaporwave.
It started on June 1st, 2011 with a Twitter exchange between two multimedia producers.
Here, in this moment, Seapunk was immortalized via a hashtag.
But the group of people who retweeted and liked that tweet were just getting started.
‘First, do you mind introducing yourself?’
‘My moniker is Ultrademon. I was considered to be one of the godparents of Seapunk’.
They began sharing art and music, chopping up and remixing 90s inspired visuals and sounds,
utilizing elements of cyberpunk to develop an oceanic aesthetic that they could get behind.
‘I didn’t really have much of a community I guess like that and for me it kind of came
from feeling like an outsider.’
Buzz around Seapunk spread quickly and small publications began tracking its every move.
But, it was still super underground and largely based on private Facebook groups.
If you asked anybody on the street in 2012 what Seapunk was, they’d have no idea.
Then in March 2012 the New York Times attempted to capture Seapunk in an article.
The headline?
The Little Mermaid goes punk. Seapunk, a web joke with music, has its moment.
‘Being a part of something that’s a meme. It makes you question your own work. So,is
this a joke? Or is what I’m doing any good? Can it be taken seriously?’
It’s debatable whether Seapunk was a joke or a real attempt at developing an oceanic
themed subculture.
But the article cites Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Azealia Banks as artists co-opting the
style.
But it doesn’t stop there.
8 months later, at only a year old, Seapunk had an infamous week.
Without any warning, it hit TV sets across the country.
[Rihanna SNL performance clip]
Ladies and gentlemen, Rihanna.
Most writers tasked with covering Rihanna’s green screen performance had no idea what
to think, characterizing it as “odd” and “trippy”.
And then quickly moving on to saying the she “redeemed” herself with the emotional
ballad “Stay.”
But the small band of web artists who spent the majority of 2011 and 2012 cultivating
that look knew exactly what was happening and it split them up on a very philosophical
level.
Many people claimed Seapunk died the moment Rihanna took the stage. But others weren’t
so angry.
‘I approached it as a positive. I think it’s almost better to be a part of something
that’s inspiring people on that level in some way.’
In fact, this sort of thing has happened on SNL before.
Back in 1979, David Bowie performed on SNL with Klaus Nomi, an opera singer who was a
fixture of the East Village art scene of the mid-’70s.
Like Rihanna, Bowie was taking the opportunity to confront a large television audience with
something from the underground.
The difference here was that Nomi was onstage performing with Bowie.
It’s true that Rihanna, Azalea Banks and Lady Gaga might be more associated with Seapunk
than the artists that originated it.
But in the age of the internet underground styles, aesthetics, and movements are always
transforming and adapting — they are two steps ahead.
Today, Seapunk is still alive and kicking, but it’s mutated for the most part, into
an even more popular musical sub-genre called Vaporwave.
It features elements of public access TV graphics and sounds, elevator music and future funk.
And Rihanna very well might be on to this sub-genre too.
You see last year, Tame Impala, the musical project of Kevin Parker, released the album
Currents.
The album art, music videos and sound all have elements of Vaporwave.
Rihanna’s latest album, Anti, features a cover of a song from Currents called “Same
Ol Mistakes”
And it was produced by Kevin Parker himself.
If you listen to that track and “James Joint”, a 1:50 interlude on Anti, you can’t deny
it.
That elevator music and future funk sound signature to Vaporwave is there.