The Joy of Simpsonwave (aka The Ghost of Lowenstein is in the Grasses)

I frequently have a hard time justifying my ongoing love affair with VHS to the digitally-minded majority who packed up and deserted their analog cassettes by the year 2000, not least because I inevitably have to concede that VHS is by an far an inferior format to its disc/data-based counterparts. I recently had a conversation with an older work colleague who'd come of age in the 1980s and spent much of his youth pulling out titles from video rental stores, and who basically minced no words in suggesting that I was a twisted young hipster obsessed with outmoded technology I had the luxury of not being saddled with during my formative years. VHS, he was at pains to remind me, is ugly and grainy, and back in the 1980s few things could dampen a home viewing experience quite like sticking a rented tape into your video machine to discover that several rounds in previous patron's VCRs had worn the thing into a degraded, unwatchable mess. "That's the beauty of it," I argued. "The graininess. The distortion. There's something about the VHS aesthetic that's oddly appealing in its impairment." Well, he wasn't buying. I had an even tougher challenge, a month or so later, when I was tasked with explaining the appeal of vaporwave to the same individual. "It's sort of a satirical genre designed to evoke the banality of the 1990s," I said, no doubt royally screwing the pooch in the process. My friend took exception to my feeble description. "The 1990s were not banal!" he insisted. "The shopping malls were," I replied. "That's more-or-less what vaporwave's getting at." I played him a track from a vaporwave album, Sunday Television by 猫 シ Corp., which he categorised as "music for teens walking into school to murder their classmates", and that was that. I had failed to win a new convert to the flock of vapor.

As a music genre, vaporwave is notable for the strong and seemingly contradictory reactions it inspires in listeners. Stefan Colton, in the article "Love in the Time of VHS: Making Sense of Vaporwave", comments that vaporwave finds its appeal in "two ideologically opposed camps: nostalgics who take pilgrimages to defunct blockbusters to worship the ruins of VHS, and anti-consumerist crusaders against the kitsch of capitalism." Being a movement dedicated plundering and desecrating any and all artifacts of late 20th Century consumerism with gleeful abandon, vaporwave has the potential to be one man's scathing satire and another's fuzzy nostalgia bomb. Some people, it would seem, just don't get the joke. Or maybe they get it all too well.

With my respective penchants for VHS and vaporwave in mind, it was inevitable that I would get hooked on "Simpsonwave", a bizarre internet phenomenon that turned a few heads back in 2016. Somebody, possibly a Vine user by the name of Spicster (whom we at least have to thank for popularising the movement), came up with the idea of combining vaporwave music with those most enduring and prolific of all 90s animated icons, Bart Simpson and brethren. Successive videos adopted an aesthetic designed to parallel the glitchy, chopped up qualities of vaporwave, and memetic magic was born. As the phenomenon grew in magnitude, several internet commentators took note and weighed in an attempt to figure out its weird appeal. One such commentator was Kevin Lozano, who penned the article "What the Hell Is Simpsonwave?" , for Pitchfork, documenting the origins of the meme and concluding that, "Those early seasons of “The Simpsons” are reeking with ‘90s nostalgia and flashes of surrealism, while vaporwave accesses something deeper in that energy, tapping into a sort of dreamy ennui." Featured in Lozano's piece is an interview with Lucien Hughes, compiler of one of the most prominent Simpsonwave playlists on YouTube, who attributes the popularity of the videos to the unique cultural currency of The Simpsons, the awe-inspiring success and longevity of which has kept it on the air and at the forefront of public zeitgeist for more than three decades: "The Simpsons is pretty unique in that it's something that almost everyone born between the late ’80s and early ’00s grew up watching. Vaporwave is very much about creating an atmosphere of nostalgia, so I feel The Simpsons just perfectly fits the whole aesthetic." Joe Blevins of The A.V. Club praises the efforts, calling them "trippy and transportive but also oddly soothing and even beautiful."

I'll wager that part of the reason for the meme's success lies in its emphasis on the melancholic. In part, it's a melancholia for our own bygone days, the disquietude in seeing the cultural artifacts of our youth presented in a chopped up and recycled state; what once seemed fresh, sparkling and new is now the fodder of internet memes. But there's also something genuinely haunting about the tendency in Simpsonwave to pinpoint the characters at their most vulnerable and despondent. By isolating and honing in on some of the show's moodier, more desolate moments (moments that are easily brushed over or at least softened within the context of a twenty-minute gag fest), it ends up showcasing familiar characters in a different, yet not invalid light. One video, U S E D  T O  K N O W by XoroX (below), makes the surprisingly convincing case that there's a fundamental existential despair underpinning Homer's characterisation, drawing on his feelings of childhood abandonment, inadequacies as a husband and his reliance on Duff Beer to ease the pain, set to the strains of a severely disfigured version of Gotye's 2011 pop hit "Somebody That I Used To Know" (note: this video is a reworking of an earlier Simpsonwave video named C R I S I S by the aforementioned Lucien Hughes, which used the track "Decay" by HOME and featured a slightly more upbeat ending). At its most potent, Simpsonwave brings out a bleaker undercurrent to the series, one which we end up suspecting has been right there under our noses the entire time, and which now serves as an almost hauntingly apt echo to our own feelings of regret and alienation in the present moment.

To understand the appeal of vaporwave and its assorted offshoots, it is important to step back even further and consider vaporwave's place in relation to a wider concept known as hauntology. The phrase "hauntology" has become popular in recent years due to its association with a predominantly British musical scene that thrives on a sort of twisted nostalgia for the public information films, documentaries and educational programs of yesteryear (music such as that of the Ghost Box label, Concretism and Boards of Canada), but the term was first coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx, in ruminating on how the ghosts of communism would continue to haunt capitalistic society following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The concept of hauntology, which Derrida characterised with a quote from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "The time is out of joint", concerns a present that is held captive by two delusory states - a past that has faded into mere memory, and all of the potential futures that have perished along with it. Hauntology is more than just the nostalgia for what has passed, but the nostalgia for what never was.

A great part of hauntology's appeal as an entertainment form has to do with the self-conscious and unsettling sense it evokes of a half-remembered/misremembered past infusing the present creating its own parallel universes - glimpses into alternate timelines that could just have plausibly have gotten us to where we are today. Richard Littler has used this to particularly witty effect with his project Scarfolk, a satirical blog which transforms the cultural attitudes and government paraphernalia of 1970s Britain into the building blocks of dystopian horror. The BBC comedy series Look Around You, an affectionate, if rather caustic pastiche of the ITV Schools series Experiment, was cut from a similar cloth. In both cases, nostalgia is employed and inverted in order to convey a distrust for our collective heritage and how it shaped us. Boards of Canada, a popular Scottish electronic music duo whose catalogue has specialised in evoking the soundtracks of the vintage nature documentaries produced by the National Film Board of Canada, but infused with a nagging sense that there is something undeniably threatening nibbling away beneath the surface, understood the appeal of such troubled reminiscing when they stated that their music is about "inventing a past that didn't really happen." The success of BoC's music lies in its sunny, nostalgic charm but there is also a clear element of diurnal horror in the proceedings, a feeling that something about this trip down memory lane isn't quite adding up. Michael Sandison, one half of BoC, proposes that there is something warm, but also upsetting and eerily deceptive about the nature of memory, when he muses that “If there’s sadness in the way we use memory, it’s because the time you’re focusing on has gone forever… It’s a theme we play on a lot, that bittersweet thing where you face up to the fact that certain chapters of your life are just Polaroids now.” As memory fades, it assumes new identities and becomes its own beast. Faded Polaroids and worn-out VHS tapes capture that temporal process in action - the distortion and mutation of the artifacts that once epitomised our youth and optimism. Vaporwave (a term which derives from "vaporware", referring to a product that is promised but never materialises) has a similar interest in distorting the familiar in order to bring out the uncanny qualities it posits were lurking there all along, and to initiate a necromantic dialogue with the ghosts in the machinery of shopping malls, weather channels and adult contemporary radio. Vaporwave understands that there is great fascination, even terror to be mined from the vapidity of the modern hopes and dreams of a bygone age.

A possible factor in why The Simpsons has proven such an adept bedfellow for vaporwave has to do with the acute awareness the show has always demonstrated for the role of popular culture in shaping (and simultaneously distorting) our individual and collective memories. Right from the start, The Simpsons was astonishingly deft at plundering the US cultural heritage and assembling a scrapbook of the critical moments that had molded America's understanding of where it presently was, where it had come from and where it suspected that it might be headed. In many respects, the colourful and dynamic cartoon captured the optimism of the non-threatening nineties, that garish period sandwiched in between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 when information technology was taking off in a big way and people were more concerned about the possibility of extra-terrestrial invasion than threats from foreign lands (the truth is out there, and all that). But it was just as wise to the banality of the age and to the repugnancies of consumerist culture (McDonaldization, McJobs, McEverything), even if the show's own ubiquitous merchandising push meant that it too was a part of that consumerism, a paradox that the series readily acknowledged on numerous occasions ("Treehouse of Horror II", "Bart Gets Famous" and "Lisa vs Malibu Stacey" all contain thinly-veiled digs at the wide array of tie-in products that were spawned in the wake of the series' breakout success). Above all, The Simpsons understood the power of popular culture in evoking a sense of time and place, and increasingly had to grapple with its own status as a television juggernaut and the dent it had made in the cultural landscape it was pillaging. Look no further than Homer's wry introduction to the flashback in the Season 9 episode "Lisa's Sax": "It all happened in 1990! Back then, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was currently known as Prince. Tracey Ullman was entertaining America with songs, sketches and crudely drawn filler material. And Bart was eagerly awaiting his first day of school." Attentive viewers might pick up on the temporal disturbance in Homer's words, for he self-consciously references the series' origins as a collection of supporting segments on The Tracey Ullman Show, then immediately relates it to a point in the family's personal history with which it could not logically overlap - anyone around at the time knows that 1990 was the year when Marge turned 34 and came this close to ditching Homer for an amorous Frenchman (so slightly later than their crudely drawn filler material days, then), and yet here it is given as the setting for a much earlier point in the family's lives, when Lisa was a toddler and Bart was poised for his induction into the horrors of Springfield Elementary. The longer The Simpsons has remained on the air, the more nightmarishly disordered this temporal confusion has become. But then as we've discussed, the past is not a static entity, being prone to mutating as it edges ever further along into obscurity. The Simpsons is the unique position, as a long-running series in which the fundamental elements have always stayed effectively the same, in being forced to cannibalise its own history, ouroboros-like, in order to keep itself on top.

More troubling than The Simpsons' own haunted timeline is the uneasy sense of a past that is gradually slipping away and being flattened into a banal compilation of pop culture trivia. Homer's introduction follows a pattern set by previous flashback episodes in which the family attempts to trace its personal origins (in "Lisa's First Word" of Season 4, Marge sums up the cultural landscape of 1983 with the line, "Ms Pac-Man struck a blow for women's rights, and a young Joe Piscopo taught us how to laugh") but "Lisa's Sax" was the first to knowingly acknowledge that the era which The Simpsons had itself helped to define was already fading into nostalgia and becoming the diluted materials for expository scene-setting, and there is something quaintly charming but also startling in seeing the the series observe its own cultural legacy take its place within that cycle. And while the assorted cultural markers interspersed throughout "Lisa's Sax" and similar episodes are often very cleverly deployed (Homer's review of David Lynch's Twin Peaks is particularly slick), there's a deliberate ham-fistedness in the manner in which they self-consciously pander to the viewer's desire for a trip down memory lane - eg: the "Disco Sucks" bumper sticker in "I Married Marge" and Marge's discussion with her neighbours in "Lisa's First Word" about the finale of M*A*S*H (emblems which are inevitably divorced of their intended meaning as the series' viewership ages and the next generation only knows about the existence of such things because they saw it on The Simpsons). The Simpsons has long been fascinated with the highly persuasive manner in which popular culture pervades and colours our personal conceptions of time and place, to the extent that it threatens to supplant individual experience altogether - in its place, we end up with the same kind of universal experience propagated by the mass media that our pathologically obsessive friend Wilson Bryan Key warned us about in Subliminal Seduction. But that experience too will have its meaning corroded over time.

For an example of that process in action, take a gander at the video featured at the top of this page, M E M O R I E S by NEOTIC. At 5:30, we see a short moment from the Season 4 episode, "Selma's Choice", in which a young Marge, Patty and Selma hold hands underwater and form a ring, looped here for two minutes and nineteen seconds to the dreamy synths of Greibel Sanchez's "Contigo". The purplish tint (a recurring characteristic of Simpsonwave) coupled with the blare of the overhead sun and the expanding and retracting ripples give the imagery a hallucinatory feel, creating an instant sense of a hazy, half-recalled memory struggling to materialise from the sands of time. The moment is a textbook example of what journalist David Keenan, in attempting to define the music genre hypnagogic pop (a close cousin to vaporwave), described as "refracted through the memory of a memory". For it is the re-appropriation of a re-appropriation - the moment derives from Marge's efforts to reminisce about her late Aunt Gladys, only to discover that her childhood memories have been conflated with imagery from Barbra Streisand's 1991 film The Prince of Tides. Of course, popular culture is a fickle thing; on the DVD commentary for "Selma's Choice" the production crew joke that The Prince of Tides, then a recent box office smash, has all but faded from collective consciousness, meaning that the joke potentially makes no sense to contemporary audiences. In its place, the image of Marge and her sisters assumes a cultural currency all of its own. Shorn of its original context and distilled to its most basic state, Marge's corrupted memories of a feature film the wider world has largely forgotten becomes a shorthand for own hazy, half-recalled childhoods. We see the passage of time decaying and mutating, as new Frankenstein creations rise up from the bones of that which has fallen at the wayside, our own recollections filtered through the recollections of another, themselves an imagined representation of a past that never really was. Curiously, this is not the only point in the series' history in which Marge's perception of reality is shown to have been hijacked by this specific film - in the Season 6 episode "Fear of Flying", we see that Marge has confused the name of her Anne Bancroft-voiced therapist with that of Streisand's character, Susan Lowenstein, and appears to willfully ignore the therapist's objection, seemingly so that she can recreate the experience of Nick Nolte's character at the end of the film, in which "Lowenstein" becomes his mantra for co-existing with the ghosts of a future he chose not to pursue. Nolte's closing words, "I wish again that there were two lives apportioned to every man", seem almost ridiculously narrow in scope when the present exists as a meeting point for an entire labyrinth of increasingly contorted parallel universes, born of what we vaguely remember, what we once dreamed, and what we merely saw on TV.

Remember that piece I wrote on Psycho II, where I read the film as the representation of a present trapped within a past, a theme explored in the original which in sequel takes on a whole new resonance due to the manner in which it self-consciously evokes and plays off of the cultural legacy of its predecessor? I feel as if I'm on the verge of making a similar case for The Simpsons, only here it's a present trapped within an alternate timeline created by popular culture (which The Simpsons in turn has played a critical role in helping to further redefine and mutate). In the meantime, let's Nighthawk with Abraham Simpson.