Chillwave in the context of "Escapism"

Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, an Internet aesthetic and meme that emerged in the late 2000s-early 2010s and became well known in 2015. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s, similar to synthwave. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates 1990s Web design and imagery, glitch art, anime, stylized Ancient Greek or Roman sculptures, Memphis Design geometric shapes, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.

Vaporwave originated as an ironic variant of chillwave, evolving from hypnagogic pop as well as similar retro-revivalist and post-Internet motifs that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the era, such as Tumblr's seapunk. The style was pioneered by producers such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Ramona Langley, who each used various pseudonyms. In 2010, Lopatin would release the influential cassette tape Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, which was later followed by Ferraro's Far Side Virtual. After Langley's album Floral Shoppe (2011) established a blueprint for the genre, the movement built an audience on sites such as Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan while a flood of new acts, also operating under online pseudonyms, turned to Bandcamp for distribution.

Hauntology is a music genre, movement or a loosely defined stylistic feature that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past. It developed in the 2000s primarily among British electronic musicians, and typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1930s to the 1960s, including library music, film and TV soundtracks, psychedelia, and public information films; often through the use of sampling.

The term was derived from philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of the same name. In the mid-2000s, it was adapted by theorists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher. Hauntology is associated with the UK record labels Ghost Box and Trunk Records, in addition to artists such as the Caretaker, Burial, and Philip Jeck. Music genres hypnagogic pop and chillwave descended from hauntology.

Hypnagogic pop (or simply h-pop) is a loosely defined style of pop and psychedelic music that evokes cultural memory and nostalgia for the popular entertainment of the past (principally the 1980s). It emerged in the mid to late 2000s out of the American post-noise underground as Gen X lo-fi and noise musicians began adopting retro aesthetics from their childhood, such as radio and soft rock, new wave music, video game music, synth-pop and R&B. Recordings were typically marked by the use of outmoded analog equipment and DIY experimentation, while distributed on cassettes and CD-R's with circulation primarily based on the Internet through blog sites.

The genre's name was coined by journalist David Keenan in an August 2009 issue of The Wire to label the developing trend, which he characterized as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory." It was used interchangeably with "chillwave" or "glo-fi" and gained critical attention through artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro. The music has been variously described as a 21st-century update of psychedelia, a reappropriation of media-saturated capitalist culture, and an "American cousin" to British hauntology.