I loved this article.
But before we go any further, I feel it is necessary to elucidate what exactly the word “Laborwave” means to me. Vaporwave, the artistic genre from which Laborwave evolved, is a post-modern music and visual art genre whose 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. It also incorporates early Internet imagery, mid-to-late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.” (Wikipedia)
If Vaporwave is the Thesis, then Ostalgie, a German term describing a longing nostalgia for life in Communist East Germany, is the antithesis. Our western culture is slowly coming to grips with the collapse of the economic system that we have enjoyed living at the peak of. In coming decades, we will face incomprehensible struggle. It only makes sense that as the world slowly crumbles around us, that we will cling nostalgically to things from our childhood and early lives that remind us of the simpler times. One Eastern Culture, who has already had to slowly come to grips with the collapse of their entire economic system over the past nearly 30 years, not just in Germany, but throughout the entirety of the Eastern Bloc. When places like Russia experienced 10 MILLION excess deaths in the years immediately following the reintroduction of capitalism in Russia, its no wonder why more Russians have a favorable opinion of Stalin than they do Putin.
The synthesis then, is Laborwave. Laborwave as I define it is: an inter-sectional art style reconciling nostalgia for a Soviet past with a nostalgia for the visual motifs of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. While Vaporwave relies on subtext, sarcasm and mild critique of the consumer-capitalist nightmare we have created, Laborwave takes it to the extreme, forcing you to confront the horrifying and uncomfortable truth.
Bertolt Brecht once said: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” To me, Vaporwave has always remained by and large little more than a mirror. But with Laborwave, I am trying to make Hammers.
And comrades have been making hammers ever since. Great job.
Impressive
Translate to “science is strength” according to G**gle translate.
I also thought this
As disgusting as it is, the very existence of the so-called “fashwave” simply proves to me that my aesthetics are powerful and emotionally evocative enough that the right feels compelled to appropriate it. We all know they certainly aren’t the most artistic or creative people in the world. All Fascists, but the Nazis in particular, re-purposed Revolutionary Socialist rhetoric, slogans, vocabulary and symbols to trick the average uneducated German factory worker or farmer that Nazi economic policy would work better than the collectivization proposed by real Socialists. In this way, the fascists discovered a way to mask a brutally reactionary reaffirmation of 19th century property rights in the facade of a Revolution.In societies as broken as the late Weimar republic, willingness for the average German to support a full throttle revolution was outrageously high. So Fascist movements cloaked themselves in a disguise of quasi-Revolutionary aesthetics.
was a really interesting way of viewing fashwave. The way it matches the constant and predictable co-opting and bastardization of other cultures, movements, and revolutions, as their own right down to leftist iconography and talking points.
