1001 Albums Summary

It doesn’t surprise me that this is rated so low, but to me, this is a work of art I remember when I discovered vaporwave, it moved me in a way music rarely had before. Vaporwave, if you don’t know, is essentially muzak that’s been slowed, chopped and reverbed. The background music of the 80s and 90s, crafted intentionally without a soul, to fill in the dead space inside an elevator, a mall, the other end of a call centre phone, given a haunting makeover. It was an ironic genre, making some kind of comment on the consumerism of the 80s and 90s - what that comment is, is dealer’s choice. The vapidity of consumption? The big lie of advertising? A simple nostalgia for the tragic optimism of a promise that never came true? Back in the day, the music came in tandem with a visual style where marble statues and palm trees were paired with Japanese letters, evoking the lobby of some kind of corporate utopian future where American capitalism clutched arms with the soaring Yen - what felt like the natural next step for the new millennia. Though, as you and I know, that future never came true. And at the turning point of it all, was the symbol of two smoking towers. The symbol of American exceptionalism. The heart of American finance. In the city where the sinister smile of the 1990s shone brighter than perhaps anywhere else. I wonder if there was muzak playing in the lobby and in the elevators on September 11, and for how long it kept playing. Where most vaporwave is, if you’ll forgive me, vaporous in it’s ideas - simply evoking a feeling like that of a dead mall, or ironically skewering the friendly face of pre-millennium capitalism - NEWS AT 11 is far more powerful, interesting, and chilling. Echoey saxophone is intercut with news and advertising from the morning of 9/11, just before the planes hit. There’s in innocence in everyone’s ignorance, enhanced by the sheer fake friendliness of American TV. You almost want to scream at the anchor to turn around and pay attention. You want to scream at the McDonalds ad. Muzak is transformed from the sound of nothing, or the sound of spending, to the sound of comfort. The sound of a pre-9/11 world, where things were simple. Like being inside the womb, inside a shopping centre. And what is a shopping centre, than one big womb? This album is deeply nostalgic, and deeply sad. NEWS AT 11 lets you time travel to the day the muzak died.