Taking a Second Listen to Vaporwave’s Most Iconic Song

This was written for a class assignment.

“リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” (Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing) by Macintosh Plus (an alias for producer Vektroid) is arguably the most iconic song in the genre of vaporwave. The track takes a sample of Diana Ross’s “It’s Your Move”, a song about a waning relationship, and turns it into an ironic capitalist critique.

The album that “Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing” was released on, Floral Shoppe, is arguably more iconic for its album cover than the music itself. Featuring a Greek bust sitting in a pink checker-boarded void, with a sunsetting skyline in the distance, it encapsulates the aesthetic of the genre — an ironic appreciation for the gaudy excess of the 1980s.

But to understand what makes the track itself so brilliant, we have to understand the purpose of vaporwave. Vaporwave, at its core, is an offshoot of plunderphonics, a style of music that heavily samples popular works in almost unrecognizable ways. Building off of the sample-heavy electronica of the 1990s and early 2000s, Vaporwave began as an internet-based subgenre in the early 2010s. Oneohtrix Point Never, releasing under the name Chuck Person, released some of the first works of Vaporwave.

Let’s look at one example. In his track “B4” (uploaded as “nobody here”), Chuck Person takes a sample from the Chris De Burgh ballad “Lady in Red” and turns it into the backdrop for a haunting early example of vaporwave. In its original context, the “nobody here” in the chorus was just meant to signify the intimate nature of dancing with the namesake “lady in red” — but in the Chuck Person track, it becomes a reminder of isolation. It’s worth mentioning how the visual aesthetic of vaporwave plays into this as well — the original YouTube upload of “B4” contains a video backdrop of a never-ending rainbow road leading into a skyscraper filled, starry night sky. It’s this combination of excerpted 80s maximalism mixed with a distant nostalgia that makes Vaporwave tick.

It’s these same factors that are visible all throughout “Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing”. The title of the song itself gives us an insight into the direction of the work and vaporwave as a whole — an absurd combination of 80s maximalism a la Lisa Frank, the devil-may-care chillness of smoking weed, and modern audio editing techniques. The result is a dreamy void of a track that harkens back to the golden age of American consumerism while warping it in such a way that it becomes unsettling.

The use of the Diana Ross sample is essential to the song’s staying power — the melody of “It’s Your Move” at the core of “Lisa Frank 420”, with its virality making the Ross sample possibly the most iconic in the genre of vaporwave. Much like what “B4” did to “Lady in Red”, “It’s Your Move” is warped into something different — transforming from a synthpop jam about longing into something much more smooth.

The vocals become much deeper and reverb-heavy, taking on a more unsettling quality. The looped refrain of “Don’t say no” and the bridge of “I’m giving up on trying / To sell you things that you ain’t buying” take on a much different meaning in this context — adding to the ironic nostalgia of the genre by reframing “It’s Your Move” as late-capitalist propaganda. As “Lisa Frank 420” closes, the refrain of “it’s all in your head” builds until the track breaks, slowing down and becoming even more unsettling, the sample becoming deeper and even heavier in reverb. The track ends on the original song’s first line, “I don’t understand because you won’t say yes / But you don’t say no” — and at this point, the sample is so warped that it’s unrecognizable. It’s a fitting reinterpretation — “It’s Your Move” is exactly the type of music one can imagine playing over the speakers of an empty Sears store circa 1988, making it a perfect candidate to warp and twist in such a nostalgic yet cold way. In this context, the original song turns from frankly, stereotypical mall music into something that could soundtrack the supermarket scene from American Horror Story.

Most of the music sampled in Vaporwave as a whole is similar to “It’s Your Move” in that it sounds quintessentially from the 1980s, and would be perfectly in place soundtracking a department store of the era. It’s by playing with this nostalgia and warping it into something that can be enjoyed both genuinely and ironically that the genre works its magic on the samples. As a genre born from the wild west days of internet copyright, it’s a key recent example of how sampling has changed music forever, and brought it into wildly divergent and interesting directions.