In December 2011 a producer who recorded as Vektroid put out an album, Floral Shoppe, under yet another name: Macintosh Plus. It went up on Bandcamp, free, via the small label Beer on the Rug. The cover was a Hellenistic bust on a pink-and-cyan checkerboard. The genre's true origins sit a little earlier, in prototypes like Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010), but this is the record that crystallised it.

The contents were stranger than the cover. Most of the tracks were 1980s soft rock and pop records — Diana Ross's "It's Your Move," the AOR band Pages, others — slowed to roughly half speed, drenched in reverb, and chopped into loops. The question that followed was not "is this good?" but "is this music?" The Tumblr art crowd reached the album before the music press did, and decided, with appropriate irony, that it was.

The track below is the canonical Floral Shoppe cut, with a title written in the mix of Japanese script and numerals that early Vaporwave used as a visual signature: リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー. The romanized title reads Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing — but the Japanese, コンピュー, deliberately stops the word for "computing" mid-syllable, and that throwaway gesture was the whole point. The naming convention told you everything about the moment: internet-native, multilingual on purpose, faintly stoned, faintly nostalgic for a 1990s no one had actually lived through.

The palette of source material settled quickly: 1980s shopping-mall music, corporate jingles, Windows 95 startup chimes, late-night infomercial backing tracks. Stretch them, drench them in reverb, chop them into loops. For most of 2012 and 2013 this was a half-serious internet aesthetic with a record collection behind it.

Around 2016 the meaning of the records started to shift, without anyone having to rewrite them. The 2008 financial crisis was no longer recent news, but its aftereffects had not gone away, and disappointment in capitalism itself had set in. A glut of nostalgia products filled the culture, and lo-fi hip-hop as study-and-work background had become a default. In that climate, the central Vaporwave gesture — taking a song from a more confident decade and slowing it until it sounded haunted — no longer came across as a prank.

Subgenres branched off and sharpened the move. Future Funk took Japanese city pop records, sped them back up, and stitched them into bright disco loops. Mallsoft pushed deeper into the empty-shopping-mall ambience. Slushwave slowed everything further, until the music almost stopped being music again.

The track below, "Skylar Spence" by Saint Pepsi, is a Future Funk landmark. In early 2015, after trademark pressure, the producer renamed himself Skylar Spence — taking the name straight from this very track — and the song became one of the bridges between Vaporwave and the city pop revival that the rest of the internet would eventually discover on YouTube.

By the early 2020s the original Vaporwave records had been reframed, not by their authors but by their listeners, as a kind of elegy for a future that did not arrive. The optimism — the sense that the future was going to be brighter — that the 1980s and 1990s sound carried had not survived the intervening decades, and the slowed-down versions sounded like the proof.

It is a strange life cycle: a genre that began as an internet joke ended up as one of the more durable critical artefacts of its decade. The records held their shape. The world around them moved into a mood where they suddenly made sense.