>>6221378Vaporwave is about the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s, it's about the nostalgia that our generation feels about that period of time, but it's also about the future and the past.
It's basically envisioning a consumerist, capitalistic society of people who just go to the mall, and buy things, and use technology (because it's "new" and will take us to the future). It's about feeling that all your needs are being met because we live in this convenient society where everything is taken care of. That's where the connection to "muzak" comes from, because you hear that shit in boring business situations where you're supposed to remain calm and think abstract thoughts about the convenience and efficiency of everything.
Times New Roman is widely used in vaporwave stuff because it was once new and heralded what might have been a new age in business aesthetics, and now it's blown out and cliché. So it represents what vaporwave is all about. Same with the muzak influences, that style of music is little more than a cliché now, yet vaporwave takes us back to a time when it was a real and serious part of culture.
The Japanese thing comes from the idea (which we still have with us today) of Japan being the birthplace of the future's technological and commercial conveniences. Vaporwave isn't about Japan per se, it's more about Japanese tech and business influence on the rest of the world.
Roman architecture, statues, busts, etc. are a well-known artifact of Western culture. They represent the overblown and boring past being redeveloped into a vision of the future. They're kind of connected to Times New Roman, there's even a more literal correlation with the "Roman" thing.
All this is superimposed on the nostalgia of the 90s Internet and technology, and it's about recapturing that feeling of newness and mystery and "what happens next?" that the Internet brought.
