https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSMaB_Fzks0

식료품groceries definitely takes one of the more unique approaches to vaporwave that I have heard so far. The name and imagery place you in a location I rather doubt any other album has ever centered around: a fresh produce market. The new age, jazz, and softened traditional Asian (Korean?) folk melodies are a lot more naturally pleasing than what most of vaporwave samples from. I might have enjoyed some of this music in its original form. 식료품groceries colors it with 80s beats and a low-volume haze that take you to a supermarket from another world. It is futuristic, in a sense, but the 80s vibe places it firmly in the past. It is, perhaps, a nostalgic reminder of how the future used to be perceived. On 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open, you relive the experience of visiting a supermarket when they were still new and novel. What other genre of music can give you that?

Listening to this, it strikes me just how different 20th century trash music is compared to what we hear in retail stores and restaurants today. Much of it was certainly contrived, copying sounds once believed to place consumers in a purchasing state of mind. Easy listening with a bit of pep, always subliminal, it was meant to make you feel empowered to buy anything that caught your eye without care for the cost. Whether that approach actually worked, eh, it’s hard to say. The Muzak corporation certainly made a lot of money pitching it. But beyond serving a capitalist agenda, the music did have inborn qualities. If it really was pure trash, it would not have been very effective. What it might lead you to buy–that was the garbage.

If you walk into pretty much any business but Panera Bread in America today, you won’t hear anything like it. You will instead catch the same 20-track rotation regardless of the store, all songs conceptualized in corporate offices and performed by talentless beauty queens. The music has become itself a product. The idea is to craft music so mind-numbing that the melody will stick in your head all the way to the check-out, where the albums are conveniently on display for you to purchase if you haven’t found them on your smart phone yet. Since most people can’t differentiate infestation from fascination and buy on impulse, it’s not a bad scheme. When the practice becomes so universal that I can’t even choose my retailers based on their lack of painfully bad audio, it’s a great scheme. (By the way, I eat at Panera Bread a lot, and not so much for their average food.) Modern society’s further descent renders classic “shopping music” an art, and vaporwave artists are reviving it as such. In a round-about way, 식료품groceries might be one of the bleaker artists I feature here. By taking what was once considered trite and revealing its relative quality compared to retail music today, it reminds us just how much more vapid and commercial our world has become.