My Favorite Vaporwave Album - NEWS AT 11
Posted 2026-09-11
Look at almost any "best Vaporwave albums of all time" list, and 猫 シ Corp's NEWS AT 11 is a common appearance, and rightly so. Its selection and use of samples is exquisite, and 猫 シ Corp's audio design is truly top-notch in the Vaporwave scene. The way the album utilizes samples from newscasts on the day of 9/11 creates a foreboding sense of irony and discomfort, as the listener, of course, knows what happened on that day, but the album continues on with its lo-fi jazz samples without ever directly touching on the events of 9/11 directly. Through this, it exemplifies the Vaporwave genre in the best way: it causes the listener to embrace the promised future of the 90s, while also presenting it as the facade that it is. The promised peace and better future of the 90s fades away like vapor when confronted with the events of 9/11 and the resulting changes to the world order.
Vaporwave is a very diverse genre, but at its fundamental level, in my opinion, it's about the contrast between the promises of the past and the realities of the future. The term Vaporwave comes from the term "vaporware," a term used to represent a software that is advertised as coming in the future, but never eventually materializes. Vaporwave takes this concept and extends it to society as a whole, specifically that of the 1990s.
In the United States during the 1990s, there was an overall feeling of peace and prosperity; the Cold War was over, a Democrat was in office, and the economy was doing great. The mainstream opinion was that this prosperity would last forever, that history itself has ended. In Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, he argued that liberal democracy had been proven to be the ideological victor of the world, that capitalism and liberalism's dominance would persist well into the future. To the Americans of the 90s (and in particular, the children who were raised in this environment and would later become Vaporwave's biggest demographic), the future was bright.
However, the September 11th attacks shattered this illusion in a way that was genuinely traumatic for most Americans. The United States suddenly seemed vulnerable, the economy plunged (and would plunge even further after the Dot-com bubble burst), and the country would soon begin again its forever wars. Without the USSR as an enemy, the US generated one to go to war with forever, and 9/11 provided the best justification the Bush administration needed to slaughter thousands in the name of "freedom".
And 9/11 didn't just reveal that the promised future was a lie, but that the alleged peace of the 90s was a lie all along. The US was involved in the Gulf War right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and involved itself in multiple conflicts throughout the 90s. The economy wasn't doing well for everyone, and really only for large corporations was working as advertised.
nostalgia is a trap and vaporwave's irony gets around that; we can enjoy the past while also acknowledging that they were lies