In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry. Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it - "haunted." Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production. Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave's many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism's effect on art, musical raids on mainstream "indie" and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce. Grafton Tanner is a writer and musician from Georgia. Babbling Corpse Vaporware and the Commodification of Ghosts By Grafton Tanner John Hunt Publishing Ltd. Copyright © 2015 Grafton Tanner All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78279-759-3 Contents Introduction: Ghostly Encounters, Chapter 1. Spectral Presence: Vaporwave and the Uncanny, Chapter 2. Erasing the Human: Anthrodecentrism and Co(s)mic Horror, Chapter 3. Lost Futures and Consumer Dreams: Hauntology and the Sounds of Capital, Chapter 4. Sick and Tired: 9/11 and Regressive Culture in the Twenty-First Century, Acknowledgments, Notes, Bibliography, Discography, CHAPTER 1 Spectral Presence: Vaporwave and the Uncanny For when it dawned – they dropped their arms, And clustered round the mast; Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths, And from their bodies passed. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" In Tobe Hooper's 1982 horror blockbuster, Poltergeist, malevolent ghosts enter a suburban family's home through the television set and kidnap their daughter, all while ransacking the house and upending their lives. The film has remained a canonical, mainstream fixture of the horror genre since the 1980s and seems to advance a heavy-handed anti-TV argument: that the television is a medium of horrors. For viewers of the time, Poltergeist allegorized the rampant, media-fueled fears of the Reagan-era nuclear family – namely threats against children, such as kidnapping and even ritualistic Satanism. The film is literal in its representation of outside forces entering the safe enclosure of the suburban home and corrupting the balance of family life, and the conduit through which the ghosts enter is the television – the "medium of the dead" (his italics). What happens in the Freelings' home takes the 1980s fear of television's near-spiritual power and uncanny presence to its frightening conclusion. Poltergeist 's ability to tap into a cultural mistrust of electronic media has afforded its timelessness, such that a remake was released in mid-2015 (appropriately updating the story to fit with our current screen-saturated environment). Perhaps no other book more accurately details the history of electronic media's relationship with the occult, from contacting the dead via the radio to fearing the televisions in our homes, than Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, which posits that we have often thought of electronic media as "gateways to electronic otherworlds." Beginning with the invention of telegraphy and the rise of Spiritualism, Sconce outlines the history of electronic media's uncanny ability to appear "haunted." In particular, "sighted" media (such as the television) foreground this uncanniness because the "'ghosts' of television ... [seem] to actually reside within the technology" – ghosts in the televisual machine, if you will. Drawing on the idea of haunted television, Sconce notes: Sound and image without material substance, the electronically mediated worlds of telecommunications often evoke the supernatural by creating virtual beings that appear to have no physical form. By bringing this spectral world into the home, the TV set in particular can take on the appearance of a haunted apparatus. Though we can easily understand Sconce's definition of a haunted television, why do we associate the uncanny with ghosts, especially ghosts in our machines? What about the radio or the phonograph? Certainly, Sconce's notion of haunted media can apply to digital technology and the Internet, but how can we think of the ghosts of the digital age? And what is their relationship to the ghosts of analog media, the ghosts of both the immediate and far-reaching pasts? Writing on the uncanny, Hélène Cixous proposes that the uncanny "asserts a gap where one would like to be assured of unity." She expands on Sigmund Freud's notion of the unc