Y'know, with vaporwave not being nearly that big of a thing these days and the new version of Ishkur's Guide -finally- coming out, I've kinda been thinking about how sometimes the simplest things can have a tremendous impact on music as a whole.

Like, vaporwave itself is obviously not very out there anymore these days, but there's no denying it's had a huge influence on music from the early to mid-'10s onwards - even the most vanilla pop music these days just sounds a lot dreamier for lack of better words than it did up to around 2012, gated reverb on is back after having basically vanished altogether for two decades and then some with the start of the '90s, and the way samples are manipulated in vaporwave - itself primarily taken from chopped and screwed - has become a production staple in many genres since.

That said, this isn't even the first time this has happened.

Flash back to Belgium in 1986, when a DJ in a local nightclub (most likely Dikke Ronny in Ancienne Belgique, Antwerp) decided to play an EBM record (Flesh, by A Split Second - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDy-RVeI-A) at 33 1/3 RPM and with the pitch control set to +8 by accident, rather than its intended speed of 45 RPM. This slowed the fast and hard-hitting beats of the original down to a crawl - the sound of it all went from speedy and fierce to slow and menacing, with a tempo of around 105 BPM and a deep bass that was mostly unheard of on this side of the Atlantic at the time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6XfRWVZvms)

People loved it, and new beat was born.

They also soon discovered that this sound gelled -very- well with the acid house craze that was coming over from Chicago via the UK at the time - naturally, as people began to produce their own records in the style they took on influences from that as well, and from their on out, after reaching a peak in popularity around 1988, the style began to slowly speed back up and diversify in the process - early hardcore and its descendants (happy hardcore, jungle/drum and bass and gabber among others) directly came from it, and it left its mark on other styles emerging at the time as well, ranging from eurodance that would dominate the European airwaves for much of the next decade to the then budding trance scene.

Together with Chicago house and early Detroit techno (both of which honestly deserve way more exposure of their histories as well) in the US, these three genres basically revolutionized electronic music in the mid-late '80s and set the stage for the absolute explosion of styles that would happen in the '90s.

With all that in mind, vaporwave (or related genres like synthwave and witch house) seem to show themselves more through their influence on already existing genres than spawning any big scenes on their own per se, so far at least - but then again, people in 1989 had no idea what was about to happen from 1991 onwards either. But between that, the diversification of people's tastes in general, and music (once again) hitting a point where making it has become more and more accessible with learning resources being widely available and software being more available than ever, I feel like we're headed towards a new explosion of stuff once again, much like what happened in the '90s and the late '00s/early '10s.

Mark my words, music in the 2020s is gonna be wild.