I'm about to post a long one here. A whole story.
Some guys have been working on a vaporwave documentary for about six years now, and apparently they left me out. I was one of the pioneers of the genre. My project turns 14 years old this year. A lot of the artists featured in the doc are people I've been "URL friends" with for over a decade, even if we don't talk much. I currently have collabs in progress with some of them.
Back in 2012/2013, I helped push the careers of several early pioneers through the /vaporwave facebook page I created when I first started this project. facebook was the platform at the time. Even years later, after the page had been inactive and I had already left facebook in 2013, it still had over 20k followers. For a small niche like this, back then, that was a lot.
I helped build the scene early on, not just with that page but also through multiple tumblrs I created. I was featured on seminal compilations. I have a video mixtape that's considered a vaporwave reference. It's on youtube with almost 1 million views and hundreds of positive comments from people all over the world.
I have an album that's considered a worldwide reference in the genre, and another project with a track that's also seen as a reference, with well over 10 million streams combined across platforms. Artists from this micro-scene who are big today, some of them in this documentary, sent me private messages years ago saying they started their projects inspired by my work. I still have those messages.
I've released my albums on vinyl. If it's around 300, hundreds of copies sold to different countries. Cassette tapes too. My vaporwave tracks have been used in Thrasher videos, shown at New York Fashion Week, and I was invited to produce a track with this project for a Japanese girl band. That album was released through a label under Victor Entertainment, one of the oldest and most influential record companies in the world, with its history dating back to 1895 and closely tied to the invention of the gramophone.
I'm on IMDb. Last year, one of my tracks was used in an American short film that won awards at multiple festivals, the first AI-generated short to premiere in IMAX.
All of this is online for anyone to verify. I'll probably organize it properly into a mini-doc or a well-written article at some point. I just haven't done that yet, and I probably should have.
I never chased anyone. People came to me. I never asked for anything.
My project has been used and cited in multiple academic theses here in Brazil. They're archived on google scholar. Just search for "VHS LOGOS", which is the first vaporwave project in Brazil, and possibly in Latin America.
I've had over 50k monthly listeners only on spotify for at least five years. I've been on spotify's official editorial Vaporwave playlist for about five years as well, and also on "Liminal". I'm not signed to any label. I don't DJ. I've never been part of collectives. Check my numbers on youtube, soundcloud and spotify. Compare them with other artists from this scene. I'm a statistical outlier here, no fake modesty. All organic numbers.
I don't have friends at pitchfork, bandcamp, billboard, big music YouTubers, or anything like that, unlike some people who used that kind of influence to get press. And that's fine.
Back in 2013, there was a small drama on the facebook page I mentioned. I criticized the dozens of projects popping up from producers coming from other genres, or total amateurs, who didn't even understand what they were doing or didn't even like the kind of music we were sampling. They were there for hype and memes. I knew this because I ran the page alone and received tons of messages every day asking for promotion. I could tell, and I didn't post them.
I also didn't post future funk, even though I'm a future funk producer myself. At the time, I was helping shape vaporwave. I was curating the sound and the aesthetic. Anyone searching for "vaporwave" on facebook landed on my page. They had to see and hear vaporwave there. That was my mindset.
So I argued with some people from that "scene". They got butthurt over nothing, insulted me, and I insulted them back. Later on, I was invited to be one of the editors for spotify's official Future Funk playlist. The person who invited me didn't know that a few people disliked me because of that old stuff. When he asked others if I should be included, he never got back to me. Funny how this world works.
The documentary is probably already finished and coming out this year. I don't know if I'm mentioned. No one ever contacted me. At this point, I don't even care if they do. I'm making my own mini-doc this year, focused on my own project. It might not be as polished, but the history will be documented for the future. Maybe then someone will finally write a Wikipedia article about me, because I'm not there either, even though others from the same niche are.
I never asked, and I'm not asking, anyone about this documentary. It's their project, and they're free to curate and tell the story however they want. But let's be honest. If I'm not in that documentary, it's incomplete and arbitrary.
So what's the problem? Am I wrong here? Is it because I'm Brazilian? Because they don't like me? Because I'm low-profile? They know me. They know my project. Not just because of everything I mentioned. Every artist in that documentary knows VHS LOGOS. Did no one suggest including me? Or did someone suggest it and it got shut down?
To be clear. I'm not the star of anything. I'm not the protagonist. I'm not better than anyone. I'm not competing. But I do have a historical place in this, don't I? If someone makes something called "the history of vaporwave" and doesn't include VHS LOGOS for even five seconds, it's not just that the story is incomplete, because plenty of names won't be included anyway. Given everything I've laid out here, what possible reason would there be to erase my role in a genre and aesthetic called VAPORWAVE, which I helped create, shape and am undeniably part of?
Am I overthinking this? Or are they straight up being 4ssholes to me?