Do any older Jow Forumssters remember this stuff? There doesn't seem to be all that much NOSTALGIA for this whole aesthetic, even though it was big for a while and had a lot of money behind it. I'm talking about the whole cultural complex of smooth jazz/soft rock, media/TV shows, and marketing campaigns focused at the sub-elite urban/suburban striver-class during that era. I'd say the aesthetic began to coalesce toward the end of the 1980's, and was on its way out by late-1995/early-1996, as pop music became more electronic and the internet bubble expanded.
It's kind of difficult to find examples to use as "platonic forms" of this stuff, since it was kind of diffuse and tended to lack an aesthetic core. It was more like a mood - slightly anesthetized, inoffensive, clean, meant to slide easily into the background so that you could focus on your work. Pic related some of the spirit.
Notice how there really IS no background in the image - there appears to be a hill or something to the right, across some indistinct waters, but those features have been smoothed out so that they become a texture rather than a landscape. The calm coloration and vague nature theme recalls the commercial form of the "new age" aesthetic popular at the time.
I feel like this whole cultural epoch was more important than we assume - this stuff was a sort of distilled, syncretized expression of a culture for people whose deracination meant that they had lost their own.
The music was similar, which is perhaps why most of it has vanished from the cultural imagination. It included songs like "House of Stone and Light," musicians like Kenny G, along with lots of landscape imagery of beaches or places other than your office:
This music tended to DALLY with other styles (like R&B or rock) without actually BEING them. Eg, the use of R&B or jazz-style horns but within the general idiom of the style:
TV media included shows like Murphy Brown, Mad About You, and a variety of long-forgotten adult-oriented drama series like "Homefront," "Thirtysomething," or "Midnight Caller."
Alexander Hughes
I think you're onto something, but I'm far too retarded to explain it. Your post is definitely jarring my memory and images from 80s/90s movies are flooding my brain. The yuppie characters were NEVER front and center. They were always supporting or antagonistic in some way, despite the aesthetic being so in.
Vaporwave is kind of a throwback to that era and aesthetic. Maybe the whole yuppie thing was white people wanting something like the 1950s again. A last resistance against the explosion of niggers in media. Obviously it got shut down in favor of hip hop and grunge.
Xavier Peterson
>The urban yuppie aesthetic of the late-80's to mid-90's isn't discussed much >There doesn't seem to be all that much NOSTALGIA for this whole aesthetic
This is literally what vaporvawe is. It has been exceptionally popular since 2012.
Are you a Boomer that doesn't know what's going on?
Logan Garcia
Vaporwave is only popular on our corners of the Internet. Ask the average person and they have no clue what it is and I guarantee have never heard a single track. I have normie peers my age who I know wouldn't know about it.
David Baker
This is a really interesting post. My mind went back to “My Two Dads” and that movie “Beethoven”. I also thought about Lydia’s parents from “Beetlejuice”. The whole Yuppie thing was huge for about 20 years then for some reason it just vanished. Where did it come from?
I love this stuff. I'm getting older and starting to miss my youth more and more. It feels like another world. So much hope for the future. Everyone today is so disconnected from each other, it feels artificial.
The people protesting the central park 5 are all white and largely female. How many white women do you think would protest rapist niggers these days?
All anyone remembers about this case is how niggers dindu nuffin and are eternal good boys. Images of black power fists and civil rights activists walking in arm and arm like MLK.
This way of life culminated in Frasier and died with the show when it ended.
Oliver Diaz
The vaporware connection is interesting, though it kind of feels like most vaporware is "referencing" 80's synth music. The 1987-1995 or so "yuppie style" wasn't quite so focused on synth; it had a lot of "jazz" elements combined with trendy pop production components like drum machines:
I was a very young kid back then, so maybe I'm fascinated by this period because it was taking place when I was born, and my very earliest memories are full of this stuff, especially the music playing from mom's radio in the car. But looking back as an adult, with what I know now, I can kind of see the marketing and the mass-media "cultural shaping" that must have been behind it, too.
"Yuppie" was a stereotype and a slur, but it referred to a relatively large class of people, not all of whom considered themselves "yuppies" - white-collar workers in urban areas (including those who lived in the suburbs) in their 20's and 30's at the time. This whole "tranche" of media was aimed right at them, and it was fairly popular.
Mason Cooper
I don't remember people using the word yuppie in the 80s. Graduated in 84. They used the word Preppie. Anyway no shoulderpads in women's suits = not 80's. ALL women wore shoulder pads in their suits. Having said that I would love for the aesthetic to come back. We really dressed up and worried about our hair in the 1970's and ESPECIALLY so in the 1980.s
Because the writers at the time were hippies and they clashed with the yuppies. Think Alex Keaton vs his parents from family ties. This is why yuppies were looked down on in media. They were the gen z of their time in a way. They didnt want the idealistic bullshit their parents fell for they wanted tangible success.
Mason Lee
Ah this is a better picture of smoking jackets. We wore them in public with Bolos
I had just moved to a town of 111 people with 120 in the High School and MTV just went national a year or so before so the kid copied every thing they had seen more so than my JHS with 1000 kids
Easton Rogers
>Obviously it got shut down in favor of hip hop and grunge.
WHY DOESNT NOONE MENTION THE RAMPANT FAGGOTRY OF THE 80S!!!????
Because it was everything liberals hated. Re-watch american psycho, they live and eyes wide shut (the scene with the jocks calling tommy a faggot for his style)
STRAIGHT WHITE faggotry and coke. Don't you see how the yuppie style is exclusively middle class? Now tell me which part of society has been targeted and eradicated the most over the past 30 years. Exactly.
Jayden Smith
>STRAIGHT WHITE faggotry and coke. Don't you see how the yuppie style is exclusively middle class?
if someone wants to destroy you, you dont make yourself more worthy of destruction, dont you? I do think that romanticism of the 80s was worthy of preserving.
Matthew Brown
Whoops sorry i forgot who I'm talking to here. Your country was literally made up 20 years ago.
Samuel Hall
Boring is a not a term I would use for the 80s. Since 2000ish. yeah totally 100% bored off my nuts. 70s and 80s, NEVER bored ever. it carried into the late 90s in the right crowds.
Eli Morales
kind of but we had a strong postpunk scene in the 80s so Im hip with the talk. anyway, yuppism is SWIPPLEism of the 80s, represents everything what is wrong with white people.
This was literally the purpose of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, written by Liberal FAGGOT Brett Easton Ellis. It’s propaganda that paints successful white upper-middle class as cartoonishly evil and 80’s as some time of social malaise, even though nothing could be further from the truth.
Caleb Hill
Why can't I get a girl like that?
Jayden Price
>It’s propaganda that paints successful white upper-middle class as cartoonishly evil and 80’s as some time of social malaise
80s were a prosperious era for whitey, but yuppie urbanites created a lot of problems.
Eli Bailey
I hate anything urban related. Cities are the hotbed of degeneracy
Jackson Edwards
In the late 90's, when the economy was booming there was a very brief resurgence. Probably culminated with American Psycho (the movie). But people thought James Spader's look in the 80's was breddy cool and were coveting shiny shit again after the Grunge years and recession.
Brayden Morris
>Because the writers at the time were hippies and they clashed with the yuppies.
you opened a can of worms. on one hand yuppies are implicit and hippies are SJWs, but on another, yuppies are coke snorting and homos and hippies are sustainable.
transfuturist VS anarchoprimitivist? which way huite man?
Not really true - Yuppies were often the villain (especially as you moved into the 90's - the most blaringly obvious example being Reality Bites - a film that angered boomer Roger Ebert because it featured a girl choosing a dirty, unemployed, cynical Gen X grunge asshole over the hardworking, charming yuppie) but during the ACTUAL Yuppie era, we had films like The Secret Of My Success, featuring Michael J Fox basically playing an update of his Family Ties character - a young midwestern boy hustling hard in NYC to make it rich on Wall Street.
Of course, the collapse and recession of the late 80's and early 90's effectively killed that off and was replaced by Grunge and weirdness until the mid 90's turn around and economic boom + birth of the internet for normies.
Yup. Family Ties (the show Fox made his name on) featured a family of boomers who were former hippies who became suburban liberals, and their son was a young Reagan obsessed wannabe yuppie.
>THAT'S NOT A NAME, THAT'S A MAJOR ELECTRICAL APPLIANCE pretty in Pink. ducky right ? Man I loved all those films and that time. Miss it so much. I used to write about missing that time in 1997-1999 on the web.
Joseph Reyes
>huge for about 20 years then for some reason it just vanished working doesn't pay off when socialism reigns, so why should anybody post 2000 be a yuppie
Jason Phillips
The 80's gave the world one of the greates novels ever written in the English language, too. Posting 80's Japanese cover for maximum a e s t h e t i c
>former hippies who became suburban liberals, and their son was a young Reagan obsessed wannabe yuppie.
Wuh! Its hard to tell sometimes who is the good guy honestly...todays leftists are SWIPPLE types which are urban liberals that want to be hippies and rightists are suburban selfsustaining that hate hippies...I simply hate neoyuppies today and the whore corporate crap culture, I side with hippies here...for now, Idk who to hate faggotry is indeed implicit, but its still gay.
I think the whole aesthetic actually revolves around a pointed rejection of integrity or history. It's a form to take on after sloughing off your real past and personality.
Bad yuppie music is meant to be palatable, without being challenging or divisive. It's like a story you can tell around a camp fire of strangers.
The clothing and graphic design aesthetic are generally centered around taking the natural form and abstracting it.
The counter to this movement was a gritty realism and soulfulness. Race and identity is nullified or rejected in yuppism.
Brody Clark
>Think Alex Keaton vs his parents from Family Ties
Hmm. Yes, it was very "utopian," in the original sense of a utopia as no place at all. A blank canvas filled with composite "identities" run past focus groups and tested by marketing teams before being "rolled out."
But one theme that runs throughout all this stuff is a desire for calm - hence, all the muted colors, the computer-generated blues and the extensive use of black-and-white. This style was meant to be appropriate for use as a background element. Art as an accessory.
Charles Roberts
The reason you might like the 80's aesthetic was because the more high end stuff was very 1930s,1920's influenced with that bit of new wave edge. It was an interesting and elegant look when done right. Now everyone looks like fucking bums. Whoever made it okay to go out in public in pajama bottoms and ratty t-shirts and slippers should shot in the asshole.
Ethan Peterson
I would venture that the mixture of stimulants and tranquilizers inform that aesthetic as well. Valium, Halcyon, Cocain, and amphetamines.
I can see a person who really leans into their work getting overamped all week and then dropping a couple valium and sliding into a soft jazz coma to recover.
I spent the early 90s in this dynamic
Michael Wilson
>Now everyone looks like fucking bums
This. The 80’s look so appealing because the styles radiate deliberation, coordination and make you feel like the person actually cares how he or she looks. These days everyone looks like fucking garbage, even in high end fashions, it’s the lazy Millenial attitude – “haha maaaaan I’m so above it all, actually I’m just a fucking slob but I’ll pretend this was a conscious decision”. Everyone dressed in garbage, women without makeup – Very very disrespectful.
Mason Mitchell
I feel like the concept of yuppie may have been that generation's version of shitting on white people. It would be the same attitude displayed towards white gentrification.
Isaiah Butler
From what I can find, the very early 90's were the commercial peak of "soft jazz," with most urban markets hosting at least one soft jazz radio station on the FM bands. And this showed up a lot in mainstream pop, with songs like Richard Marx's "Keep Coming Back." It's interesting to me how quickly that style simply vanished, though - Keep Coming Back was a hit in 1991, but even 5 years later, I can't imagine a song like that performing very well.
Yah. I remember, yah. I've made a note of it in my Filofax. It says >stop being so fucking old you very old cunt I've got a thing for this mini-mouse jewess Jane Wiedlin. In the video she plays an electric guitar bigger than she is and snogs a real dolphin. This was evidently before music production got bought up by the same creeps that control all media because people like this were mediocre back then. 100x better than the crap sandwich served today. m.youtube.com/watch?v=gAsLDf-tYlg
St. Elmo's Fire is a great movie but I find it very depressing. It has a certain air about it. I suggest watching it. I don't know how to explain it but certain aspects of the lifestyle seem very desirable. The Big Chill is very good as well.
Carter Jackson
Without the silly shoulders, this is pretty cool
Kevin Perez
Sam Fox I remember had boobs everywhere. She's a type. Short, hugely boobed. Reminds me of my sister little (Susy is prettier) I pregged my sister, for real no joke. We are a good looking family. Couldn't resist. (Step sister, I don't play banjo). m.youtube.com/watch?v=xjzsDZt71u0
Or >*little sister Can't recall what I meant. Thinking about boobs.
Ryan Ortiz
Because nobody cares. If nobody acknowledges your existence in public. Everyone is some random stranger so it doesn't matter what you do. I can't feel shame in such an anonymous environment. Real life has become the internet.
Also I'll be collectively judged by the masses either way. If it's the end of the special snowflake it means my individual actions don't matter if I'm judged negatively by the collective anyways.
Kayden Gutierrez
In the 80's if you dressed 70's you were attacked physically, that sort of thing had been going on for decades - in the mid nineties with rave culture that ended. It was a dry run social control experiment. Also since then the same turds that produce all media have bought up music production. Might just be I know a guy who has connections to the producers of the biggest bands back then. Might be. Or I might be full of shit. Either way it's all ultimately owned by finance now like everything else in the media. It's not random cash behind bands any more. Nothing harmful to 'them' will ever be allowed to come from it. Anything that helps 'them' and the NWO plan will be promoted. These days people can be made to do anything. Skinny jeans, ear/nose plugs and jester shoes prove it. Was going to link My Way by Sid Vicious but that was 70's I think. This was more 80's vibe m.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1NrQYXjLU
Well the reason their is no nostalgia for this corporatised, consumerist, pyramid scheme or “affiliate marketer” era is because it is shit. The 80s has a lot of angst and edge, it was almost as if people were on the verge of awakening politically with the rise of the populist against the communist infiltration of our institutions in the 70s, this is the era that A E S T H E T I C is emblematic off. There was armed conflict all over the world, bank robberies, and serial killers but somehow things remained wholesome, fun, naughty and sexy. This is why the early to mid 80s are where it’s at, it is the edge, angst and existentialism that you can see if films like repo men, they live, breakfast club and even films like back the future and Star Wars.
