Why music keeps me going
2025年9月29日
The idea to write this article came while I was listening to Rhythm Inside by Alexander Pierce. That's not the first time I feel this, I also felt that while listening to Running in the Night by FM-84 and Ollie Wride a year ago. I wanted to talk about why music keeps me going after all that's happened so far and how I got where I am.
If I'm not mistaken, the first songs in this style that I like so much were Kids by Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein (props to Kapka's remix which is really awesome too) and of course, one of the best-known synthwave songs, Resonance, by HOME. At the time, I didn't know how to explain why I loved them so much, but the sounds of the synthesizer keyboard, the beats... they made me feel something. Something good, a safe feeling. Like home.
Alongside I was listening to old songs from movies I watched as a kid. I realized much of what I watched back then had these 80s/90s tracks. For example, Herbie: Fully Loaded had in its soundtrack songs like Magic by Pilot, Jump by Van Halen and Working for the Weekend by Loverboy. Regular Show had some oldies too, like You're the Best by Joe Esposito, Holding Out For A Hero by Bonnie Tyler. Even Back From The Future, although not from my generation, was still part of my childhood. Some good ones from there are The Power Of Love and Back In Time by Huey Lewis & The News.
Then, around 2020 or 2021, I discovered a bunch of slowed + reverb music videos, usually with an anime GIF in the background. The fact that something as simple as slowing down and adding reverb effect to a song could completely change its vibe blew my mind. It's perfection in its pure form. It makes you feel like you're in another dimension, like an emotional gravity pulling you into a place where you can just be and chill. When I listened to the original versions of it, the difference was night and day. But vaporwave was definitively the peak music/aesthetics, it's no coincidence that I chose it to be part of my nickname.
Why is vaporwave so good? Because it reimagines the past as something beautiful. It takes sounds, commercials, and other references from that time (simple things that many consider as “futile” or “disposable”), combines them all into art or music, and creates the feeling of nostalgia. If the past can be recontextualized into something beautiful, maybe so can our present, or our future. It's a future that look a lot like the past, and fundamentally, all we have to predict the future... is the past.
Music helps me deal with many things. The loneliness I felt in groups I no longer belong to. The changes in life, passing phases, losing contact with loved ones. I look for news or what's happening on the internet and it's no good. Everything seems overly pessimistic, fake, sensationalist and... it makes me wonder if there's a point in having hope in a world that is going crazy or falling apart. These songs always bring that hope back. You could say it's escapism? Maybe it is. But sometimes, stepping away from the noise is the only way to stay grounded. When I hear one of these songs, when I'm going through something rough, it gives me a good feeling, that what I'm doing here, the people I spend time with, the conversations, the simple moments, is all worth it in the end. Music keeps me going forward.
And that means maybe, just maybe, everything will be alright.
And no, Vaporwave is not dead.