So what is Simpsonwave exactly? It's basically a genre of YouTube videos that mixes classic Simpsons moments with vaporwave tracks and sounds. The clips from The Simpsons are often heavily edited, given a codeine purple filter, a static VHS feels, and usually arranged with psychedelia in mind. These clips are overlaids with classic vaporwave music and sounds making the otherwise strange edits feel complete. The mashup of the two is both startlingly and relaxing. Those early seasons of “The Simpsons” are reeking with ‘90s nostalgia and flashes of surrealism, while the sounds of vaporwave accesses something deeper in that energy, tapping into a sort of dreamy nostalgia inside us all.
Let me back up for a moment.
In the mass graveyard of memes, the micro-genre of music known as vaporwave was all but assigned its own headstone. It revolved around Tumblr aesthetics and ‘90s pop-culture nostalgia and started around 2010 with James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Vaporwave’s critical height came in 2012, when writer Adam Harper painted the genre as the height of anti-capitalist gestures in music, a new “punk” so to speak. Since then, entire academic books have been dedicated to picking apart the nuances of vaporwave.
If you are a person who spends any significant amount of time on the internet, you should know that at this point, you don't find memes—they find you. There’s something ingrained in the menagerie of algorithms that just plops random crap (bad and good) in your feeds at all hours, only to be replaced by new stuff the following week.
The origin of Simpsonwave originated from a Vine by the user Spicster, where a clip from the Simpson's season seven episode “Bart on the Road” is set to the tune of “Resonance” by the artist HOME. Spicster inspired a movement, as an outpour of Simpsonwave videos and edits were birthed into the interwebs becoming an internet sensation/meme.
