Acid nostalgia: the Barberbeats, art for art's sake, and the copy for the copy's sake

Abstract

This article presents the dubious nature of the Barberbeats movement, an electronic music subgenre of the vaporwave movement. Firstly, we seek to determine the purpose of Barberbeats to establish the genre's differences from electronic music and vaporwave. We consider two levels of discussion of the style: as a simulacrum or copy of the original movement and its anesthetic aspect, given the object's indiscernibility compared to other musical genres such as downtempo and lounge music. Concepts such as technical reproducibility, aura, background music, and the de-interiorization of aesthetic objects (according to Benjamin, Adorno, and Han) are relevant to mapping the object of this analysis. As a development of the investigation, we postulate the threshold condition of the Barberbeats and the difficulty in determining precisely whether its aesthetic proposal constitutes a genre of its own derived from vaporwave or whether it is feasible to assume, according to Adorno, that it is music out of place.