I'm sorry, those are bad. The first is a joyless dissection of wordy music theory, which is to production of music as Freudian literary analysis is to writing. That's all made up post-hoc by the academics, the artist never has any of those intentions in mind when they make music and it describes nobody's creative process. And by the way it's synthwave, not vaporwave.
The second immediately parroted that stupid myth that vaporwave is all some kind of cerebral criticism of capitalist consumerism. Ugh. One pretentious guy wrote a big "think piece" about that back in like 2011 and it spread like cancer despite all the founding producers in those days going on record saying they have no idea what he was talking about. It's just this soulless and cynical method of taking the complex, hard-to-pin-down emotions that music can evoke and cheapening it into some trite social commentary with a shoehorn and a can of WD-40 to make your banalities fit. So sad. And then the guy in the video goes on to make terrible imitation vaporwave to further demonstrate that he just doesn't get it.
Yeah, not sure what the "vaporwave is a criticisim of consumerism" came from. It's a thing now though, since most people started listening to the genre _after_ this theory came out, and many interpreted the music with it.
To me, it was always about the feeling of finding weird, old stuff. You listen to this music on streaming, and you don't know who made it, or where it came from, and then you just never find it again. It actually sounds better on shitty speakers, since it increases the feel of listening to a cassette you found in the dumpster
I went to a music conservatory. Yes, this does accurately describe some peoples' creative process. Even some people who make synthwave. Popular music has been heavily trending away from being outsider art for a while now. People with deeply technical competence in composition have a strong advantage over those that don't. Even Park Jae-sang/Psy went to Berklee. A lot of pop music that you listen to is _extremely_ deliberate.
While I agree with you that the capitalist consumerism criticism was just one guy's read on the genre and is complete bullshit, there are a large number of people who are not ignorant about this music who believe it as well. Even the most well known synthwave artist interviewer/blogger/podcast-host believes it (he used to be a coworker of mine). Music becomes something else completely different from what the artist intended once it leaves their hands.
