Eyeliner's Buy Now

A study of Eyeliner's Buy Now, a vaporwave homage to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 80s and 90s. Brimming over with fake wind-chimes, dreamy synth pads, and hyperactive slap-bass, Eyeliner's Buy Now is an ebullient homage to the kitsch sounds of the 80s and 90s. Self-released in 2015 on Bandcamp and on cassette by US label Beer on the Rug, the album has come to be regarded as a vaporwave classic. The perfect product for an anxious, hyperreal world, Buy Now poses the question: what is the appeal of the "fake" and "uncool" sounds of the past? Born in 1983, New Zealand computer-musician Luke Rowell came of age as the digital revolution upturned the music industry and helped shape the outlook of the millennial generation. Buy Now epitomizes a new kind of album for our times: DIY, all-digital, free, licensed as Creative Commons, and belonging to a "virtual" genre, an internet-based scene without geographic center. Drawing on the album's production archive and interviews with Rowell, this book argues that Buy Now offers both musical pleasure and mental survival-training for an era when sincerity and irony can appear dangerously indistinguishable.