I remember asking my dad if I could order a CD of the music on the Weather Channel. Because that wasn't possible, I used to record VHS's of the local forecasts so I could listen to the music. I never really knew why I loved the music so much considering my other favorite band at the time was probably Dream Theater. (But even then, my favorite DT song was always their "soft rock" song with a smooth jazz alto sax player Kenny G-ing it up throughout. Lots of e-piano as well. That sound, whatever it is, has always pierced my heart.)
I also remember asking my mom, who made a big deal out of hating Michael Bolton, if I could get his music without vocals for Christmas when we watched him perform on some day-time talk show. :D
Hearing Muzak in the mall (or airport) as a kid combined with the surreal yet corporate-y atmospheres made such a huge impression on me and I didn't quite know it until the past few years. That is when I started exploring and revisiting all of the aesthetics of things at the time I was doing a lot of developing as a human.
It's so satisfying and therapeutically self-expressive to contextualize these types of things. Especially in exaggerated, abstracted, and very re-contextualized ways. All audio piracy and anti-corporate values aside, I love this stuff because I feel like it's what has been playing in my head my entire life. We sample other artists and we don't credit them, but there is something really awesome to me about finding interesting things, altering them in our own creative ways, and glueing them together to make something new. If someone was doing that to my music, I would be so excited.
Additionally, I'm attracted to vaporwave because I am very much an experimental artist. I love to make weird shit. Noisy or otherwise. I have always loved sampling, remixes, covers. I even love listening to remixes and covers of songs I absolutely hate. I have always been totally fascinated with effects and processing. When I played in rock and punk bands, I had a huge pedalboard, full of modulation, reverb and delay effects. Pitch shifters, samplers, drum machines.
One of my favorite things is fucking up something that someone else made. Vaporwave gives me a brand new, emotional, artistic, and enjoyable outlet for that.
With that said, anyone who was not born in, or alive during the 80s or early 90s... I have no disrespect, and I do not devalue one's love for the community and genre. Everyone is allowed to like what they like as long as they aren't being someone they aren't. So anyone who is young replying to this need not feel judged!