Seapunk je novi muzičko-stilsko-dizajnersko-modni mikrožanr i internetski viralni fenomen. Vizualni dio (cyberpunk '90-ih filtriran utopijskom yin-yang gif-estetikom), važniji je od same glazbe, koja pak preferira sve "akvamarinske" teme, od oceana, dupina, plaža do piramida, snova te žarkih boja i zapravo je slična vaporwaveu (o kojem smo govorili u ovom postu).
Neki tvrde da je seapunk prvi muzički podžanr stvoren na internetu i za internet, svojevrsna šala unutar šale.
Glavno izvorište zaraze je Coral Records Internazionale.
Zombelle is apparently the face of seapunk.
The people look like seapunks.
The music sounds like crappy techno bleep bloop glitch everything-core.
One of the earliest releases that specifically was classified as seapunk was Zombelle and Myrrh Ka Ba’s five song EP “Tropicult,” (shown below) , made available to download for free on July 26th, 2011. That October, Coral Records held the first Seapunk showcase in Brooklyn, coinciding with that year’s College Music Journal Festival, featuring Lil Internet and five other DJs and performers.
Some of the earliest attention to the trend was a September 2011 post on Mishka NYC’s blog. The next month, digital marketing consultant Luna Vega posted an in-depth look at the styles and trends involved in the scene. One of the earliest press mentions of Seapunk occurred in January 2012 with a print aritcle in the British culture magazine _Dazed & Confused and featured on news websites San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Chicago Reader and SSG Music. That February, a seapunk show featuring performances by Zombelle and Starscream was reviewed by the Village Voice. Three weeks later, seapunk was featured in the Fashion and Style section of the New York Times, where it was billed “a web joke with music.” This led to response articles on Hipster Runoff, Stereogum and Vice’s music blog Noisey, where the history of the term and scene were laid out via screenshots of tweets and Facebook posts.
Notable Videos
Rihanna Controversy
On November 10th, 2012, singer Rihanna used a seapunk-inspired background during her musical performance of “Diamonds” on Saturday Night Live (shown below, left). Her out of the ordinary performance was featured on Mashable, the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter and Popcrush. However, Tumblr and Twitter users spoke out against the performance, comparing the backgrounds to the art and animation work of Jerome LOL).In the first four days following the performance, the backlash from the sea punk community was reported on by internet culture and music blogs including Buzzfeed, Uproxx, The FW, the Atlantic, the Examiner, Salacious Sound, Flavorwire, Spin and the Daily Dot. On November 13th, a single topic Tumblr titled No Seapunk Rihanna Copyright launched, compiling GIFs, photoshopped images and edited videos of the perfomance, as well as of rap artist Azealia Banks who was accused of co-opting sea punk musical styles in her June 2012 song “Aquababe.” Nick Briz created a green screen version of the performance, encouraging artists to create their own backgrounds which he collected on a personal homepage.
Despite the backlash, on November 11th, 2012, Azealia Banks released the video for the song “Atlantis” which was also sea punk inspired.
Fans collect on Tumblr with posts tagged “#seapunk” and “#sea punk” As of November 2012, a Facebook fan page for Seapunk, created in September 2011, has more than 3300 likes. In March 2012, Sea Punk Gang launched as an online collective to share new seapunk music, posting an exclusive mixtape every month. Their Facebook fan page has 1670 likes as of November 2012.
knowyourmeme.com
The week seapunk broke
A fast-evolving Internet-born dance-music microscene puts down roots in Chicago
By Miles Raymer
Shan "Zombelle" Beaste and Albert "Ultrademon" Redwine
At the end of December I noticed an uptick in online chatter—especially in niche networks within Twitter and Tumblr where up-to-the-second knowledge of microtrends in dance-music culture is generally assumed—regarding something called "seapunk."
The term refers in part to a style of electronic music that
incorporates bits of 90s house and techno, the past 15 years or so of
pop and R&B, and the latest in southern trap rap—all overlaid with a
twinkly, narcotic energy that recalls new-age music and
chopped-and-screwed hip-hop mix tapes in roughly equal measure. In a
broader sense it's an aesthetic-slash-philosophy built around ocean
imagery, the color turquoise, the rave-era ideals of "peace, love,
unity, and respect" (PLUR), and a cyber-utopian outlook that updates
that distinctly 90s concept for the era of the animated GIF.
If there's a geographical center to the exploding seapunk scene, it's
probably Chicago. In late December—about when I noticed that surge in
chatter—its main architects, Albert Redwine and Shan Beaste, moved here from LA, where they'd started the seapunk ball rolling this summer. Redwine produces music under the name Fire for Effect and DJs as Ultrademon, and Beaste records and performs under the name Zombelle; both previously lived in Kansas City, where Redwine worked with electro-disco weirdos Ssion. This fall he launched Coral Records Internazionale,
which is already seapunk's center of gravity despite having only four
releases, all download-only or limited-edition CD-Rs. He's planning a
vinyl release of his own material in the spring.
There have been seapunk parties in Minneapolis and Los Angeles as well as Chicago (the first was December 29 at Berlin), but the scene's real home is on the Internet—specifically Tumblr. A combination social network and microblogging platform, Tumblr has an interface that encourages not only the creation of original content but also the reposting (with or without comment) of other users' material; this has helped make it a fertile breeding ground for online memes as well as a booming success with media-saturated users, especially younger ones.
The definition of seapunk "depends on where you're at, honestly," says Beaste—meaning online or off. As she puts it, "It depends on if you're URL or if you're IRL. . . . Your mentality based off of that answer alone will determine whether or not you're gonna be able to understand it."
Most of the people who do understand it are young and constantly Internet connected, like Beaste and Redwine—who carry on conversations via their Twitter feeds with the two roommates who share their Logan Square apartment, even when all four are home. Entire virtual communities on Tumblr are awash in signs of seapunk allegiance: turquoise color schemes, emoji (Japanese emoticons), graphics heavy with Omni magazine-style ersatz chrome a la the Netscape-era Internet, SoundCloud streams of Ultrademon DJ sets.
The raid that Odd Future pulled on pop culture, launched from Tumblr, is proof that a very small number of people can instigate a wide-reaching aesthetic-social phenomenon in a hurry without money or assistance from traditional culture-biz institutions—the labels and mainstream media outlets that flocked to the group were latecomers to a party that was well underway by November 2010, the month of OF's breakthrough profile in the New York Times. Tumblr is the quickest and most efficient meme amplifier yet, and makes it possible to watch a catchy concept propagate across communities in real time.
That fact that myriad musical microgenres exist almost solely on the Internet is old news. For me what makes seapunk more interesting than the rest is that it reflects how communities function on Tumblr and in similar spaces. IRL it wouldn't just be difficult to pull together a community of people with a shared interest in techno-utopian philosophies, turquoise hair dye, and rap beats from songs about dealing cocaine—it'd be almost impossible to create the circumstances under which those elements would've cohered into a package. But in a churning remix engine like Tumblr, bizarre collisions like that happen all the time.
Redwine admits that the seapunk concept came about through the largely random accumulation of ideas. "Originally the term came from a friend of ours on Twitter," he says. "Well, a friend of ours IRL too, but on Twitter he hashtagged '#seapunk' because he had this dream about a leather punk jacket that had barnacles on it. It kind of evolved from there, but all of us were really attached to this, like, digital kind of paradise, ocean-themed aesthetic, and we're making music and art based off of it, and seapunk just was a name and a way to unify everybody."
Seapunk is still a rather modest phenomenon—Beaste and Redwine each have fewer than 1,000 followers on Twitter, and some of the biggest coverage the scene has received was in September on the blog of NYC fashion line Mishka. But there are a number of indications that it's creeping toward a larger audience. Cool hunters have been casing seapunk for months, possibly drawn in by Beaste and Redwine's roommate Molly Soda, an Internet personality with an outsize influence on an audience of media-hungry youth; Los Angeles trend-forecasting firm Trend Era has been including seapunk in its client presentations since November. Beaste also suspects that Lady Gaga has been stealing style ideas from her, which isn't as far-fetched as it sounds given the underground inspirations of many of Gaga's sartorial stunts. (Gaga did dye her hair turquoise recently.)
Redwine says that one of his career goals is to produce beats for Soulja Boy—he's been bugging Soulja Boy about it on Twitter—but it remains to be seen how much effect seapunk will have on mainstream pop. It could end up zero, but it's worth noting that two years ago chillwave was a tiny, obscure sub-subgenre named after a snarky Internet joke at the music's expense—and now a rising number of major pop albums bear its influence.
Of course the mainstream pop-culture infrastructure may not know what to do with seapunk, or with the vast number of similar microscenes willing themselves into existence at this very moment. Not only are they ridiculously idiosyncratic—imagine an A&R guy trying to explain seapunk to an executive who doesn't know how to put music on his iPod—but they also evolve at a blinding rate. An audience constantly looking for a next big thing can always find a next big thing. By signing Odd Future and Kreayshawn to big contracts, Sony and Columbia have shackled themselves to fenceposts while their audiences are sprinting away.
Way before MTV started showing videos around the clock in the early 1980s music was primarily an aural medium. There was always the visual element of magazines, posters, and sparse television programs, but for the most part unless you attended a concert the only visual element you had of your favorite band was their album cover and if you were lucky maybe a few page spread in Rolling Stone. MTV completely changed this concept and from there on the visual aspect became just as or even more important then what the music sounds like. In the new web era of unlimited bandwidth and non-stop visuals from YouTube, Tumblr, and every other media platform (twit pics I’m lookin’ at you buddy) music has become just as visual as movies or television. So much so that there’s been micro-genres sprouting up where the visual element is almost more concrete and substantial then an actual unified musical aesthetic.
The extremely recent Tumblr incubated micro-genre of Seapunk is definitely the best example of this concept. Witch House, the micro-famous / micro-infamous genre that had some critical fanfare in 2010 has a real definitive visual aesthetic that accompanies the sound, but the sound itself is also really specific and pretty easy to nail down. Seapunk honestly seems like the first musical sub-genre that’s invented for and by the Internet where the visual element is more concrete then the sound itself.
Seapunk is kind of an inside joke of a joke which isn’t too surprising considering it’s fiber optic origins. Web celebrity and all around digital hooligan Lil Internet said he came up with the term from a dream he had and from then on, as most Internet concepts seem to do, it became viral in a matter of months. Seapunk can be loosely described as the 90s early Internet cyberpunk culture filtered through a utopian glossy gif aesthetic of dolphins, yin yangs, CGI rendered dreamscapes, and everything aquamarine you could possibly cram into an animated gif. It’s kind of like if that Kevin Costner box office bomb Waterworld was shot on the Internet with a 4D camera and then turned into a elaborate Tumblr theme.
Actually the visual element is easier to describe then the musical aesthetic if that even seems possible. Part of that is due to the extremely short time span it’s been around for. Only a handful of artists are producing music under the Seapunk umbrella, and out of those there’s only been a handful of label releases besides for the abundance of web only Seapunk mixes, which is definitely a parallel to the witch house movement. The first official release was the Coral Records compilation Seapunk Volume 1. There’s definitely a similarity in the sound across the whole compilation, but more then anything it’s a genre where the visual element is a much more concrete tangible concept.
The sound on the compilation spans everything from old school jungle, rave, and breakbeats you might have found in London in 1995. There’s also some aspects of the lo-fi chillwave sound, but with an overall aquatic kind of shimmery vibe. If you sat down and listened to the whole compilation you could probably pick out 15 – 20 genre elements which are then rearranged and put back together in a familiar but decidedly off kilter fashion. As with so much other new web culture, Seapunk takes the last 20 or 30 years of electronic music history and even visuals and completely Cuisnarts them into an entirely new sound and visual aesthetic.
That’s one of the most interesting aspects of Seapunk which is definitely become a common theme for new web culture in general. It’s a musical genre that’s based more on the visual then actually how it sounds, which is something you can really only pull off on the Internet. It’s like when a new brand launches or an esteemed company releases a new product. Before you even use it or have a chance to buy it you’re introduced to it through the visual element; the type of the package, the logo, the actors in the commercial representative of the potential audience’s demographic. Before you actually make a purchase the visual element is the first thing that gets you to the store to even contemplate buying it.
That’s kind of what Seapunk has done. In the last few months there’s been so many Seapunk Tumblrs popping up, Seapunk photos where everyone’s hair is turquoise, Ecco the Dolphin screen captures, and enough yin yang animated gifs to fill an aquarium. Before you even have a chance to listen to the music you’re already so familiar with how the music looks that it changes and affects your perception of how the music sounds.
That’s one of the concepts the new web culture has accomplished that’s extremely hard to pull off in other mediums. It’s the visual abstraction of the genre that personifies the music, instead of people’s perception of it being defined by it how it sounds. It literally sounds like how it looks, but unless you’re online or familiar with new web culture, that concept is extremely confusing. That’s what the Internet has accomplished over time almost by accident. No matter what creative endeavor someone is working with, the Internet has the capability of merging all the preexisting mediums into an entirely new blurry amalgam that’s made from the parts of the old model but looks nothing like the history it was conceived from. Seapunk may be only the beginning of a cultural evolution where all of our senses could potentially be engaged in a medium instead of the conventional aspects we’re used to. In a few years people might be talking about how a new song tastes or smells instead of how it sounds, and considering what’s happening now, that really doesn’t seem too surprising.
Note: We want to credit the seapunk graphics and images to artist Kevin Heckart who is the main artist behind the Seapunk aesthetic. We’re sorry that we didn’t give credit earlier to Kevin Heckart for his artwork. Thanks. - /lunavega.net
Coral Records and the #Seapunk Movement
Coral Records is a brand new record label started by Kansas City bred, Los Angeles based, music producer Fire For Effect, who is probably best known for his work with the boundary smashing queer-art performance group, Ssion. The label was started to act as means to expose the world to the burgeoning music genre, lifestyle, and fashion house of “#seapunk.” Supposedly coined by the producer, (and personal favorite twitter personality) Lil Internet, in a dream, #Seapunk is a mostly internet based phenomenon, birthed out of the tumbler and twitter universes as a means to describe a lifestyle aesthetic that is all things oceanic and of the sea.
“The beach to me symbolizes where we came from, since i think we are aqueous mammals. We are more similar to dolphins and whales than apes in my opinion” says Fire For Effect. He goes on to muse, “I imagine a place where stars are bright, galaxies are visible in the night sky on a full moon where all my friends and loved ones are raving for eternity, that is the essence of the beach to me” In contrast to this poetic midnight beach rave, Fire For Effect is also environmentally conscious of the state of our Earth and of its future as we approach massive global shifting in 2012. And it is true, that today and in our short term future our attentions will surely be put on the oceans of the world as both temperatures and water levels rise threatening our aquatic friends and our worlds major cities.
Fire For Effect
Zombelle
Teams
To coincide with the strong conceptual element behind the liquid sounds sampled throughout certain key #seapunk tracks, there is a fully realized visual styling to those who identify with the lifestyle. Name checking the old television show “seaquest dsv“, the movie “Water World” (duh), the Sega Genesis video game “Ecco the Dolphin” and various anime’s like “Ponyo“, #seapunk is a sort of cyber punk meets futuristic Mad-Max on water attitude meant for those who can surf the gnarliest swells of the world wide wave. #Seapunks can be spotted around in bright outfits of green, purple, ultra violet, and sea foam blue, wearing water socks, sporting shell necklaces, hawaiian floral print shirts, and the trade mark look of a true seapunk, dyed aquamarine hair. “definitely a mainstay is my acid washed jacket, which has kept me warm in many a cold warehouse rave” muses Fire For Effect.
Coral Records just put out their first release (Splash001) via their Bandcamp page. The release features some incredible production work from the likes off kilter future steppers, Teams, and Le1f, among others, and comes highly recommended. For just starting out, Coral are keeping themselves very busy, releasing a slew of EP’s and LP’s and are hoping to be pressing vinyl by December. Some of the upcoming releases are by fellow seapunkers Zombelle, Slava, and many more. UP THE #SEAPUNKS! - mishkanyc.com/
Little Mermaid Goes Punk
Seapunk, a Web Joke With Music, Has Its Moment
By BEN DETRICK
“SHOUT out to Tumblr,” said Zombelle, a blue-haired singer who performed last weekend at an unnamed warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The concert was billed as the city’s first Seapunk Alien Disco Indie Rave, but only a handful of the 20-somethings clutching cans of Budweiser seemed to know precisely what “seapunk” even meant.
A look around the graffiti-lashed venue offered clues: T-shirts
plastered with pixilated sharks, raised neon glow-sticks, several mops
of hair dyed blue and green.
Sprouting from the digital petri dish of social networking, seapunk is a
whimsical style that mashes together cartoonish aquatic themes, rave
culture and a nostalgia for ’90s Internet imagery. The iconography,
which exists almost entirely online, includes clip art of dolphins
jumping through pyramids, aquamarine-haired mermaids with SpongeBob
T-shirts, and psychedelic orbs flying over computer-generated waves.
Like LOLcats and pedobear, it is an inside Web joke that feeds off its own ridiculousness.
“Micro-genres dovetail perfectly with online media’s thirst for
novelty,” said Mark Richardson, an editor at Pitchfork, a music Web
site. “I also think there’s an overriding awareness of the absurdity
involved that is part of the appeal.”
Started online last year by a tiny sect of social media geeks, seapunk
gathered momentum as it echoed on Twitter, Facebook and especially
Tumblr. It has occasionally surfaced, in the real world, with
seapunk-themed parties and bands, but the real joy remains in tagging
and sharing the trippy nautical images.
According to a D.J. in Brooklyn who goes by the Twitter handle Lil Internet,
he coined the term “seapunk” last June after having a surreal dream,
which he tweeted about: “Seapunk leather jacket with barnacles where the
studs used to be.” His friends added a hashtag to “seapunk,” and a
trend was born, like Aphrodite from the foam.
“The surprising thing is that it really was cohesive,” Lil Internet said
by iChat; he declined to use his legal name, saying he is now known
solely by his Twitter handle. He also described seapunk’s vibe as
“Venice Beach Acid Rave 1995,” and cited surf-wear logos, yin-yang
symbols and round holographic sunglasses as part of its look.
Seapunk has also given rise to a tiny music sub-genre, although the
“punk” element would not be recognized by Joey Ramone. The spacey
electronic dance music borrows from Witch House, Chiptune, Drum &
Bass and southern rap. Some tracks remix songs from R&B acts like
Beyoncé and Aaliyah.
Despite their subculture status, seapunkers insist that their
sensibility has been appropriated by the mainstream, or at least leeched
by celebrity stylists. There’s no concrete evidence of piracy, but pop
culture has indeed seen recent splashes of aquamarine: Nicki Minaj
painted her skin blue for a Vogue shoot; Katy Perry wore a turquoise
bob; a Google Image search of “seapunk” pulls up a photo of Lady Gaga
with a neon blue wig.
“No one will actually credit it to us,” said Zombelle, who lives in
Chicago and said her offstage name is Shan Beaste. “There are people who
work for Lady Gaga that are in my circle of friends.”
Azealia Banks, a rapper from Harlem, is the rare notable who has
publicly praised seapunk: she wore green hair, name-checked the genre on
Twitter and has described herself as a mermaid. But Ms. Beaste dissed
Ms. Banks, too. “Mermaids are vicious harpies who lure sailors to their
death,” she said, scorn cresting in her voice.
As with any online trend, seapunk is probably fleeting. Chino Amobi, an
artist from Richmond, Va., who makes electronic music under the name
Diamond Black Hearted Boy, has already shifted from seapunk to
slimepunk.
“It’s the toxic waste of 2012,” he said. On March 9, Mr. Amobi will hold
a slimepunk rave in Brooklyn during the Arts Not Fair. “It’s going to
be the saddest rave you’ve ever been to.”
New York Times profiles seapunk genre. Has #seapunk arrived or is it just a dumb Tumblr hashtag?
By Carles
I am not sure if seapunk is a genre of music, a web trend, a cultural
trend, or just some #hashtag that Tumblr tweens use to describe a new
aesthetic of the way ppl look when they are trying 2 hard 2 be/look alt.
The New York Times 'blogged' about some seapunk show by a seapunk
buzzband named Zombelle, covering it like it is a relevant enough trend
to try to get 'the SEO jump' on. Seapunk apparently sounds like techno
bleep bloop speed glitch hip hop 90s r & b chillwave indie pop core
intelligent techno house with allusions to _________. I think seapunk's
gimmick is just all about being able to say that it is influenced by
'everything' [on the internet], thereby making it coverable on the
internet.
Here's what seapunk buzzband Zombelle sounds like in case u wanted 2 know what seapunk was all abt
“SHOUT out to Tumblr,” said Zombelle, a blue-haired singer who performed last weekend at an unnamed warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The concert was billed as the city’s first Seapunk Alien Disco Indie Rave, but only a handful of the 20-somethings clutching cans of Budweiser seemed to know precisely what “seapunk” even meant.Have u evr shouted out Tumblr? Do yall know if seapunks pray 2 David Karp?
Look at these effing seapunks.
Is seapunk the nu- new nu-rave rave? I wanna go 2 a place with sillie t-shirts and glowsticks and ppl with stupid hair. <3 p="p">
A look around the graffiti-lashed venue offered clues: T-shirts plastered with pixilated sharks, raised neon glow-sticks, several mops of hair dyed blue and green.Do u evr wonder if ur trapped on 'the digital petri dish of social networking'?
Sprouting from the digital petri dish of social networking, seapunk is a whimsical style that mashes together cartoonish aquatic themes, rave culture and a nostalgia for ’90s Internet imagery. The iconography, which exists almost entirely online, includes clip art of dolphins jumping through pyramids, aquamarine-haired mermaids with SpongeBob T-shirts, and psychedelic orbs flying over computer-generated waves.
In the modern era of buzz, all u have 2 do is add a hashtag 2 something 2 make it a relevant, self-aware trend that innovative young ppl can talk abt like it 'matters.'
Started online last year by a tiny sect of social media geeks, seapunk gathered momentum as it echoed on Twitter, Facebook and especially Tumblr. It has occasionally surfaced, in the real world, with seapunk-themed parties and bands, but the real joy remains in tagging and sharing the trippy nautical images.Here is some broad from the seapunk buzzband Zombelle. Does Shan Beaste look 'mad hot'?
According to a D.J. in Brooklyn who goes by the Twitter handle Lil Internet, he coined the term “seapunk” last June after having a surreal dream, which he tweeted about: “Seapunk leather jacket with barnacles where the studs used to be.” His friends added a hashtag to “seapunk,” and a trend was born, like Aphrodite from the foam.
“The surprising thing is that it really was cohesive,” Lil Internet said by iChat; he declined to use his legal name, saying he is now known solely by his Twitter handle. He also described seapunk’s vibe as “Venice Beach Acid Rave 1995,” and cited surf-wear logos, yin-yang symbols and round holographic sunglasses as part of its look.
s000 many mnstrm artists are STEALING the authentic seapunk aesthetic.
Despite their subculture status, seapunkers insist that their sensibility has been appropriated by the mainstream, or at least leeched by celebrity stylists. There’s no concrete evidence of piracy, but pop culture has indeed seen recent splashes of aquamarine: Nicki Minaj painted her skin blue for a Vogue shoot; Katy Perry wore a turquoise bob; a Google Image search of “seapunk” pulls up a photo of Lady Gaga with a neon blue wig.Seapunk = alt = mnstrm.
“No one will actually credit it to us,” said Zombelle, who lives in Chicago and said her offstage name is Shan Beaste. “There are people who work for Lady Gaga that are in my circle of friends.”
Azealia Banks, a rapper from Harlem, is the rare notable who has publicly praised seapunk: she wore green hair, name-checked the genre on Twitter and has described herself as a mermaid. But Ms. Beaste dissed Ms. Banks, too. “Mermaids are vicious harpies who lure sailors to their death,” she said, scorn cresting in her voice.
BTW. This is what seapunk looks like.
Do u live 4 seapunk?
Is seapunk ripping off another genre/aesthetic?
Do u <3 br="br" h8="h8" microtrends="microtrends" or="or"> Do u vibe 2 seapunks, or are they 'completely full of shit'?
Is seapunk a musical genre, fashion aesthetic, or just a lifestyle brand created by influential marketing firms?
Should MTNDEW/Converse sponsor the next microtrend genre?
Can seapunk replace chillwave as an 'internet fueled' microtrend, or would it actually require 'good music'?
Do trends 'mean anything' any more?
is the only good seapunk a dead seapunk?
HAs the internet 'ruined everything' or made everything 'totally awesome'?
Does seapunk make u wish that poor, artsy ppl couldn't afford laptops?
Has seapunk 'gone mainstream'/finally gone from sea 2 land?
Seapunk Washes Up
By @LILINTERNET and @LILGOVERNMENT
One week ago, The New York Times dipped its toes
into the rising micro-genre known as #seapunk, and said that “like
LOLcats and pedobear, [#seapunk] is an inside Web joke that feeds off
its own ridiculousness.”
Somehow we felt there was more to the story, so we hit up Coral Records Internazionale to
get the straight dope on how seapunk made it from a hashtag to the
storied pages of the Old Gray Lady. We didn't get much of a response, so
we hit up the Twitter personae who created the term itself and
asked them to tell us what the hell was going on. Two days later we had
this incredible manifesto in our inbox.
We present to you @LILINTERNET and @LILGOVERNMENT's “Seapunk Washes Up" in it’s entirety, not just because it’s too good to edit, but because these high seas run deep, 'naw mean?
SEAPUNK WASHES UP: THE UNTOLD STORY BEHIND THE MICRONICHE
As documented by @LILGOVERNMENT and @LILINTERNET
Written by @LILGOVERNMENT
"Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly." -William Gibson, Neuromancer
When the idea of #seapunk was born in a dream, neither @LILINTERNET nor myself predicted the #splash heard 'round the world. With varying degrees of amusement, amazement, and eventually eye-rolling distaste, we watched a tongue-in-cheekstyle/philosophy that defined our summer become a press tsunami. #Seapunk grew into a genre, a record label, a visual language, and a subculture, a ship steered on a very strange course by new and self-appointed captains. We have remained quiet through multiple, oddly aggressive attempts to rewrite history by those we thought were in on the joke, but our seas remain silent no longer.
Seapunk today is the ex-girlfriend we thought we knew, but then she cut her hair, dyed it turquoise, started listening to different music and untagged all her old Facebook photos. And while we don't so much relate to her anymore (what were we thinking?), we can't deny experiencing unprecedented levels of entertainment watching the process take place. Allow us to share the lulz with you.
We bring you the true tale of #seapunk, an accidental meme that became a scene, via an empirical timeline created through our own and others' memories, as well as a little help from the internet. While writing the story in the third person is the ultimate dickbag move, it does make for the best retelling.
Dive in! Just not too deep... shallow waters ahead.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
THE DREAM + THE #
June 2011 - @LILINTERNET wakes up from a dream at 5am, tweets about a "seapunk" leather jacket encrusted with barnacles instead of studs (Fig. 1), and goes back to sleep. He tells @LILGOVERNMENT, who hashtags #seapunk for the first time (Fig. 2). Lil Internet and Lil Government just want to escape to the beach (Fig. 3)…and a meme is born.
Fig. 4
THE BUZZ, THE IDEOLOGY + THE SECRET GROUP
Summer 2011- A loose-knit group of TWITTER users begins frequently tweeting #seapunk jokes back-and-forth to each other- crab claw earrings, fishnet, smoking hashtags and seaweed, etc. Cyberpunk elements enter the picture (Fig. 4); between talk of sitting on a beach with unlimited bandwidth and seasteading to escape government jurisdiction, the lines between the internet and the sea begin to blur. Albert Redwine (@ultrademon) forms a secret #seapunk Facebook group and invites the crew. The lulz continue.
THE FIRST ARTICLE
September 2011 -SuperSuper! Magazine in London has been listening in on (and participating in) the conversation, both via TWITTER and Facebook. Feeling the love, they publish the first print #seapunk article, immortalizing the original core group - (@LILINTERNET, @LILGOVERNMENT, @UNICORNKID, @ULTRADEMON, @ZOMBELLE_, @TTTEAMS). More exploratory than definitive, the piece included watery graphics, a shipwrecked mermaid mask, bits of good humored philosophy and an "essential listening" track list that includes Le1f, random trance, and "putting your ear to a seashell".
RIPPLES IN THE GLOBAL CLIMATE
Fall '11 -Dis Magazine asks "What is seapunk?“ Despite various and increasingly conflicting answers, the universal consciousness is tuning in. Soulja Boy is repping his own "Ocean Gang" with aquatic raps like "Came Out The Water," also tweeting both #seapunk and #splash hashtags. #Seapunk tweets pop up from the likes of Azealia Banks, Venus X, Franki Chan and Kreayshawn. Even Gaga's hair is conspicuously turquoise. Seapunk is alive and well on Tumblr and various blogs, including Mischka.
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
LINES ARE DRAWN IN THE SAND
September-October 2011- What was once a free-flowing exchange of quips, ideas, and imagery in the Seapunk secret group turns to squabbles about what "is" and "isn't" seapunk (Figs. 5, 6). Albert Redwine (producer Fire For Effect) wants to start a seapunk electronic music record label with contributions from original group members. However, Lil Internet and Lil Government are wary of the "us against them" mentality forming, the exact opposite of seapunk's initial lack of intention (Fig. 7). Original supporters (and musicians) like Le1f and Teams, who says "I stopped relating to seapunk when I realized it had surpassed a fun TWITTER joke/fashion style and turned into a club," are also disillusioned. Meanwhile, Redwine and Zombelle are (mis)appropriating punk terminology, pushing "#up_the_seapunks" and driving the ship full-throttle towards confusion. Mention of seapunk's point of origin is becoming conspicuously scarce.
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
#SEAPUNK GOES IRL: THE GENRE, LABEL + "SCENE"
November 2011-early 2012 - Seapunk, having achieved niche ubiquity, is now well on its way to being packaged and sold.Seapunk-billed parties go off in LA, NYC, Chicago and Minneapolis, to name a few. Redwine's label, Coral Records, begins putting out limited edition CD-Rs and mp3 releases with new "seapunk" electronic artists. He also begins issuing swift DMCA takedown requests to remove any free download links of Coral Records releases. Punk may be dead, but hypocrisy is alive and well via Redwine (Fig. 8) and Coral Records (Fig. 9).
"Everything is really wet, and I don't mean that in a sexual way. That's why we just use a mixer and no turntables because the water would fuck up our gear." Redwine says in a recent interview with Dazed and Confused. He would also "like to start a shop - it would include expensive French fisherman's rain gear," and goes on to say "my name doesn't actually relate to the sea either, but it's all alchemy because we're making gold here."
Fig. 10
THE NEW YORK TIMES SPEAKS: "SEAPUNK, A WEB JOKE WITH MUSIC, HAS ITS MOMENT"
March 2012 -Making gold, indeed! New York Times writer Ben Detrick pens a piece about seapunk for the Sunday Styles section, interviewing Zombelle, Redwine, and Lil Internet. Redwine, wholied outright to Detrick that he did not have Lil Internet's contact information, added that "[Lil Internet] doesn't have anything to do with seapunk." Redwine is not quoted in the final article, while Zombelle shouts out Tumblr, disses Azealia Banks' pro-mermaid stance and complains that "no one will actually credit [seapunk] to us," throwing additional shade Detrick's way via TWITTER within hours of the interview taking place (Fig. 10). Thanks to Detrick's own journalistic sixth sense, he finds Lil Internet himself and includes him in the piece, thwarting a perplexingly blatant attempt to conceal seapunk's true origins.
Fig. 11
GOODBYE, SEAPUNK; HELLO #WAVERAVE
Present- Zombelle no longer seems to be stressed out when interviewers ask her what seapunk is, as she and Redwine vie to be known as the true creators of seapunk. Coral Records continues to put out some amazing artists like Unknown, and we love watching seapunk influence continue to swim its way into current fashion. We (Lil Government and Lil Internet) are more than happy to let seapunk's second wave own the genre, the scene, the label, and the merchandise that they deserve full credit for creating- with one request. Might we recommend #waverave (Fig. 11) as a more appropriate blanket term for the "movement"? Or at the very least, a more original one.
It is with heavy hearts that we put #seapunk in its original form to rest, leaving you to bathe in the deep symphony of our summer '11 SEAPUNK AMBIENT SOUND PACK. The download, like Willy, is free.
http://www.seapunkgang.com/
Coral Records:
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