Beyond the Screen: Exploring Vaporwave Musicians’ Communicative Identity Work

ABSTRACT While vaporwave musicians create surreal soundscapes from under the cover of anonymity, they also engage in complex and humanizing identity work processes. We applied a communication theory of identity (CTI) lens to semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 self-identified vaporwave musicians. Grounded in the experiences of vaporwave musicians, our iterative qualitative analysis revealed that participants constantly contend with friction between personal, enacted, relational, and communal identities. This study’s contributions include extending CTI literature into a new realm of music subculture, suggesting new avenues for understanding identity within digital communities, and emphasizing the importance of lived participant experiences.