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The Vaporwave album Conditions at Hickory begins with static, as if you’re tuning in to a 1940s radio broadcast. First and second tracks “Foothills” and “Daily Commute” start out humdrum and benign enough. Then, the mood shifts. Sounds come like warnings, cautions of something sinister to come. Beeping sounds and tornado sirens start to interrupt the music. By the time you get to “Thunderheads” and “Squall,” you’re in the thick of it.
Kana, aka Dreamweather, released the seven-track album on YouTube, where it soundtracks a frozen image: a bright-red severe weather warning for Hickory, North Carolina. It could be that Conditions is trying to warn you about an impending storm. It could be that the album, with its smooth, jazzy AM-radio tones, is trying to rock you to sleep in the midst of it.
Kana is one of a number of artists who have taken transmissions from the weather reports of yesteryear and merged them with the lo-fi electronic music genre known as vaporwave. Emerging in the early 2010s, vaporwave has exploded on YouTube recently, soundtracking nostalgic video footage like family trips to Florida in the ’90s or Transformers cartoon clips. The effect is as unsettling as it is comforting—a visual reminder of a different, maybe better era that can’t be lived again.
As the trend has evolved, many of the more popular vaporwave clips have been those that place ambient sounds over Weather Channel broadcasts from the ’80s and ’90s. Like Twisters, these sometimes eight-hour-long broadcasts evoke a time when TV and radio offered guidance in a storm—and a time before climate change made extreme weather events more frequent.
Popular vaporwave artists play their music over weather forecasts from fearless stormchaser Jim Cantore. Others—sometimes practitioners of the subgenre known as weatherwave—soothe you with sound as longtime severe weather expert Steve Lyons waves his hands madly about an impending Indiana tornado.
“As a child, I would often just sit and watch the Weather Channel for hours on end,” Kana says. “I vibed with the local forecasts, its music, and its programs a lot, so discovering that other people were interested in this extreme niche blew my mind.”
Some of the most popular weatherwave clips use a VHS recording of a Weather Channel broadcast on a random cold '90s night in the winter. One, a 41-minute video from YouTuber onceinalifetime, has nearly 900,000 views; another is an eight-hour megamood from chyllvester with nearly 650,000 views. Many comments below them speak in nostalgic terms: “I basically lived in hotels growing up (long story). The Weather Channel was the only real constant from place to place. It helped me greatly then. It's still helping me today.”
The Weather Channel was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in May 1982. From the beginning it coupled its stalwart weather broadcasts with a steady stream of smooth jazz, a combo that came to define the 24/7/365 weather network. Whether you were tuning in for the tropical update segment or international weather, the sounds stayed constant and steady, even if the weather did not.
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By the late 1990s, nearly 80 percent of American households had access to cable TV and the Weather Channel became the soundtrack for people eating their morning cereal, settling into a lonely motel, or praying for a snow day.
Watching clips of TWC now is “almost like a digital form of escapism, a way to revive a forgotten slice of the past while also reshaping it for today,” says Ipojucã Vilas Boas, creator of YouTube channel Retropical Records, which hosts a vaporwave YouTube playlist with thousands of views. One of her recent weatherwave videos touches on ’80s TWC iconography, like “The Days Inn 5 Day Business Planner.”
The man responsible for much of TWC’s original music in the ’90s is Trammell Starks, who once played keyboards for R&B stars like Roberta Flack but eventually started scoring corporate video for companies like Delta.
He tells WIRED he started by making music for TWC’s disaster videos, but by 1996 had worked out an arrangement where he started writing songs for the Weather Channel’s signature “Local on the 8s” forecasts, creating 43 pieces of music over the course of a year. Notably, none of these songs had names. Instead, Starks gave them numbers because he considered them all background music.
Vaporwave’s big open secret is that some artists repurpose Starks’ sounds, occasionally without credit. This recently came up on a Facebook page for TWC Classics, the largest and oldest site dedicated to the Weather Channel. “That’s one of the reasons why I hate vaporwave,” admin and longtime TWC fan Matt Marron wrote. Marron expressed similar thoughts when WIRED reached out to ask about Starks’ work.
The irony here is that Starks’ tracks are nameless just like many vaporwave artists are anonymous. Starks’ songs play in a relentless reliable loop just like vaporwave. Today, for better or worse, both sounds store memories of the Weather Channel. Starks says Local on the 8s played six times per hour, 24/7 for two years. Today, the TikTok Discover page for Trammell Starks has more than 6.4 million posts.
“Just that repeat airplay [on the Weather Channel]. Without that, I don’t know if we’d be having this conversation,” Starks says.
True to vaporwave’s nature, the story behind the weather warning used for Kana’s Conditions at Hickory video is that of a very real, and quite devastating, tornado outbreak in May 1989. Nothing overtly catastrophic ever happens in Kana’s version of Hickory. Most weatherwave is this way—a juxtaposition of a distant danger and calming sounds. “People just want to escape from the stresses of the world and just feel like a kid again, and the warm, fuzzy music of this genre helps fill that void very well,” Kana says.
Jennifer Ladino, author of Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature, sees weatherwave as generally relaxing and nonconfrontational, the kind of thing that would be more likely to swab away the realities of a warming climate rather than highlight them in an activist way.
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Another term, solastalgia, speaks to the feelings of grief caused by a disconnection from the natural world and witnessing the depletion of the earth’s resources, though Ladino doesn’t think this is in play when it comes to weatherwave.
Instead, Ladino mentions how psychologists have argued that nostalgia can mitigate stress and loneliness. It also helps highlight the disconnect between the past and present—a present where people are a lot more wrapped up in climate realities than they were when TWC first launched.
“The music and content are in tension with each other,” she says, adding that it depends on who’s watching and listening, and how aware each user is of that disconnect.
Ladino once worked as a park ranger. When she was wearing her signature Smokey Bear hat, she recalls that people looked up to her, expecting her to reel off trail information and weather conditions, and diagnose a mysterious ailment alike. “My first book on nostalgia came from wearing that uniform and having people treat me as some kind of relic of tradition and authenticity,” Ladino says.
Meteorologists seem to exist in a similar space, significant enough even to be a movie hero (see: Groundhog Day or Nic Cage’s The Weather Man), though not on the level of a movie lawyer or cop. In that sense, weatherwave’s reframing of TWC broadcasters as familiar faces who merely convey a vibe rather than deliver updates makes sense. They can remind viewers of a simpler time while foregoing the details. Competence porn set to modern, cool-sounding Muzak.
Liz Jarvis Fabian was one of TWC’s first on-air broadcasters. She understands why this mashup works. “I can see how a lot of people turned to the Weather Channel when there was a crisis,” she says. “When a major storm is coming … Those dramatic times in your life. People don’t forget. And so if that music is kind of a bridge to a significant memory, even if it’s an unpleasant memory, it’s still nostalgic.”
But there’s a difference between trusting weather personalities to deliver accurate weather information and listening to climate experts ringing alarm bells. So even if weatherwave provides a salve for climate anxieties, that’s almost by accident. It may be riding a wave of popularity based on the viewership of people who want to remember when storms were a little less scary, but it can’t rewind the clock.
