[otde]

Younger millennial/Z-adjacent here. I don’t claim to speak for everyone younger than me, but I am continually impressed by the level of genre awareness today’s youngsters have.

Genres like synth/vapor wave are very conscious remixes of periods of time many of us were barely alive during, and their popularity comes in part, I think, from the tenuousness of their connection to the time period from which those genres draw their audiovisual cues. For me, at least, my earliest memories are a dream half-remembered, and music that draws from but does not emulate music from that time period can be a way for my imagination to fill in the blanks.