George Clanton - I Been Young

I've been wrong. I've been young.

Album: Ooh Rap I Ya [3rd album]
Genre: Vaporwave, Chillwave
Album Release: July 28th 2023
Single Release: April 7th 2023 [2nd single]
Length: 4.59
Producer: George Clanton
Vocalist: George Clanton [age 35]
Label: 100% Electronica

Music Video

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: 2,400,000 +
YouTube Music: 300,000 +

Credits

Details

• George Clanton has also made an album with Nick Hexum.
  
• The song is about the struggles of leaving youth behind. Every day time ticks by and although you wish you could stay young forever youth should be left for the young. When you have lives the young life for too long reality lurks around every corner. The music is made in 2023 but has an early nineties Madchester sound as if the youth Clanton sings about is in the past. The song opens with lyrics that sound immature "hanging on to every grudge" but later there are some chords that sound like an epiphany and the lyrics become more experienced "wrong enough to say I'm sorry, owning up to things I can't undo". It's as if the singer matures as the song goes on. The picture of Clanton above, that shows him in his thirties on a slide, also depicts a man who has stayed young too long. He's even wearing a backwards baseball cap.
  
  
• 100% Electronica is an independent record label set up by Clanton to showcase vaporwave artists. The label is now home to acts such as death's dynamic shroud and Satin Sheets. 
• Clanton is an influential figure in vaporwave. He releases work as an artist, promotes others on his label and even organised the worlds first ever vaporwave festival. 100% ElectroniCON debuted in 2019. As is typical of a form steeped in technology Clanton streams his live performances on Twitch.
  
  
• Vaporwave is a sample based form of music and as such is built on a foundation of the past. The samples are slowed, looped and have reverb added until they become hypnotic echoes of what they once were. You might be hearing a song for the first time but still find it recognisable. The genre is one of the first to be built around internet culture and is spread in the same way. There is no need for promotion on radio and magazines when a hundred dedicated members of a message board can spend days making memes and achieve the same results through social media.
  
  The album covers are based on Windows computers and old science fiction. They have a distinctly eighties and nineties aesthetic. Words are deliberately misspelt, the spaces between words are missing and the band names are often in all upper or lowercase. It's like surfing the world wide web back when people still called it that.
  
  The genre takes its cues from neoliberalism and old technology, blending iconic images and sounds together in order to make something new and have something to sell. All of the original ideas are gone and what remains is the bastardisation of the old and the good. It's no coincidence that the majority of vaporwave artist are middle class white guys who seem to have had their cultural moment and are soon to be replaced by a cast of diverse, genderqueer social justice warriors with a bone to pick and a polyamorous relationship.
  
  The music appeals to a large number of people on the alt-right as it has a sense of nostalgia which resonates with conservatives. As electronic music it feels synthetic but in the way of retro futurism rather than cutting edge. Most of us look back and remember the past fondly, "it isn't like the good old days" we say to one another but really the past wasn't better. We were enjoying the fruits of our youth and the bad times have been laid to rest in the bed of memory. Vaporwave reaches out with one hand to a past where the problems didn't seem so immense and the answers were more apparent, it's reminiscent of a simpler time and therefore comforting.

Artwork