Floral Shoppe (フローラルの専門店)

About

Floral Shoppe, also known as フローラルの専門店, is a 2011 vaporwave album by the electronic artist Vektroid, released under the alias Macintosh Plus. As one of the most well-known vaporwave albums, it has helped define the genre. In addition, the cover art is often photoshopped in parody.

Origin

Floral Shoppe was released on December 9, 2011 on the music streaming/marketplace website Bandcamp by the American record label Beer on the Rug. The album incorporates slowed and edited samples from many songs, notably funk and R&B spanning from the 1970s to the 1990s.^[1][2] The album art was created by the recording artist, Vektroid, also known as Ramona Xavier.

Spread

The album received mixed reviews from critics; while review websites such as Tiny Mix Tapes and Sputnikmusic gave the album praise for what they saw as a deconstruction of pop music, though other reviewers such as Anthony Fantano, who gave the album a rating of 4/10, were more critical.^[3][4]

Nevertheless, the album found its fans; a YouTube upload of the full album has been viewed over 1 million times.^[5] It has also spawned two unofficial sequels, both titled Floral Shoppe 2, as well as a nightcore version which restores the sampled songs to their original speeds.^[6][7][8]
The album has been discussed on 4chan's /mu/ (Music) board since 2012, and has since been mentioned nearly 5,000 times.^[9] The album also has a large following on Tumblr. Although it was not the first vaporwave album, it is one of the most well known in the genre, influencing both the popular perception of the genre as well as its overall aesthetics, including popularizing common visual traits such as Japanese text and ancient Greco-Roman busts.

Notable Sub-memes

リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー

"リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー" (trans. "Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing") is the second track off of Floral Shoppe, and is arguably its most well known track, with over 1,300,000 views on YouTube, surpassing that of Floral Shoppe itself. It is an edited and slowed down version of the song "It's Your Move" by R&B artist Diana Ross. Because of this, vaporwave is sometimes jokingly described as "slowed down Diana Ross songs". The song itself is occasionally covered or remixed; the most popular remix of the song is a Death Grips Mashup which has over 350,000 views on YouTube.

Cover Art Parodies

The album's cover art has inspired numerous parodies. The Roman bust of Helios in particular has been a common subject of edits.

Search Interest

External References