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Music

The Alt-Right Co-opts Synth Music and Dubs it "Fashwave"

YouTube producers add Donald Trump and Hitler samples to synthwave beats in what's been dubbed the "soundtrack of the alt-right."
Potential fashwave compilation album design by genosavior on Twitter

The far-right white nationalist movement dubbed the alt-right—who some say are better described plainly as Neo-Nazis—have apparently developed a of music called fashwave. As its name suggests, the "genre" involves a crude combination of fascist ideology with the vintage electronic music of synthwave, reports Buzzfeed. It's all topped off with a vague melange of 80s aesthetic signifiers, including images of space travel, combat iconography, 8-bit stylings, and lots of neon.

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The primarily YouTube-based producer C Y B E R N ∆ Z I is the most prominent producer in the genre, having racked up about 3,000 subscribers and nearly 300,000 views. "Right Wing Death Squads" and "Galactic Lebenstraum" are among their most popular songs. Other well known artists in the genre include the UK's Xurious and another producer named Stormcloak; their music is mostly instrumental aside from samples of figures including Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.

Notorious white supremacist and Neo-Nazi news website The Daily Stormer regularly covers the in a recurring feature called Fashwave Fridays, and has published an in-depth article about it called "The Official Soundtrack of the Alt-Right." Playlists of music in the genre have gone on to populate other platforms including Bandcamp and Spotify. Often times, they cull work from artists who have no political affiliations with Neo-Nazism, much to those artists' despair.

Xurious was even billed as a musical guest at the alt-right's National Policy Institute conference in November, at which movement figurehead Richard Spencer led Nazi salutes, along with cries of "hail victory" and "hail Trump." They also used the official alt-right logo in the album art for their October LP Rise Of The Alt-Right.

A website called Infostormer published a response to Reggie Ugwu's piece about the genre in Buzzfeed. "The Jew owned Buzzfeed blog has done an article about how Fashwave has become the musical soundtrack of the Alt-Right," they said. "The fact that sites like these are covering this sort of thing reveals how the Alt-Right and anything associated with it is quickly becoming the trendy counter culture of this era."

THUMP reported on a separate Neo-Nazi electronic music subgenre called War Trance earlier this year, whose most popular figure is DJ Ghost of the Reich.

I just got shoaded from — C Y B E R N ∆ Z I (@CYBERNAZI1)December 14, 2016

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