Going to The Mall
Black Friday, 11/25/22
A few friends and I went to the mall on Black Friday. And not just any mall, we went to The Johnstown Galleria — but better put, we went to all malls that day.
Closed off sections, far-off corners where the holiday music distorted, and cargo cult children’s displays. It had an uncanny atmosphere that fell somewhere between a haunted house and liminal space.
We came in and made our rounds to a shoe store, Books A Million, a few others, but most new was a “32GO” store now finding itself in malls. It fits nicely into the vacantscape where there is no cashier or employees at all. You (3) shop (2) scan and go! However, kayfab was broken during our visit when someone came in and went to the back room of the place.
All the while in the mall I had this sense that everyone there was taking part in some exercise. We weren’t shopping we were taking part in the mall’s experience (a unique Black Friday experience) like a nostalgic theme park before decommission. It’s final vestigial state — less vital organs have shutdown or shuttered and it tries an experimental trick or two in a deathrattle.
There is the disused church to apartments, so maybe there is hope in repurposing the mall. But it will never be the American mall, the commercial-communal space we recognized in the early 2000’s and for some earlier. Anything new built on top of this is postmortem.
Vaporwave is a newer music genre which appeals to the same era of the mall’s zenith. The music is this sort of caricature-like take on 80s and early-90s music with reverb, cuts, and looping. It often goes in tandem with equally hyperbolic imagery of neon, glowing grids, crimson typeface, and palm trees. A popular ironic phrase of the music genre is “vaporwave is dead. Long live vaporwave.” It lives off of the bygone while offering something new.
The aesthetic of the mall was ripe for vaporwave and “mallsoft” was a natural subgenre. Mallsoft embraces the reverb and wears the echoey distortions as if you were in the mall’s main lobby. The album Palm Mall goes the full way, adding the echoey clicking of shoes, the distinct and unintelligible shop chatter, and even loud speaker ads. But for me NEON PALM MALL was an early defining mix of the genre. It opens with vivid 1991 camcorder shots of a fountain surrounded by palm that shoots to a second story. Video of store fronts and packed escalators now wholly alien to the mall of today.
Is the death of the mall — albeit slow, a tragedy? I think it can be. Physical space shared with others has an inherency of worth. Mall spaces are starting to look like large scabs. It feels like a loss too. Out of them came a unique sensory atmosphere with evidently clear aesthetics and experiences. Although, ironically, it seems to evoke this in large part by meeting it’s terminus. And even if a mall, the new mall, were to arise tomorrow with it’s employeeless shops and slot machines, it would be different. Nostalgia is hard to make sense of.
The mall is dead, long live the mall.
