I’d hate to be one of those bloggers that just re-posts what others write, but this is a damn good rant.
There has never been a form of musical elitism as contrived as that of the indie hipsters.
In the past year, Napster’s full potential was finally reached as the entire MTV generation made the transition from radio rock/rap over to the current triarchy of hipsterism: emo, indie, and hardcore. The underground has become the mainstream. Just years ago you’d get funny looks for listening to unpopular bands; these days, everyone under 25 is competing to know the most unpopular bands, and the more obscure they are, the better. Nowhere, of course, is there a shred of genuine passion for music, as the kids are as blinded by fashion as they ever were. Your average Joanna Newsom fan would undoubtedly be listening to Limp Bizkit today, if that was still were the fashionable thing to do.
We end up with a really sad situation where even though kids have the entire world of music at their fingertips, the only thing they’re looking for in their quest for new music is another band that will compliment their carefully calculated image of a young, in-the-know hipster. Never has such a mass effort been put into finding new music that you don’t even like.
As fashion wins out over music, all hipsters look for specific aesthetics in their bands. At the bottom of the hipster hierarchy reside emo and its fellow -cores. While the emotion in these genres may be contrived, -core is at least honest about its obsession with scenesterism. -Core does not claim to be anything other than self-absorbed, shallow, and fashionable.
Indie rock, however, is not nearly as honest about the confines of its genre. Indeed, perhaps because indie rock is at the top of the hipster hierarchy, indie is obsessed with proving its worldliness, and is obsessed with proving that its perceived superiority to -core is indeed justified. As such, Indie rockers are not content to be merely labeled scenesters (as -cores are happy to be); indies want to be seen music lovers first and foremost. In their strained and unconvincing to attempt to prove that they truly, really do love music, indie rockers feel the obligation to listen to genres other than indie even if they have no ear for them.
Unfortunately, however, this attempt at musical diversity suffers from an inherent flaw: having diverse taste in music is about being able to appreciate multiple aesthetics in music, and indie kids are only able to appreciate a single aesthetic – that is, the indie aesthetic, the aesthetic of fashion. This is abundantly clear in examing the indie kid’s awkwardly pathetic attempts to branch out of indie and appreciate non-indie rock; if you look closely, the indie kid’s non-indie listening is limited to meaningless subgenres of subgenres that happen to comply to the indie aesthetic.Indie kids need special ‘indified’ versions of other genres in order to render them listenable, as they simply can’t handle those same genres in their raw, pure, (and unfashionable) forms.
Indie kids can’t take trance, so they listen to electroclash. They can’t take gangster rap, so they listen to abstract hip hop. They can’t take doom metal, so they listen to drone metal. They can’t take neofolk, so they listen to freak folk. Etc etc.
In brief, the indie rocker can only explore music in the context of fashion; for supposed ‘music lovers’, indie rockers are without a doubt the most limited music fans in existence. Unfortunately, however, the sheer number of hipsters is so massive in 2007 that their influence has left its deteriorating mark on virtually every genre. As unpleasant as the situation is, in a way I feel for these kids: what must it be like to automatically reject all music with genuine passion and sincerity in favor of self-concious detachment?
Grabbed from an unknown author at this Last.fm group.
