Tales of a Hipster Nothing
"Indie sleaze" and the "hipster music era" are trending again. I was an insider as much as I was an onlooker.
Wake up, babe, we’re glamorizing hipsters again.
Vice has released its definitive guide to the “Hipster Music Era.” Twitter is litigating the legitimacy of “stomp clap” and its dubious standing in the “real” hipster’s iTunes library. People are still losing their shit about how an amorphous, nameless music era was re-dubbed “indie sleaze.”
“Five years into the ‘sleaze’ revival, the movement that shaped the 2000s is also coming to define the 2020s.” -Ryan Schreiber
You couldn’t escape even if you wanted to.
Me, I’m perfectly satisfied to see the trend cycle come back around… as long as the requisite 20 years have passed. And guess what? Girl Talk’s Night Ripper just turned 20. We’ve officially crossed the Rubicon.
I came of age during this era. I recognized myself in Vice’s timeline. I was listening to almost all of that music, in roughly those years. But that doesn’t mean they were writing about me.
People like me, we weren’t the coastal cool kids. We were not tastemakers. The Cobrasnake wasn’t taking photos of us. We were not stylish like Alexa Chung or the Olsen twins.1
If anyone called us hipsters, we bristled at it.2 You could decide if you were punk, goth, or emo, but other people made you a hipster. Frankly, we barely understood the word, but we knew for sure it wasn’t a compliment.
Still, the “hipster music era” is the one that shaped us. And seeing it canonized and handed back to us all glossy and neat is super fucking weird.
So let me tell you what it was like to be an unnamed extra during that time — what it was like to fall in love with music in the early 2000s.
September 2002:
I’m hanging out in my friend’s dorm room. Somebody down the hall just got a hold of a new EP by a band none of us has ever heard of. They sound unreal. How can one guitar and one drum set sound so massive? I get chills. I play “Mystery Girl” obsessively for a year. When I finally get to see The Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2003, I don’t realize until the song ends that I’ve been holding hands with a stranger the whole time.
Fall 2003:
Peaches is insane live. It’s wild that she’s playing at our tiny school. One minute she’s popping blood capsules that run down her chin. The next minute somebody’s running up on stage to feed her Fritos. This is better than getting spit on by Karen O.
May 2004:
I drive back to my hometown just to see Metric open for The Stills.3 Emily Haines pulls me up on stage to dance with her for “Dead Disco.” I’m twice her size; it kind of ruins my stupid Courtney Cox moment. She’s drunk. I don’t stick around for The Stills. Next time I see her, Metric is headlining. A group of us share a cigarette with her outside after the show. She compliments my friend’s shirt, but I think she’s talking to me (I’d stenciled the cover of Old World Underground onto my t-shirt myself) so I say “thank you!” at the same time that he does. I feel like an idiot.
Summer 2004:
I’m in the passenger seat of my friend’s busted-up Toyota. We’re parked behind a seedy dive that serves cocktails in dixie cups. He says he’s got something new he wants me to hear. I barely make it halfway through Jay-Z absolutely massacring one of John Lennon’s prettiest songs before I tell him to shut it off. What the hell is this shit? Six months later, I will write up a glowing review of The Grey Album as part of my application for an online music magazine.
November 3rd, 2004:4
Yesterday, I waited 5 hours in line to vote. Tonight, we’re letting out our collective vitriol at a Le Tigre/Gossip double billed show. Kathleen Hanna is a balm. I write about it in my LiveJournal later: “It did help me feel better, even if we’re royally fucked.”
April 2005:5
I don’t know if anything will replace my love of Strong Bad emails (my Chucks still have Trogdor sharpied all over the white rubber), but I’ll give YouTube this much – it has actual music videos. I’ve been watching M.I.A.’s “Galang” again and again. She’s dressed like the discount Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and a dozen copies of her are dancing in front of neon spray-painted backgrounds. My review of Arular is actually getting published.6
May 2005:7
Daft Punk was playing at my house until I started losing my edge. At an off-campus cookout, somebody is spinning The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” and it’s the sexiest, the funniest, the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. My third eye opens. All art punk suddenly makes sense. I have ascended to another plane. Now I DEFINITELY get it when James Murphy says “I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.” I WAS THERE.
October 2005:8
Cat Power comes to play at the student union. She’s a mess, but we’re with her. We’re entranced. Shaking at the piano, she stops mid-song and bids us sit on the floor. We do – it’s sticky. I feel a little bit sorry for her. I barely know the boy next to me, but we lean on each other for support; structural, but maybe also emotional. The show ends late and another friend tells me “this is typical Chan Marshall.” I’m seething with jealousy. He met her backstage then and she uttered just three words to him: “Lou Reed, man. Lou Reed.”
Fall 2006:
I tell David Coleman that I’ve been wanting to write an essay about how the mashup has replaced the cover song in the cultural zeitgeist. I never do it.9
August 2007:10
I’m heading to the Pitchfork Music Festival on a press pass. I know, right? This is the wrong time in history to be a 23-year-old girl with zero journalistic experience (and zero backbone) attempting to rub elbows with Pitchfork’s editor. I never muster the courage to introduce myself. I also get my ass handed to me both by journalists and the fans hugging the barrier for “being in the press pen with a point-and-shoot.” I tell them to fuck off but I want to cry. I make awkward small talk with Gregg Gillis. I point at his hat and tell him we’re from the same hometown. I’m never showing my face in public again. In a month, I will start law school.
Summer 2008:
International Law is just an excuse to have a summer abroad and go deeper into debt. On the bus from Luxembourg to Brussels, one of my classmates figures out a way to listen to the radio on her MP3 player. It feels like we’ve been disconnected from music for ages. This song is SO catchy but we miss the name of the band. We sing the song to each other for days so we can look it up the next time we find an internet café. “They call me hell/They call me Stacy/They call me Her/They call me Jane/That’s not my name/That’s not my name…”
Fall 2008:
I’m trying to boot and rally at my own damn party. My playlist is perfect; I can still hear it going in the living room. A disembodied voice: “I think this is Le Tigre?” I yell back from the bathroom floor: “IT’S BIKINI KILL!”
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 at 22:51:
Subject: Re: Reminder: No Ripcord 2008 Lists Due By Sunday!
Dave,
I’m sorry I’ve failed you, but I couldn’t come up with a list even if you let me make up my own album names. That’s how out of the loop I’ve become.
The new Beck album is really good, though. And the Girl Talk album. Was that even 2008?? Oh god. I’m sorry I suck.
-Gabbie
Law school was a cultural dead zone for me.11 I fell off the musical map for years, and emerged only tentatively after I passed the bar.
Vice says that 2009 was “definitely, inarguably, when the hipster era peaked.” That’s certainly convenient for my temporary tap-out, isn’t it?
Whatever you want to call this time period — whatever you think of its music, its fashion, its parties, its grime, its ironic affectation — it’s what built my taste. It’s how I started to understand connections between new music and old.
Hearing LCD Soundsystem back to back with The Normal is what eventually sent me down my very first post-punk rabbit hole. When Ted Leo stitched “Maps” together with “Since U Been Gone,” it didn’t just help me hear how similar the songs were, it also began cracking my “too good for pop music” shell.
And yes, Girl Talk12 burst open a world of sampling and old school hip-hop beyond my limited MTV memories. The “hipster era” taught me to listen to music as much as it kept m`e up partying.
I spared you from a million other discovery vignettes. Of dancing to The Knife’s “Heartbeats” and crying to José González’ cover. Of cleaning kitchens to the Ratatat remixes. Of listening to Lady Sovereign, somebody’s latest find from studying abroad in London, on the floor of a dingy apartment above the five and dime.
Now I want to hear about yours, from whatever era raised you.
Want paid access for free?
P.S. My end-of-year lists picked back up again in 2013 and haven’t stopped since. If you want to judge more of my pre-NBfOH taste, or maybe fill in some of your own recent music gaps, I could be persuaded.
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Hell, I was too fat to wear most clothes from American Apparel!
I say this, but I also remember a day in 2003 when a group of us stood around the humanities building on campus, passing around a copy of The Hipster Handbook. It was a joke, of course, but there was a weird mix of pride and embarrassment when we found our college in there, roasted to ashes.
Hands up if you remember what this band sounds like.
My Top Albums of 2004 (written in April 2005):
This is also the month that everyone around me started discovering MP3 blog mashups. The first one I remember was Largehearted Boy (David Gutowski) posting an absolute banger of 50 Cent and Guided by Voices called “Da Club is Open.” For the curious, I still have it somewhere. hmu.
It was terrible, by the way.
My Top 10 Albums of 2000-2005 (written in April 2005). Yeah, the stuff I left out pisses me off, too.
Ted Leo/Rx – The Tyranny of Distance
Metric – Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?
Sleater-Kinney – All Hands on the Bad One
The Decemberists – Castaways & Cutouts
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Fever to Tell
The Shins – Oh, Inverted World
Deerhoof – Apple’O
The New Pornographers – Mass Romantic
Jurassic 5 – Quality Control
Mclusky – Do Dallas
My Top Albums of 2005 (written in December 2005):
My Top Albums of 2006 (written in November 2006):
My Top Albums of 2007 (written in December 2007):
Well, not entirely true. But I primarily associate that time with a LOT of electro, synthpop, and their tangentially danceable ilk. Little Boots, Lady Gaga, Pąșśìóň Pïț, Hot Chip, Justice, MGMT, Janelle Monae, The xx, Sleigh Bells, and so on.
I’m still embarrassing myself about him (and Ted Leo, for that matter) after all these years.
The Stills drank all my alcohol in our shit hotel room in Seattle when we drove down to see them open for Interpol. I think 2003? We drove down from Vancouver in an 8-seater van, and two couples split up on that trip, one reformed with opposite partners. Someone asked on the way back 'Can you unfriend someone on friendster?'
I lived in London from 2004, can confirm it was a very similar vibe. We lived over the road from a very hipster pub in Spitalfields and I remember getting a lecture from a Wieden + Kennedy intern with an asymmetrical haircut, who promptly realized someone stole his work laptop from under the table. 2005. Good times.
In 2001, I waited outside a music venue from 10am until 7pm to see Dashboard Confessional. It was general admission so we wanted to make sure to get in the front row, (which we did) but we also got to meet him going into the venue, and Ben Kweller!
My best hipster concert memory was seeing LCD Soundsystem during his "retirement tour" in NYC in 2010. I've seen him in concert like 3 times since then.