Remembering Some Stomp, Clap, Hey Bands

And millennial hipster culture.

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Zoomers may have Noah Kahan, but they’ll never understand that millennials had a four-year period where every band was made up of seven Noah Kahans. We had the Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes (which sounds like a cereal). Then there was the pinnacle of twee millennial faux-folk, Mumford and Sons—an act that sounded like the soundtrack to a sad hayride. Marcus Mumford walked so Noah Kahan could run. And once I started naming those bands, I immediately grew a mustache and my coffee mug turned into lavender-flavored iced coffee in a mason jar, and my quesadilla also suddenly puffed up into a honey bacon croissant with artisanal japeño cream cheese that costs $25 because the word handcrafted was in the description.

These groups should play at a festival where you can milk goats and catch dysentery. There hadn’t been many successful people wearing suspenders since the Gold Rush. The weirdest aspect of this brand of music was that the tunes had a beat, like Amish people took a stab at making house music, or if Abba was from Saskatchewan. There were the bigger bands like Arcade Fire and people didn’t know what they were: Were they siblings? Are they cousins? Are they dating? All the above? The only thing we could confirm is they all looked like sexy scarecrows that came to life Frosty the Snowman-style and then disappeared when it was time for EDM to take over. This was peak polycule-as-a-band era.

Within the opening seconds of every song, background vocalists were HEY-ing and HO-ing for their lives. Occasionally, they would sub in the token female vocalist who sounded like a frog with a speech impediment: “Rivooors and Rhoooads, Rivooors and RhoOoOods!!” We should just call these acts “Imagine Wagons” because I’m convinced they were all the same people. And there were, on average, upwards of 19 people in these bands. Arcade Fire rolled 20 deep like they were the Wu-Tang Clan of the indiesphere. Their taxes must have been a nightmare. How do you determine the cut of the tour for banjo #3/accordion/fishbone percussion thing?

That movement single-handedly brought back Edison bulbs and string lights hung up in rustic barns for modern social events. Millennials had a brief cultural obsession with great American literature and that’s why they loved adventures, wanderlust, and the aesthetics and traditions of the past. The music it inspired would attempt to invoke a dreamy, folksy atmosphere, but in an urban setting—and they do it as skinny trust-fund kids. It was optimistic, but full of manufactured depth and meaning. In contrast to “actual” folk music, they have extremely libbed-up aesthetics—very white-girl-mandala-tapestry-core. There’s not enough back-to-nature for this genre to be considered real cottagecore, but if you squint hard enough, it is still somewhat anti-civilization. It’s the perfect backdrop to your On the Road LARP with your college friends, the feeling of day-hiking with your partner over beautiful rolling hills before going back to sleep in the VW Bus that your parents paid for. Everyone wanted to write Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up,” but it all came out like shit.

This specific brand of stomp, clap, HEY music coincided with the idea of “hipsters” becoming known to the wider public, and it was a palatable mass-market interpretation of what they listened to. Maybe some of it was a reaction to autotune. In turn, it was around the early-2010s when the word “hipster” lost all meaning. While this music was replicable and excruciatingly generic, it also had almost nothing to do with the original ethos of this culture, existing almost as its antithesis. But the broader mainstream attempted to ape some of that Cool Factor. Shows like Portlandia and publications like BuzzFeed could criticize hipsters all they wanted, but everyone secretly wanted to be one. So we adopted the aesthetics, or at least an aesthetic we could pin the moniker on. The fucking mustaches. Pinrolled jeans. Craft beer. Manbuns. Look at what Moonrise Kingdom did for Wes Anderson’s broader appeal.

Overall, there were two brands of hipsters:

Coastal City Hipsters: Indie sleaze, bloghouse, weaponized irony, Vice Magazine, cocaine habits, PBR, dance parties, American Apparel, guys commenting “dudes butts are the new pussy” on posts about emo Obama.

Middle America Hipsters: Stomp Clap Hey, Red Wing Boots and selvage denim, mustaches or lumberjack beards sealed in artisinal wax, IPA breweries, college campus quads, smaller Midwest cities, their little revitalized parts of town with coffee shops or whatever.

These are two separate scenes that never overlapped and only the second group, with the cleaner Middle America look, achieved mainstream popularity and became the face of that era. It was easy for record labels and corporations to co-opt those aesthetics until it became an unbearable and inescapable mutation. As a quasi-hipster working at an ad agency, people like me are responsible for a TurboTax commercial including a Plantasia song, or dropping Mission of Burma in an H&R Block spot.

The hipster scene has been ridiculed to death and now only survives as a shallow facsimile, but at least its snobbery and disdain led people to have some sort of discerning taste. We’d be shopping for Aristotle’s Metaphysique or some obscure French writer in a second-hand book store, instead of the new Air Jordan hypbeast garbage. House parties were full of rolling cigs, drinking cheap wine, speakers blaring some band no one has ever heard of, and half-baked discussions about Buddhism and Zarathustra and Camus all night. We would sip beers brewed by Tibetian Monks in the 1530s, and we thought Dostoyevsky was for poseurs and that the only truly great Russian author was Chekhov. We bought all our soap from a small-batch factory deep in the Cascades that included small fragments of pine needles in the bar. It was all pretentious bullshit, of course. Every other chick’s favorite director was Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino, but at least they could name a director. It used to be cool to go to arthouse cinemas to watch low-budget Sundance films instead of the latest Marvel drivel. People at least made an effort to feign intellectualism instead of aspiring to TikTok fame.

Dear god, I am an aging fool firmly in my back in my day era…

In reality, hipsterdom as the dominant mode of mass culture could only exist under specific informational conditions, and now that algorithms spoonfeed our predetermined tastes to us, there is no use for them. Being a sell-out or a poser is commonplace, so no one mocks it or points it out much anymore, like being a metrosexual or neoliberal subject. We opened the door to being cool, so now any mouthbreather with confidence can say they’re rizzed up or got that drip, and anyone who disagrees is an evil gatekeeping bully.

It is definitely not a coincidence that they stopped making vibrant, edgy, beautiful pop culture in my mid-20s when my neuroplasticity solidified, and I was no longer the core demographic that was marketed to. After all, my village shaman says you can trace the lineage of modern soy boys and art hoes back to the hipster culture of yore. In reality, everyone was probably pretending to have read Aristotle and Camus, getting drunk and listening to music that no one cares about anymore. They smoked instead of vaped. Sometimes, people conflate intelligentsia with the arts, and the arts with counterculture, and counterculture with consumer culture.

Maybe I just miss doing cocaine.

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