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hipsters are simulacra.
i think what was really going on from about 03 onwards was the end of any attempt to resist post modernism. so everything became a remix. then everyone was too self conscious to do anything. cos youd just get sneered at by know it all reference spouters. spoilt male brats who couldnt do anything themselves and only wanted to tear down what other people did. so all you could do was just smile blankly and play it safe and light.
post punk is great and i feel at the start it wasnt so much a revival as my generation discovering this awesome shit that we were too young to have heard the first time. lets not forget how so much of it really was obscure for anyone who wasn't there at the time or connected enough to the underground to hear it. certainly for a european hick like me you just DID NOT hear about that stuff. like you had to travel to the city, were it was possible to find cds and lps that were slightly obscure - ie. not in the top100 at that very moment. but not many of them. maybe you'd find a mag like careless talk or plan b. maybe you'd find a few zines if you were lucky. but the early p2p networks had very little obscure stuff on them. when bands like the pixies started reforming, it was cos there was a fanbase that had built for years after they split up.
then all of a sudden you had synths and total unbearable twee and happiness and lightness and utter utter vacuity and i was scratching my head. like - this cant be where we want to go surely? surely there is noone so lame as to want to revive that part of the 80s? i thought that we were supposed to be about negativity and art and substance and that music was supposed to be connected to a greater aesthetic and philosophy and worldview. i thought it was about being a freak! how fucking wrong i was.
look at the ultimate hipster band - animal collective. they just dress up as kittens and sing like toddlers. they are a symptom of the end of the post modern period, which was a competition to see who could undercut the other guy with the most jaded, cynical and indifferent sneer. instead of facing the abyss of nihilism, kids who grew up on this crap were too infantilized and stupefied by consumerism. they didnt believe in anything so they became too stupid to assess anything. their hyper individualism becomes so allergic to anything that might make you not unique you end up not actually being composed out of anything at all. so you get the sound of 00's indie which is utterly pristine cheeriness that at times quivers with astoundingly repressed despair. but its not the despair of emo or goth or anything, its a despair that cant find an expression and cant even be countenanced. being sad would mean have a reason to be sad which would entail actually committing to a position and thus having to do something other than blindly stumble around the shopping mall at the end of history. its like the refrain of "DENIAL" from teen spirit came to haunt us all! the 00's was one of the most conservative decades ever.
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