Hey! Hipsters Did Not Listen To Stomp-Clap
My latest SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS B-side debunks a persistent falsehood
“look, i’m not humorless so i can get behind jokes looking back on the hipster era just as much as the next girl who spent too much money at american apparel. But people have GOT to stop associating that scene with stomp clap lumineers shit. it’s inaccurate!”
So posted the writer and prolific tweeter Ashley Reese last week on the app now known as X. Predictably, this take set off a #discourse. People could not resist chiming in, myself included. Many of us did so because we agreed with Reese. Others disagreed or, because it’s the internet, engaged in entirely different arguments due to a willful misreading of her message or lack of basic reading comprehension.
Reese’s point was simple: It’s ahistorical to say hipsters listened to early 2010s stomp-clap folk-rock like the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons, so please stop making that false association. As the above graphic illustrates, some people do align hipsters with stomp-clap. It’s a category error. It shows a misunderstanding of what hipsters were. The hipsters of 2012 took a substantially different posture toward popular music than the hipsters of 2002, but even mainstream-friendly late-stage hipsters turned up their noses at stomp-clap. At the peak of their popularity, these bands were the antithesis of hip.
To this you might say: Who cares? It is admittedly not a high-stakes matter, but it’s one that matters to me. I care because I want to see history presented accurately, not distorted, and because this subject relates to one close to my heart: the evolution of indie rock and the broader hipster music canon. I don’t know what Reese was reacting to specifically when she fired off her fateful tweet, but I’ve seen this mistaken association a lot, this designation of hipster anathema as the height of hipsterdom. It usually comes from people outside the hipster bubble. It makes me think the general public has a poor understanding of the way hipster tastes and attitudes evolved in the 2010s. One reason I wrote my book was to clear up those misconceptions.
SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century. When I started out, my goal was to write the definitive history of How Indie Rock Went Pop. Inevitably, that pursuit involved an examination of the hipster, a somewhat slippery archetype that infiltrated 2000s pop culture in tandem with the even slipperier genre known as indie. There’s been a fair amount of scholarship on hipsters, most famously Mark Greif’s 2010 New York article “What Was The Hipster?” Greif’s conclusion had an impact on my thinking: “The hipster is that person… who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”
The metamorphosis of indie as both a genre and a concept is inextricable from the evolution of the hipster as a cultural entity. The two terms are not entirely congruent. You could be into indie rock and not be a hipster (because you rejected the elitist, performative, trend-chasing aspects of hipsterdom). You could be a hipster and not be into indie rock (because you were instead an aficionado of underground rap, extreme metal, Japanese city pop, or all of the above). But the cultural proximity between hipsters and indie was undeniable. Understanding the evolution of hipster attitudes is key to understanding the concurrent changes in indie because those attitudes directly impacted those changes.
“Indie rock” has always been a somewhat vague descriptor, but it was a lot easier to define around the time Sebadoh released “Gimme Indie Rock” in 1991. In the ‘80s, the Our Band Could Be Your Life era, “indie” wasn’t a ubiquitous term yet, but retroactively, we can assign it to an independent business model and a loosely defined genre that thrived within that model. Indie rock denoted a scrappy, inventive subset of bands native to the world of zines and college radio, often too lo-fi, imprecise, or otherwise off-kilter to appeal to a mass audience. In the post-Nirvana moment when so many underground bands signed to major labels, the definition of “indie” got blurrier, and it has continued to blur up to the present day, to the point that even Taylor Swift’s world-conquering Folklore was described as her “indie” album.
In sketching out that arc, my book weaves together a lot of different threads involving technology, media, fashion, etc., considering factors like MySpace, The O.C., Pitchfork, American Apparel, and even the advent of coffee shop WiFi. In terms of the music itself, it surveys several distinct subgenres and scenes that ended up grouped together under the “indie” umbrella. I present a bird’s-eye view of a sprawling history, with no singular factor driving the narrative. But one constant throughout is the hipster revulsion toward the tasteless masses—that early-adopter compulsion to discard whatever has been co-opted by the mainstream and stake out new unclaimed territory ahead of the curve.
We’ve all seen this happen over and over again in the music world. It’s commonly understood that as underground trends bubble up into the popular consciousness, smoothed-out and/or hollowed-out iterations of those trends emerge, often disconnected from the scenes and cultures that birthed them. By this point, the hipsters are on to the next thing. In the first chapter of SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS, borrowing an example from the great Nitsuh Abebe, I recall how the indie music world reacted when grunge went mainstream and subsequently morphed into post-grunge, nu-metal, and butt-rock: by swerving away from all that aggression, toward the soft, quirky, dreamy, and whimsical. (Think Elephant 6, Elliott Smith, Belle And Sebastian, the Flaming Lips...)
That late ‘90s moment is relevant to this discussion. Within last week’s flurry of tweets, the savvy journalist Emilie Friedlander made a salient observation. While acknowledging that the term hipster originated with black revolutionaries in the 1940s, Friedlander pointed out that the pioneers of modern hipsterdom were not millennials but Gen-Xers in the late ‘90s and early 2000s “who defined themselves based on liking film or music that was either too obscure or too ‘difficult’/weird for mass or even middlebrow consumption.” These hipsters “did not care for big name indie bands, or stopped caring about them the moment they became famous,” she wrote. “They liked shit like obscure 70s psych records, ethiopian jazz, ryuichi sakamoto, ‘outsider artists,’ noise music, etc.”
This ethos is where we get the trope of the hipster as the snob who treats knowledge of obscure music as a means for accumulating cool points, who might answer your question about their favorite bands by replying, “You wouldn’t know them.” This mentality often arose from a timeless sense of alienation, a disgust with the lowest-common-denominator crap enjoyed by the average Joe. There was a noble component: a desire to reject consumerism, distance themselves from corporate bloat, subscribe to Adbusters, pursue social activism, and live in a better way. And it sometimes provided its adherents with a sense of superiority, albeit one constantly endangered by the prospect of encountering someone who’d one-upped you in this game. James Murphy brilliantly parodied this subculture on “Losing My Edge” — and ironically, LCD Soundsystem contributed greatly to the indie-goes-pop breakthrough I tracked in the book.
As the 2000s rolled on, a number of factors endangered the old-school hipster way of thinking. File-sharing and online publishing radically increased the accessibility of music and information, lowering the bar for eclectic expertise. Vice, American Apparel, and Terry Richardson brought a hedonistic, fashion-conscious sensibility to hipsterdom, grabbing the baton from Steve Albini’s edgelord provocations but running counter to his ethical DIY approach. Pitchfork and the blogs in its orbit channeled the hipster quest for new esoteric discoveries into a daily race to uncover the hot new band, a process of rapid anointing and discarding that dovetailed with the digital era’s devaluing of music.
The O.C., Garden State, and a slew of similar projects in their wake created a pipeline for user-friendly indie bands to connect with a vast new audience outside the grimy club circuit, and they strengthened the public’s association between hipsters and the poppiest of the indie bands. As hipster fashion sense became to the 2000s what hippies had been to the ‘60s (note that Friedlander’s authentic hipster era ends around the time the public discovered trucker hats), Urban Outfitters allowed you to buy a facsimile of a thrift-store wardrobe directly off the rack. An explosion of hipster dance music led to a flurry of parties soundtracked by blown-out remixes downloaded directly from music blogs, a frontier where cross-pollination between genres went into overdrive.
Crucially, poptimism was also popping off (speaking of subjects people love to discuss with faux-expertise). In the 2000s, a growing number of critics, artists, and fans rallied around the belief that many tenets of music snobbery—our culture’s longstanding intrinsic biases about what makes music good, substantial, important—were tangled up with prejudices like sexism, racism, and homophobia. Contrary to some interpretations, poptimists did not argue that if music is popular it must be good (or at least that’s not how Kelefa Sanneh explained it in poptimism’s most sacred text). They simply believed all music deserved a fair shake, that there are gems to be discovered within genres traditionally dismissed as fluff, and that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure.
The cost of records used to be a barrier toward exploring new genres outside your wheelhouse. But as music got free, there was little reason for hipsters not to put mega-hits on their iPods alongside their favored obscurities. The MP3s were flowing, and the cloistered world of alleged good taste was starting to feel constrictive. Still, there was a transgressive quality to flouting the old taboos. In the context of hipster tradition, professing your love for so-called teeny bopper music was arguably more outrageous than checking for Merzbow. Theoretically, at least, it was a betrayal of historical indie ideals. I remember feeling scandalized and delighted when Pitchfork named Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” the No. 1 song of 2006, as if we were all getting away with something.
Following indie music throughout the 2000s, I came to understand poptimism as a progressive ideology and opposition to it as evidence of a stodgy musical conservatism. I distinctly remember Pitchfork’s Chris Dahlen pushing back against that framing in a 2005 column. “It is currently deeply uncool to judge music by how it’s made or who really made it—or to expect that the performer nominally attached to the song wrote it, or played on it, or even sang a single note that wasn’t fixed by a computer,” Dahlen wrote, summing up the emerging line of thought. “If you think that a performer with a career and proven talents, like say Bruce Springsteen, isn’t playing the same game as, say, Ashlee Simpson—who’s still shorthand for ‘phony’—then you’re stunted by prejudices that impair your ability to love music.”
Poptimism undoubtedly had progressive roots. It was intertwined with critical theory and the ideologies sometimes now summed up as “woke,” set on challenging old, entrenched power dynamics. Though poptimism recognized the legitimacy of a lot of music that had been historically disrespected, it was working to dismantle a longstanding critical bias toward earnest white guys with guitars. So although the concept led to lots of critical rehabilitation, it rarely bolstered the kinds of earnest white guys with guitars who never had much critical respect to begin with, including the post-DMB sphere of fratty singer-songwriter types like John Mayer, Jason Mraz, or any Nashville troubadour with big Christian coffeehouse energy. At a time when hipsters were racing to embrace the mainstream, this was a class of performer they could all still agree to mock. Eventually, indie rock’s glow-up led to some artists who felt like they belonged in that same bucket with Mayer and Mraz: namely the stomp-clap bands.
The rising profile of hipsters and indie rock had a gentrifying effect. It’s not like noisy, gritty, anti-commercial indie ceased to exist. That stuff was flourishing in the late 2000s. But as more people with no connection to the underground discovered this music, more approachable versions of indie rock emerged to appeal to an increasingly normie audience. It was already happening in 2005 when Dahlen wrote his poptimism-skeptical column, which played out as a defense of “adult alternative music” like “Norah Jones, Gillian Welch, and Madeleine Peyroux; the Arcade Fire, Death Cab For Cutie, and Rufus Wainwright,” a list that notably mixed some indie brand names in alongside your parents’ favorite jazz-pop CD. This was Starbucks music. KCRW music. Grey’s Anatomy music. To hipsters, such easy-listening coffee-shop indie represented the opposite of the cutting edge. It was basic, bland, and—sin of all sins—bourgeois.
It was impossible to miss that gentrification process playing out in the realm of indie-folk. I traced the progression in Chapter 7 of SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS (excerpted here). In the mid-2000s, freak-folk was one of the defining hipster trends, a loose configuration of rustic neo-hippie types living alternative lifestyles and making truly outré folk music. By the late 2000s, more sonically clean-cut (but visually still quite hairy) versions of indie-folk were beginning to explode in popularity. Woodsy beardos like Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes were critical sensations, but they were also easily digestible for mass audiences.
O.G. hipsters would have abandoned ship, but by now we’d reached the Obama-era hipster, the millennial hipster, who Friedlander called “a commoditized version of the early 2000s subculture that was much more about wanting the thing you like to become popular.” These were the people dancing to Crystal Castles and MGMT at Bonnaroo, buying Best Coast and Wavves vinyl at Urban Outfitters, vaping to Beach House and Tame Impala while scrolling through early versions of Instagram, and ultimately getting way into Carly Rae Jepsen. The concept of the hipster itself had been gentrified too.
Yet this generation of hipsters were still always keeping an eye out for the next big thing, and they had a Spidey-sense for which faux-hipsterish music had become the province of the painfully uncool. Even these late-stage mainstream-loving hipsters were averse to being lumped in with a less enlightened populace. They were still defining themselves against whatever they perceived as unhip. So when “Skinny Love” and “White Winter Hymnal” and “Home” inevitably led to “Little Talks” and “Ho Hey” and, uh, “Home,” hipsters reacted strongly against stomp-clap’s rising tide. You could see how the suspenders, beard oil, and mason jars aesthetic had arisen from the old-timey garb of indie bands like Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, and Iron & Wine, and how much the music had in common with Pitchfork’s favorite folkies. But some kind of millennial-cringe rubicon had been crossed.
Pitchfork, still the barometer for hipster thought in those days, dropped a rather hostile 2.1 on Mumford & Sons’ debut in 2010, with critic Stephen Deusner declaring “this West London quartet really does sound more like a business than a band, supplying value-added products at discount prices.” In a piece decrying Mumford and the Lumineers in 2012, I noted their fan bases’ overlap with Dave Matthews, who had always stood far outside my understanding of cool-kid music. By early 2013, my Stereogum colleague Tom Breihan felt compelled to write an essay defending Mumford & Sons because the hipster consensus against them was so strong. “Critics (and, perhaps more importantly, those fans who profess to have critical taste-levels) tend to regard Mumford as, essentially, dogshit,” he wrote, “even as shinier populists like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga and Adele enjoy general-consensus critical acceptance and sometimes love.”
The massive success of stomp-clap left many people outside hipster circles with the impression that these bands were the new face of hipsterdom. And indeed, many of the bands hipsters liked in the early 2010s were just as bourgeois and radio-friendly as any bowler-hat stomp-clap band. But to hipsters, the stomp-clappers felt like a caricature of the past decade of indie, one that maybe even retroactively tainted the source material. Thus, in the early 2010s hipsters raced as far away from earnest acoustic music as they could. They had plenty of other exciting options, gravitating instead toward a bumper crop of new blog-cultivated rap and R&B talents, a rising wave of Tumblr-beloved alt-pop stars, and electronic experimentalists from labels like Tri Angle and Software. Meanwhile, big-name indie bands with even a whiff of stomp-clap resemblance swiftly retreated from those parts of their sound—think of Arcade Fire pivoting to dance-rock on 2013’s Reflektor or Bon Iver taking years off and returning as electronic experimentalists on 2016’s 22, A Million.
By that point, the hipster subculture had more or less died out, replaced by a burgeoning Trump-era social progressivism that left no room for ironic distance (or even self-awareness sometimes). Stomp-clap might have coincided with the death of hipster culture; maybe it was even the final nail in the coffin. But arguably the last thing hipsters ever did before going extinct was to resoundingly reject that shit. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. If you liked this post, you would definitely like the book.
I've been following this discussion on the indie sleaze IG because I can't handle twitter, but suffice it to say it's a petty topic I have serious feelings about. There's a lot of revisionist history about the whole "hipster" era writ large (I was recently told nobody was using the word until after 2010 ?!) and the claim that anyone who fell into that camp, whether they called themselves that or (much more likely) not, would do much more than shrug at stomp clap, is suspicious. The comparison to Dave Matthews is perfect. It was frat boy music. Hipster costume music.
I may be pushing it with this, but the late stage mason jar hipster era of music, followed by Trump's election and l guess national burnout, seems to have ushered in a short but notable period of musical stagnation before a massive COVID-era boom. I could be talked out of that, but it's something I've been thinking on as I do my own digging into recent history.
normos thinking hipsters listened to the lumineers and shit pisses me off man. the 2009 hipster geography was rife with beautiful music (indie arena rock like japandroids, smell scene like mika miko, npr bullshit like dirty projectors, the beachy lo-fi stuff like early best coast, whatever the drums were, noise pop like times new viking, garage like happy birthday) and fake appalachian wackness was just a distant island. also, can we finally get the story straight on whether "hipsters" drank PBR or drank craft? what the fuck else even is there!!!!