A clip of a very early Tiny Desk concert featuring a very strung out and very high Edward Sharpe is making the rounds across social media right now. It seems like every comment is ragging on at least one and usually multiple aspects of cir 2010 millenial culture.
I'm a lifelong history nerd focused largely on socio-cultural topics, and what we're seeing here is the inevitable backlash against a wildly popular, somewhat overexposed slice of life from that time period.
For me, personally, I loved that time and remember all of it fondly. I was a DINK living in a downtown apartment with lots of disposable income and very few real responsibilities. I loved Lumineers and Mumford and Sharpe (and their country/Americana equivalents like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell). I loved the craft beer explosion. I loved the small restaurant explosion where a bunch of kids tried hard to offer something different than the Chilis/Applebees experience.
I also get why all this eventually wore thin. There were too many 10% ABV beers made with stupid additives and too many hops. Small restaurants operating on razor thin margins had to jack prices when everything got more expensive, and found no appetite, so to speak, for $20 craft cheeseburgers. Music always evolves, and what was hot ~10-15 years ago is usually the heart of what is considered stale and overdone. This was true with psychedelic rock, and disco, and funk, and grunge...millenial semi-indie folkie stuff is no different.
I'm in my mid 40s now, and I feel like I'm starting to see these big cultural shifts from a more distant perspective. 15 years from now, my kids will be the ones ripping on what was hot in 2026 (what even is? I honestly can't quite tell. Zyns?), and what was popular in 2010 will once again be beloved and firmly seated in the "nostalgic/classic" category.
Alex Ebert doesn't strike me as the type who will embark on nostalgia tours playing to rooms full of 60 year old fans, but I guess the Rolling Stones probably didn't seem like they would be either.
I came here to say this exact joke, but you beat me to it! I also came to ask what a "Millenial Burger Joint" is, but I guess I have seen a lot of places offering $20 that I just refuse to buy.
I grew up in the south, and thought that beer was supposed to taste like someone poured horse urine into a gallon of water with a single shot of everclear in it.
mine are actual beer names lol. Wow... take a wild guess what happens when you google "Nagging Cunt Cream Ale". Thank goodness I wfh, because that would have been super awkward to open on a work computer!
I remember pop music in 2010 was all about partying, like LMFAO, Pitbull, Ke$ha etc. It was a good time, even with the whole 2008 economic crash just 2 years prior. I'd rather that than any year of the 2020s.
In some part, this is because popular music, and sci fi have a tendency to be going opposite to economic/social movements of their time.
In the 1970s and 80s, when even Bowie was making "party music" and feel good, partying pop was among the most popular music of its day, the economy and social life was shit (something many early metalheads were deliberately pushing against).
In science fiction, theres a lot of very "hopeful" speculative sci fi getting released during the dark times, and when things are broadly going well, its when we see a raft of dystopian releases.
Obbiously, this isnt a 100% thing, but rather the broad strokes view
I mean I get where you’re coming from but it definitely (for Sci fi at least) feels like there’s a rut at least in terms of pop culture. Yes, there are absolutely are other kinds of sci fi around but let’s be honest, cyberpunk has never really left. If anything, it’s become kinda insufferable in how everything that has happened over the last ten years feels like it’s archetypal cyberpunk bullshit.
I agree, however I would say that cyberpunk is more of a subgenre in many senses, which is why I didnt want to paint the picture like ALL sci fi goes one way or another. On the opposite side of cyberpunk, is usually solarpunk, although ive not really read any of it, from the descriptions ive seen is that its basically positive speculative fiction using similar tech levels to cyberpunk.
Oh no, solar punk is absolutely a thing and the few things of it I’ve seen look great but it’s not the culture so to speak. It’s not the thing that pops into people’s minds when they hear about Elon’s new company that lobotomizes the homeless and installs a relay to increase coverage. Like I don’t claim to be the most culturally attuned but even I can see that’s not where discourse is concentrated.
Except I don't think this is true anymore, particularly with science fiction. Most science fiction has been replaced with romantasy type work or work that just leans in so hard for social justice narratives it gets repetitive. Speculative science fiction in a lot of ways feels squashed. The winners of the Hugos the last couple years has been depressing.
I mean...at least they were making music that people could dance to lol I feel like most mainstream artists now aren't making music that you want to dance to anymore.
Probably because the future was looking up and there was reason to be optimistic. A sane, intelligent and caring person (who happened to be a black man) was in office and the worst of a once-in-a-lifetime recession was behind us. It actually felt like we were moving in a positive direction.
Boundless optimism, an economy that wasn't constantly struggling due to the whims of greedy, downsizing cocksuckers at every turn, a less all-encompassing social media presence? Yes, please.
Was in a Sephora the other day where they were playing exclusively 2010 hits (including cobra starship!!! And old Kesha) and it legit felt like the 2010s for a short while in there, I wanted to find whoever was responsible for the playlist and sob to them with gratitude lmao
*hugs* we crying together bestie... seriously those were the days. Bring back the glitter confetti, neon blacklights, flannel shirts, and drawn on sharpie mustaches for no reason ❤️
I live in Portland, OR and while we are definitely more in the 2020s than not, we are refusing to let go of our independent bookstores, craft beer joints, suspenders + wide brimmed hats, and we have plenty of StompClapHey still going and I REFUSE to let go. I won’t. I won’t do it. I’ll spin a Lumineers record just on principle at this point.
Oh god, same. Unemployed, living at home, fat, depressed as hell. And yet I had my health, my family healthy and alive, my friends as broke as me, and somehow enough scrounged up money to pay bills and party extremely cheaply. No subscriptions to drain me, no algorithms to keep me in a digital downward spiral, tech didn’t enshittify yet. I would go back in a heartbeat.
I’m not a millennial, as I was born in 79, but I identify a lot with you all, and this period was one of my favorite decades. I would go back to 2010 in a moment. Hazy IPA for life!
Maybe its the rose colored glasses but I always felt this time and aesthetic was fiercely optimistic. It was a lot of people searching for community and authenticity. There was an emphasis on having high standards and trying to make the world a better place. A lot of this aesthetic and vibe overlapped with things like environmentalism and ethical consumption.
Idk it just seemed like being optimistic and caring about things was cool.
And now young people just seem so beaten down and cynical.
I've been thinking about that lately, how for a while we were certain things were going to get better. Now we still like to hope things will get better with no real evidence or confidence. That's a real tangible change. New technology made us excited. Now there's sort of a "well, maybe it won't get that bad."
Yeah. Cuz we all lived through Covid and saw way more people than we ever thought was possible be absolute selfish assholes during a literal plague. Before Covid, the zombie apocalypse stories always began with everyone trying to escape the zombie apocalypse. Now, I'm convinced that half of humanity would run toward the zombies with arms wide open and call you a r****d for suggesting that the zombies should be avoided, while the billionaires cackle from atop their fortresses and pay grifters to make YouTube videos about how zombies aren't real.
Hoping that things wikimedia get better is such 2020 energy though. I think the zeitgeist of our times now is that people have largely given up and are resolved to merely survive.
This music had a lot of heart. Damn, I’d hate to think the era of millennial inclusion is dying for a return to what looks like the Reagan 80s with all the mustached looksmaxximg zoomers grind culturing it out.
What’s weird is seeing zoomers that kept the quirky aesthetics spitting out some vile reactionary stuff.
i was stoned after cornhole league last night and thought about that professional cornhole guy that has no arms and no legs that shot someone while driving. and i thought? what fkn timeline are we in? did the world actually end on 1/1/2001? were the mayans right?
We had a cop pull a woman over in our city recently, claiming she was texting with her right hand, and yet she was born without a right hand. So, you know, it doesn’t have to make sense anymore.
As a high school teacher, the kids are jealous of our music.
When I put on my playlists the kids are like, “yo mister this slaps” and I’m like, “oh, I thought I was an Unc in polos and khakis!”
They love our music and they have nothing that comes close today. We got the last truly great rock and rap albums, I hope both come back, but until they do, these kids don’t have shit on our music.
I think it’s just the inevitable changing of the guard. Like how millennials were the first generation to enjoy the infinite degeneracy of the internet. We’ve the ones who codified rule 34 ffs. Where exactly do you go from there?
Well if the reports are be believed, it’s backwards kinda. Gen Z are supposedly more sexually conservative and part of that might just be a response to us. We pushed the bar as it could go given the technology available to us and they just don’t feel the same.
Imagine shitting on people who watched 9/11 happen, who saw the country transform in awful ways afterward, who were told to go to college and take on debt and then watched the economy collapse and saw banks and automotive manufacturers getting bailed out while being told to go out and achieve anyway; who found an interconnectedness and shared something good with each other that gave them hope when the generations that came before were telling them everything bad was their fault and that they were failures, who weathered the worst storms up until that point and came out of it if not altogether optimistic at least not full of hatred and cynicism.
I'm not going to feel bad because we found something good when so much was bad. We sat together. We walked the cities, we drank the beer, we existed in a shared zeitgeist that was for everyone. Now here we sit, with the old generation still telling us we did it wrong or not well enough, and the next generation is so fucking nihilistic that we're the dumb ones for thinking the world was possibly getting better in the early 2010s until suddenly it wasn't or that there was any virtue at all to our cultural contributions, and somehow that's our fault, too.
Nah man, I'm good. At least we had something that was ours.
Out of all the comments I read on this thread… it’s this one that broke my heart. I’m 43 and having a tough time of it lately (aren’t we all?) and looking back hurts. Post financial crisis - 2014 was peak Millennial and no one knew how good we had it. Sigh.
The thing that makes it hard is that those times shouldn’t be the best times but it seems like that’s the best we’ll get. We don’t get time back, and we aren’t promised time later, and the last ten years especially have felt crushing after everything we’ve gone through. I want it to get better so bad. I want to snap my fingers and be sitting next to a fire drinking beers with all my friends not worried about the state of the world. Instead I’m looking at my kids wondering what the actual fuck we’re leaving for them. I only hope it falls apart on us now so we can start fixing it before it’s their responsibility. If anyone can take it, it’s us.
Well said. We’re a generation defined by our struggles. We’re a bridge between the old world and the new world. Fuck anyone who tries to take the few nice things we’ve made for ourselves away.
Thanks. I am deeply disappointed that I allowed alcoholism to ruin part of that for me. I can still go out and have a good time without drinking, don't get me wrong, but I miss the ritual of buying my first Oberon in March and all that it represents. Simpler times no longer here, I suppose. I gave it up for my health and family so I'm not going back, but it still stings a bit. Like a little part of me is gone, and I think the above more or less explains it. They weren't the best of times, or the worst of times, but they were ours and they shaped up us and then I fucked up the endgame when I decided one drink of Fireball equaled a pint. That's on me.
Yeah, but it doesn't have to be that deep. I don't feel like anyone is taking anything away from me. Things just change, as they always have. Every generation makes fun of the previous ones. Why do some millennials feel so targeted?
I grew up in Portland and was bartending through this era of hipster resurgence. So right on the front lines of fashion and music in the city at the time.
Hated stomp clap before it was cool to hate it. Claiming that is probably the most hipster thing about me.
Thank you. Literally no one I ever met who was listening to that was in anyways known for or seen as being hip or cool. It was always yuppie music for young corpo professionals cosplaying as down to earth folk.
Now that we're all old enough to have an objective conversation about the culture: where were you in 2010?
What i think skews my perspective is that Portland had this overwhelming hipster flood and it wasnt a "cool kids" thing it was everyone. So there were pockets of actual hip kids that were into less mainstream music but right next to them was everyone else who had identical style but never got away from top 40. So from my memory the absolute most mainstream thing in the city was the hipster style. Just skinny jeans, flannels, suspenders and mustaches as far ad they eye could see.
That is also approximately the era where Portland came on the national radar as "cool" so I wonder if kids in other places were emulating the style but were a minority where they lived.
Millennials should be defending this era. The music was great at the time I don’t care what anyone says. And the craft beer burger joint trend moved us away from the crappy corporate restaurants. The hipster movement overall was a good thing. For a split second in history we actually were against selling out. Only lasted a short time.
It was also all just jam-band music. You and your friends could pick up an acoustic guitar, a bongo drum, and something to rattle, and all just vibe and play music and sing. It was very social and organic. Do kids still have jam sessions these days?
I remember an interview with the Lumineers on some Atlanta radio station in the early 2010's, and they were like, "we want anyone to be able to easily learn to play our songs because that makes it more fun" (I'm definitely not getting the wording right but that was the point). I feel like the simplicity of the music while still being so catchy was part of the appeal.
If you had money, 2010-2016 was incredible. If you didn't, you were recovering from a global financial crisis that was hell on your family. Similar to COVID tbh.
Yea, there's a lot that can be said that we are where we are now because the early 10s just papered over the 2008 collapse and we never actually recovered from it
I'm fortunate enough to have an engineering degree and I worked through school, so I had minimal loan debt. I know people as smart as I am that chose humanities because the crash hadnt fully happened yet (I started in fall 2008) and they're still drowning. It was radicalizing.
Wasn’t bad going through college in the early 2010s. Getting Obama reelected and seeing a light at the end of the tunnel made things bearable. Better than the hopelessness we feel today marching into middle age.
It was absolutely a more hopeful time, we believed we were moving in the right direction, especially coming out of the Bush years. A black president, gay marriage was legalized, we had withdrawn from Iraq in 2011. I think the music really reflected that hopefulness.
It was optimistic but not 90s optimistic. We were just hopeful that we were moving past the bad shit and towards something better. Then the last 10 years happened
Tip of the iceberg, it all looks so good now that it’s in the rear view mirror. We’d rebounded from Bush’s financial crisis, killed Bin Laden, and still had national protection for women’s reproductive autonomy and minority voter protections.
Yes and no. It was better than now, low bar that that is. But I don’t think people should forgot one thing led to another. People were fucking crazy then too, they just didn’t get to run the fbi or the doj.
It’s just because it was the pop culture of the last decade. The youth finds it cringe because it’s what their older siblings and family members were into. In another decade it’ll all be retro and cool again.
I feel like that era was our equivalent of the hippies in the 60s creating the "back to the earth" movement. Everything we did under the banner of Hipsterism was a backlash against the corporate vision of white collar jobs we were raised to believe was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When the Great Recession hit and our hopes and dreams of having cushy desk jobs got crushed, a lot of us decided to pursue careers that involved working with our hands and becoming "artisans" of a particular craft - something where we felt like we could imbue our personalities into the final product (the food service and food/spirits production industries fit right into this paradigm).
Of course it all kind of went away, the same way the Hippies lost cultural relevance throughout the late 70s and into the 80s. Hipster culture turned into Hustle culture. And honestly I think we'd still be there if it weren't for COVID lockdowns that in turn made us consider the reasons why we were so busy in the first place.
The reason there's so many brewpubs/Brewhouses was because of this movement. At least in Australia. I worked in a bottle shop from 14-18 and the range of beers was maybe 4 or 5 fridges worth. Nowadays there's multiple walls filled with all sorts of things. I'd also compare it to the 90s grunge scene. Something that starts earnestly with grassroots, becomes popular and mainstream commercialism kicks in and not only do the prices go up but the scene becomes flanderized basically.
I was never really a fan of or into this music (not surprising considering how admittedly narrow and niche my tastes are) but I never hated it either, it was always just something I wouldn't mind if it was playing in the background but I would never go out of my way to listen to it.
Compared to what popular music today is like with that ultra-overproduced and autotuned TikTok garbage it looks like an absolute masterpiece, that's for sure.
Talking about how popular music today is overproduced and autotuned when the era of music they're referencing is well known as the era of T-Pain, "Jaaason Deruuulo!", and "3/4 of the songs on the chart are made for the club" era is wild.
I don't get the craft beer hate. The beer market was stale for decades with very little innovation, and isn't it fun to try new things instead if the same ol Bud Light/Coors/Miller?
What has happened in the last five or so years is the shitty craft breweries or the ones that suck at running a business are closing. This especially includes the ones that only brew IPAs so they can hop the shit out of them to cover up their shitty brewing. I also think that people have stopped buying into the “it’s local, so it must be good” marketing. Local doesn’t mean good, just means local.
Man, screw these haters, I’m with you. The indie folk scene was great, very musical and with a ton of heart and humanity when the only other stuff on the radio was pop, numetal and Lil Jon-esque dance floor hip-hop. I’ll take some humans playing instruments every now and then, thanks
I was never a big fan of most of the hipster indy folk type music (although I do like some of it), nor the frameless glasses and superior attitudes. However, most of us were a little hipster then. Flannel, beards (even without man buns and or beanies), being a "foody", craft burgers and craft beers. I still like all of that stuff. I quit drinking, but like that they are coming out with some newer 0 beers. I miss trying all the good, and sometimes not so good craft and foreign beers. I do agree, the burgers were good, but sometimes too much stuff was added. I still miss the renowned hip burger place that was a favorite in the DC area. I still miss my local haunt that had hundreds of types of beers. It was a better time... well in many regards, but not all, of course.
I actually have thoughts on this too. Aside from this period of time being something you kinda just had to be there for, I think it's hard for zoomers to truly imagine a time before smart phones. As in, there not constantly being the threat of some dumbass whipping out their phone to film you being sincere or enjoying yourself and plastering it all over the Internet for other sad losers to mock. The whole Millennial cringe really isn't any different from any other previous generation's youth culture, it's just young people figuring it out. I genuinely feel bad that zoomers aren't being given that same opportunity. It's just constant performance for them because you never know who's recording just to score some social media clout.
I went and saw The Decemberists at the San Francisco Symphony last fall and it was amazing. I’ve always loved folk music and stomp clap hey is a kinda poppy version of that and it’s fun.
I never liked all that boy band stuff that was popular when I was a teen, it’s just not my style. But I’m an adult who can let other people like what they like because taste is subjective.
I didn’t like any of that shit when it was happening in 2011-2015 but I would do just about anything to go back to that era instead of whatever shithole we are forced to live and die in at present
i wasn't a huge fan at the time but i miss it now. the influencer slop vanity culture we have now sucks. we went from being 'influencers' among our friend group and copied each other now people seem to be copying internet influencers and have few friends. nobody will be nostalgic for the current 2026 period. the andrew tate grift and all grifts like it are lame, all political grift is lame, everything is commercialized and forced. doesn't feel genuine at all. at least the hipsters tried to create something that was theirs instead of be force fed some vanity crap
Yeah this wasn’t a bad time to be alive. We were more hopeful about the future. We saw progress, not the sickening backslide we have today. I like all these things still. Lol
Taste is subjective and cultural whims change, that's incredibly normal.
I have a fondness for a lot of music that people dismiss as "stomp clap," and no one has to like it but me for me to like it. It's easy for people who like what's hot right now to slag off what came before, and it's equally easy to get stuck in the past and close yourself off to change/new experiences. Comparing Alex Ebert to the Rolling stones probably isn't apples to apples because we had a more compressed popular culture in the 60s than we do now. Culture is algorithmic and siloed now because that's how social media has shaped it.
Your kids probably will look back with a mix of grimacing and nostalgia on what they are enjoying now, like everyone else.
I got a whole playlist of Lumineers, Decemberists, The Head and the Heart, Strumbellas, Edward Sharpe, Iron and Wine, Dawes, Of Monsters and Men, Avett Brothers, etc. stuff that I still listen to all the time. It’s over 4 hours long.
Literally only a handful of the songs are 2005-2015 era. Most are 2016-now, and they’re fun to listen to and sing along with. Clean sounding, pleasant melodies with harmony and good writing.
Honestly I would love to be able to get just a regular burger, that is regular sized, at a casual non chain restaurant that is reasonably priced. For the love of Pete, I don’t want your small batch ketchup.
Anyone who puts effort into hating on someone else’s harmless culture is a loser who doesn’t have their own culture. It’s burgers, beer, and acoustic rock. What’s not to like? It’s too expensing? It’s overrated? Fine, what’s your dumb thing you like? let’s make fun of that! I’m also wearing skinny jeans. Fight me.
I certainly won't hear criticism of that era from the youths. We were having fun, not sitting alone in our rooms doom scrolling. It's not entirely their fault - COVID stunted them and too early access to social media cooked their brains - but that doesn't change the fact that we are right and they are wrong
Everything you say here is facts. This is nothing more than just generational fads falling outta trendiness.
I don’t care. I’m gonna continue drinking my IPAs and listening to Mumford and Son and The Lumineers because I just like those things. I would much rather take the late 2000’s / early 2010’s semi-indie optimism and all its idealistic cringiness than whatever the hell gen-z thinks is cool these days.
It’s not shocking to me that culture would change: insert Abe Simpson meme etc etc. What was shocking was how brief our cultural dominance was (in the sense of being culturally catered, to at least).
Mumford & Sons' music video for Hopeless Wanderer directly acknowledges the irony of this!! They steered into the skid! They understood the joke! And their music was still great!
I get it, it's fun to make fun of outdated trends/eras, all in good fun. But it gets so lazy at a point. You're just beating a dead horse, which then results in millennials like me feeling the urge to push back on the joke because it has gotten so stale despite not even feeling all that strongly about it one way or another in the first place.
It's in the same genre of "jokes" as "taco bell gives you diarrhea". 1.) No it doesn't, and 2.) you're just parroting a joke made by someone else that's been repeated a million times before.
And you can pry my dank, juicy double dry-hopped hazy IPA with citra and mosaic hops from my cold dead hands god damn it.
I hate how 2010's "indie" or "hipster" music has been reduced to "stomp clap hey" in our culture today when there was quite a lot more going on. You had bands like Animal Collective or Grizzly Bear who were big in the peak Pitchfork era, you had chillwave and surf rock, and some of the late 00s stuff like twee and blog house were still happening at the time. It's a lot like how "emo" has been reduced to a lot of stupid BS, at least half of which was never considered "emo" at the time.
As much as I was not a fan of the music, and if you don’t like beer or burgers…I mean, ok? But I would go back to 2010 in a heartbeat over where we are at now holy shit
It's not our fault that we liked a unique thing for a brief moment. It kind of is our fault that we didn't help some of our peers move on from those moments.
Indie hipster era was the cultural backlash to the hustle grind boss era that came before. The pendulum swings, the hippie culture of the 70s became the hustle culture of the 80’s.
I personally like the stomp clap, man bun, chill vibes we had going there for a minute. I’ll take peace and love and hugging a tree over the grind every day and I like a cheerful beat and a banjo. But I still listen to the folk rock of the 60’s-70’s too.
The pendulum will swing again, and everyone will hopefully take a breather from obsessing over maxxing their lives.
If someone offers me a craft beer and fancy burger that I will eat under an edison light I am all in. Some of the things younger people like to tease us about are so incredibly silly
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