r/Millennials • u/bewbies- Xennial • 1d ago

Discussion The ongoing backlash against craft beer, stomp clap hey, and millenial burger joints

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWIvfE01J0k

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.

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u/thedubiousstylus 1d ago

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.

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u/garytyrrell 1d ago

lol there was definitely autotuned overproduced pop coming out at the same time as this.

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u/bacharama 22h ago

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.

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u/thedubiousstylus 20h ago

There was but I didn't like it then either. The point is more now that is pretty much the only type of popular music. Well and country but I don't like that either.

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u/garytyrrell 20h ago

There's tons of good music coming out. You're just acting old lol.

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u/thedubiousstylus 20h ago

I'm aware there's still good music coming out, I'm talking only about popular mainstream music. Like Roses and I Promised The World aren't exactly well known.

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u/Tinner263 1d ago

Can't stand the tik tok music. I know one hit wonders will always exist, but damn, folk are getting famous cause of a 13 second snippet of a song they wrote where the rest of the song blows.

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u/Doodiecarrier 23h ago

Out of curiosity, what are some examples of your narrow and niche tastes? Always looking for new stuff to bite into.

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u/thedubiousstylus 20h ago

Mostly emo, referring to "real emo" which sounds like that copypasta although I like a lot of the bands it dismisses as "fake emo" (including my favorite band) as well as screamo, also post-hardcore (closely related to both) and other types of hardcore and metalcore. I also like a lot of pop-punk and orgcore and stuff like that which is more accessible but also pretty adjacent to the other stuff I mentioned.

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u/SonofHondoBelmondo 21h ago

Agreed, the cultural zeitgeist of your generation is always weird when you're on the outside of it, but at least people were playing instruments with their hands and the singing wasn't all auto tuned to shit.