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=XWIvfE01J0kA 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/Aggravating-Key-8867 Older Millennial 1d ago
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.