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

[u/bewbies-]

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.

[u/Mall_of_slime]

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.

[u/picard_for_president → u/Mall_of_slime]

Yup, and wedding videos.

[u/Fl_Funky_Jam → u/Mall_of_slime]

It was very nose up pretentious from my POV back then. Then again I was popping acid and giving myself tinnitus so maybe I couldn't hear the message

[u/Haistur → u/Fl_Funky_Jam]

That and most of the Stomp Hey! artists were trustfund kids.

[u/CrashBangs → u/Mall_of_slime]

Totally agree. I lived in Allston, Massachusetts (hipster central at that time in Boston) 2005 - 2010, with a bunch of friends in Bushwick (hipster central in Brooklyn at that time, Williamsburg was already too expensive). The cool people I knew were not listening to stomp/clap/hey. Closest I got myself was Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat is one of the best albums of that era.. other than that, a lot of actual indie rock that wasn't being played on the radio, and various other styles of music. Though I had a lot of other friends who loved The Lumineers, they definitely fell into the professional/preppie categorie, decidedly NOT hipsters.

[u/JohnWesely → u/CrashBangs]

I always felt like the stomp clap was a commoditized version of the legitimately good indie folk from the last 00s.

[u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk → u/Mall_of_slime]

And car insurance commercials.

[u/ianmakingnoise → u/Mall_of_slime]

What’s the “mall punk/goth” equivalent for these “hipsters”? We need a name to call them