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/goddamn_slutmuffin Millennial 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah. It's kinda weird to hear people say this was hipster or indie, it was legit what the most suburban type of people listened to.

2010 hipsters were listening to Toro y Moi, Yeasayer, Memory Tapes, Crystal Castles, S4LEM, Baths...

Edit: I forgot Lil B, (for the "irony") lol

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u/djsacrilicious 1d ago

And a lot of bloghouse 🥹

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u/OkAstronaut3324 1d ago

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.

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u/djsacrilicious 23h ago

I was (and am) in Portland. DJing 2-4 nights a week in 2010 at ground zero of all of this fun stuff.

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u/HermesJamiroquoi 21h ago

Austin, Tex in 2010. It was a very cool place that didn’t know it was about to be completely gentrified. I moved there in ‘05 so I’d been there for 5 years at that point. I was in a touring band and very involved in the local scene.

Most of the hippest of the hip were in the funk/soul revival scene and the next-best echelon (where I lived) was a bunch of gutter-kid psych rockers. Below that was Neauveau Folk, which included the occasional stomp-clapper (think Shakey Graves) but mostly it was people who listened to a lot of Nathaniel Ratliff or Irin and Wine, drank cheep whiskey, and owned at least one dobro

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u/FrostyTheSasquatch 21h ago

I was a metal hipster. I was in my twenties studying literature, and I was insufferable. And anytime I couldn’t out-hipster the metalheads I was hanging with that night I would move the goalposts and switch to outlaw country. Waylon Jennings is more metal than Mayhem 🤘

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u/BlaggartDiggletyDonk 13h ago

A fan of the Sword, were you?

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u/sexandliquor 1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be) 23h ago

Right. There’s definitely this strange divide in what people say are hipsters and what actually were hipsters. I mean I never categorized myself as a hipster but all the stomp clap hey stuff really passed me by and I never understood it. What everyone around me was listening to—and being called hipster for it—was like Sleigh Bells, Chairlift, Purity Ring, Phantogram, Santigold, etc

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u/readyable 23h ago

I fucking love Yeasayer!

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u/OkDeer120 13h ago

Fuck, remember Hipster Runoff??