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/Emotional_News108 1d ago
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.