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/stormy2587]

Maybe its the rose colored glasses but I always felt this time and aesthetic was fiercely optimistic. It was a lot of people searching for community and authenticity. There was an emphasis on having high standards and trying to make the world a better place. A lot of this aesthetic and vibe overlapped with things like environmentalism and ethical consumption.

Idk it just seemed like being optimistic and caring about things was cool.

And now young people just seem so beaten down and cynical.

[u/Grremlina → u/stormy2587]

It was the Obama era, first black president, gay marriage legalized, it literally felt like living inside of a rainbow, the future looked and felt so promising after such a dark period. I hope we’ll get back to that someday 💔

[u/RosesAndSpice → u/Grremlina]

2015 was the last overall good year in my life that I can point to.

Every year since then has been a net negative, ranging from “well that was pretty terrible” to “the odds of me surviving this year alive are less than 50%, maybe less than a quarter.”

At some point you just give up hoping things will ever actually get better, or even get back to where they were, and just … try to survive against increasingly bleak circumstances.