How Everyone Became a Hipster

Maybe it’s what you’ve always wanted: The fall of the Internet’s most pretentious music blog. At the start of the year, Condé Nast—the digital media conglomerate that owns popular publications like The New Yorker, Vogue, Bon Appétit, Vanity Fair, and, since 2015, Pitchfork—announced that the “the Most Trusted Voice in Music” would be cutting a large chunk of its editorial staff and eventually reducing it to the music section of another one of its properties, GQ. 

While the site continues to be functional and active, the future of the magazine is unclear.

Almost immediately, premature obituaries of Pitchfork flooded social media; journalists mourned another ferocious round of layoffs; long-time readers lamented what appeared to be the nadir of an institution already in decline; and fans of bands that were often slighted by the site’s acerbic critiques celebrated its demise. 

Indeed, Pitchfork has always been a source of contention. From their pH-like rating system and sometimes cruel evaluations—who could forget when editors green-lit a review which was simply a video of a monkey pissing into its mouth—to their often idiosyncratic, obscurist taste, the culture surrounding the website emanated a sense of elitist, holier-than-thou appreciation. The stereotype was that the average Pitchfork consumer tended to scoff at chart-topping music and would bring up “this Danish pop band” with an “electro-punk bend” called something like “Beowulf in Sheep’s Clothing” during casual conversation.  

And nowhere was this subculture more properly expressed than the Pitchfork Music Festival, the premier showcase of the hipster band. 

Once exclusively concerned with indie rock, underground rap, and experimental dance music, the event is now more inclusive in almost every sense of the word, save perhaps the ever-increasing price tag. Nearing its 20th anniversary in Chicago’s Near West Side, Pitchfork’s jamboree now features a slate of acts that feels like much less of a boys’ club, while still offering the kind of foresight that helped it popularize some of this century’s most important artists. After all, everyone from Beach House and Vampire Weekend to Kendrick Lamar and SZA played the fest before punching their ticket to the big time. 

Returning to the festival for the first time in five years—and in light of the supposed end of Pitchfork—I found that, unsurprisingly, things had changed. There were exclusive viewing sections that towered over the masses, bougie cocktail lounges, and the urban canopy looking over Union Park was now dotted with emotionless 5-over-1 condominiums. The lineup was incongruous though still contained a collection of talented performers; it couldn’t decide exactly who it was appealing to. It seemed designed more as an Experience than the dedicated music expo I had grown up with. 

I still enjoyed myself. After all, going to concerts and day drinking isn’t exactly a journalistic chore. Yet I was struck by how alien the experience felt. Everyone felt psychologically quarantined from each other, working less like a crowd and more as armies of one—an aloof distance guiding the channels in which people congregated. It seemed we were all hipsters now. 

There was a time when such a proposition would have seemed unlikely, not to mention insulting. Hopelessly trendy, downwardly mobile, and sardonically removed from the chaos of the imperial fringe, this cohort of younger Gen-Xers and geriatric Millennials once roamed free amongst the rustic dive bars and hole-in-the-wall galleries. To be grouped into this set was, especially through the first decade and a half of the millennium, to be a part of the much-maligned “hipster” phenomenon. 

Gone were the days when subcultures were rooted in any social and political geography. Instead, to exist outside the mass culture was to be involved in a lifestyle, where consumption was the most prominent signifier of inclusion. 

As the culture critic Mark Grief observed, this signaled the end of any defiant existence external to the ubiquitous, state-backed corporate monolith. “The contemporary hipster seems to emerge out of a thwarted tradition of youth subcultures, subcultures which had tried to remain independent of consumer culture, alternative to it, and been integrated, humiliated, and destroyed,” Grief wrote. 

A cultural cannibal, the archetypal hipster was a subject who sewed details from various moments of the past and present into an anachronistic tapestry: There’s an emphasis on tribal print, but you wore it to your hyper-sophisticated tech job; you had pilfered your stodgy parents’ flannels and sunglasses to create a new, pseudo-punk aesthetic; during your shift at the combination cafe-record store, you’d drink the latest concoction that state-of-the-art coffee technology could offer but out of an ironic, fading Bugs Bunny mug. All of this was meant to indicate a separation from the formalized, trite rigidity of Bush-era strip-mall chic. 

If brands like American Apparel, drinks like Pabst Blue Ribbon, and occupations like graphic designer were the clerical collar of this new specimen, then Pitchfork was its bible. Above all other artistic mediums, it was music—with the birth of MP3 and the explosion of cheap music software—that became the cultural currency of the hipster moment. Being in the know on the latest bands and performers was to be tapped into one of the few outlets left that could provide a semblance of communal catharsis—to be ensconced in the rhythm of a vintage 808 was to forget that mass politics had ceased. Yes, we’re trapped between the carnage of the Iraq War and the end of the affordable single-family home, but at least the bands are great. 

But as someone too young to see Nirvana in concert but old enough to have attained technological literacy, places like Pitchfork provided immediate gratification. While the heyday of punk—which we’ll generously stretch from barbaric performances of The Stooges to the post-Reagan drone of My Bloody Valentine—was well into the rearview, the internet offered both an interactive archive of that past and an endless stream of what the future might hold. When you’re a teenager preoccupied with the psychological freedom that pop and rock music affirms, it’s reassuring to know there are entire teams of obsessives dedicated to cataloging its contemporary history. And Pitchfork was a keystone organism in the newly minted music blog ecosystem, which promised to deliver you from the mundanity of the mainstream. 

There was, however, an inherent contradiction. The transfer of music culture into the digital frontier, a space that claimed to grant boundless variety, presented only the illusion of independence and rebellion. It was commerce and advertising that had come to dominate the process of cultural production—especially when it came to appropriating its most seditious elements.

“Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by The Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott Heron (‘the revolution will not be televised’); peace symbols decorate a line of cigarettes manufactured by R. J. Reynolds and the walls and windows of Starbucks coffee shops nationwide; the products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as devices of liberation; and advertising across the product-category spectrum calls upon consumers to break rules and find themselves,” the author Thomas Frank noted with some prescience in his 1998 book, “The Conquest of Cool.” 

Put another way, any personal transgression would simply be absorbed into the zeitgeist. Everything was permitted, but nothing was possible. 

Meanwhile, curating your individualism has become the most crucial form of expression, and the customs of the hipster have become our new normal: With the aid of the vaunted algorithm, the practice of subculture has collapsed, and everything is stripped of context. Even Taylor Swift—who once complained about a boyfriend who preferred “some indie record” to her own music—adopted the mason jar tinted, bucolic tones of The National and Bon Iver to expand her critical appeal. 

As such, our consumption of culture has simultaneously become tailored to our own specific, quotidian preferences while also being bent to the will of the focus group. And this pincer has smothered the means for experimentation and innovation in the arts. The opportunity to breed community around shared mediums has been replaced by the “spontaneity” of zeros and ones. Trying to find a new piece of culture that sticks with you longer than 15 seconds can often feel like playing Russian roulette with a Gatling gun. 

That’s what Pitchfork was good for — until recently. Its editorial line was crafted by actual human beings, and examined a wide array of underground artists, regardless of their marketability. And to some extent, even in its neutered state, it still does. At the festival this year, bands like Wednesday—-which combines buzzsaw distortion with frank, Carson McCullers-inflected folk rock—and rappers like billy woods— whose sardonic prose tangles perfectly with his caustic, yet desolate instrumentals—released some of the most impressive works that either genre has seen in years. 

But the festival didn’t stop there. It also featured groups like controversial headliners Black Pumas, a retro soul troupe whose music sounds AI-generated, and Muna, a queer pop three-piece that will inevitably soundtrack a Pride event sponsored by Raytheon. These acts seemed to augur an independent music scene where symbolic political branding triumphs over actual artistry. 

This disconnected curation, which seemed designed to condense ten different sensibilities into a fine paste, was rumored to have been pushed by Anna Wintour, the Vogue matriarch and Condé Nast’s Global Chief Content Officer. As everyone becomes a hipster, so does every piece of human expression fall under the category of “Content.” This extended to the actual infrastructure of the festival, which had VIP spaces and boutique stalls that cried out to be included in your Instagram story. 

Even some of the acts seemed frustrated by the state of affairs. 100 Gecs, the merry pranksters of modern pop, appeared anxious to finish their gig. Will Anderson, the frontman of the scuzzy rock outfit Hotline TNT, sarcastically claimed to have “just found out about [Pitchfork] yesterday,” as if being connected to the magazine in any way was cringe-inducing. Get through it and move on. Just another stop on the increasingly amorphous summer festival circuit. 

Still, the end of the Saturday lineup left me jubilant. Unwound, a hardcore band from the Pacific Northwest, was due to begin their set. From the early 90s into the start of the new millennium, guitarist-singer Justin Trosper and drummer Sara Lund scraped by as punk rock underdogs that never got their due, until 2013 when their full discography was reissued. This birthed a new wave of admirers and they inevitably reunited. 

Through a Pitchfork review, I discovered them and became transfixed. Their music pulverized you and then cradled you in a dreary melody. Trosper’s axe fires off a hypnotizing torrent of screeches and hums. Lund’s rhythms create a trance before slamming you into a concrete wall. Their lyrics center on a feeling of detached ennui not unlike that found in the fiction of Albert Camus. 

As a committed fan—and someone who never thought they’d play again—the set was both surreal and ecstatic. They ended on one of my favorite tracks: “For Your Entertainment.” It’s in a classic loud-quiet-loud format that hits thudding valleys and power-chord-riddled peaks before collapsing on itself in the chorus via a singular, screeching tremolo.

“ENNN-TERRR-TAIN-MENT!” Trosper heaves. 

But right before that happens, Trosper calmly hums these lines: “Suffer for your sins, Pay you by the hour, Follow any trend that comes their way, They will pick your life apart, And throw away your art, Finding something new is never hard.”