Ragstock, my local Hipsters R Us, seems to have pretty stringent hiring criteria. Aside from the obligatory piercings and tats, skin tight attire, indoor sunglasses and the occasional feather boa, all personnel seem to be required to have an aloof personality, the too-cool-for-you of the high school in-crowd. Since friendly customer service is so mainstream, here you get the refreshing feeling that you're wasting the time of a hipster near you.
Or maybe it's me. Perhaps the self-indulgent, self-righteous self-image I have as a sort of pre-beard Abbie Hoffman, trusted by neither side, shows in public. Or, perhaps I'm given the cold shoulder because, as Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character so bluntly put it in Almost Famous, speaking directly to Patrick Fugit and myself, "Hey, I met you. You are not cool."
Seriously, that line always stuck out for me. Like it was written for me.
So, I'm in Ragstock for a good half hour, pawing through plaid which I think might be in right now, and the whole time Brittney Spears is piping in over the speakers. Now, I hate Brittney Spears as any good little h-word should, but I'm not quite content to hate her just because it's in among my subculture to hate her. (And obviously, there are people who are a lot better at the hipster game than I am who are happy to play her music publicly... maybe it's meant to be ironic, which seems to still be in style). I need to qualify in pseudoscientific terms why I hate the Spears, the Gaga, the majority of Top 40 drivel.
I haven't been able to do that to my own satisfaction. But:
Even others who hate a lot of pop music will concede that, "Hey, it's catchy." I can't actually define what "catchy" is, but I'm familiar enough with the phenomenon. And meditating on that, I didn't exactly come up with a formula for why so much pop music is bad, why so much lesser known indie music is better, but I hit upon a phenomenon that some of my favorite bands have in common, and that very few pop stars can claim.
Most pop songs, when they get to a catchy riff or chorus, plaster the song with that bit as much as possible and fill in the rest of the song with boring downtime. It's like the obligatory "plot" of a porn film while you're waiting to see the dick go in. Strip "Poker Face" of its chorus and what you have left is empty filler. Auditory sawdust. Even the bit at the end that sends teenage girls bouncing (the po-po-po-po-po-poker face) is really just riding on the momentum of having had the chorus shoved in the listener's ear repeatedly.
Compare that with a song by one of my new favorite groups, a relatively unknown and (in my opinion -of course, this is a fucking blog) severely underappreciated band. There is no chorus that one could even strip away, and if you can identify the catchiest bit of the song and take it out, there's still plenty of original, interesting material to grab your aural fancy.
Now, granted, I'm comparing two completely different musical styles. I'm also aware that few people listen as closely to and dissect their musical collections. But I thought this was worth note. Radical Face, along with several other bands (The National, The Decemberists, Iron & Wine to name a few) tend to, as often as not, stray away from the chorus-verse format and to surprise us, musically and lyrically, with subtle key changes or vocal antics that show some talent and forethought rather than a cheap formula built on a prefabricated "catchy" nothing.
So maybe I didn't prove a damn thing. But I feel better. Don't you?
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Blog the First - Wherein Our Hero Self-Flagellates To Attone For His Hipsterdom. Sort of.
Watchbands are thick. Jeans are tight. Irony is grandma glasses and a fauxhawk. Ugly is the new sexy and away we go!
Fashion never used to be one of my main concerns. In thirteen years of Catholic school, where the eighties clique cliches held over throughout the nineties, the jocks rebelled by letting their Abercrombie logos peek through their dress-code appropriate polos. The stoners kept their hair flirting precipitously with the tops of their shirt collars, just out of reach of violation and of the vice-principal's rusty scissors. And I bumbled along in whatever my mom found me at K Mart, more or less uninterested in what I wore as long as it could serve to slim me down a bit and hide the slight manboobs I'd had since puberty.
There was an episode of Doug on Nickelodeon that always stuck with me. For those of you who took a wrong turn at Bush Sr. and missed the nineties, just know that Doug was a cartoon staple wherein all of the characters wore the same clothes each episode. One day, the tradewinds of fashion turn toward the outfit that Skeeter, the main character's best friend, has worn without fail since the pilot. Suddenly Skeeter's friends are harping on him for jumping on the trendwagon.
That sums up my adherence to fashion trends for the first, say, 25 years of my life. Plaid, always the friend of the chubby kid who tends to spill, waivers in and out of style and I go with it. I slid into the pre-distressed clothing era with genuinely neglected articles of my own. The rest of the time, I was my usual, sloppy, un-hip self.
Then I met Molly.
Molly had a style that seemed unique, and in a way it was. She could pick over a thrift store for the garments and accessories that had the most unique stitching, most retro floral pattern, or - well, I don't really know. She was an artist, musician and actress and her style seemed to appeal to others with the same talents, people in professions that I admired. I took that to mean that her tastes were good, refined. Nevermind that occasionally what she wore was downright ugly. Vintage T-Shirts (actual vintage, plucked from a rural Minnesota Salvation Army, not a Wal-Mart artificially faded Lucky Charms baseball tee) paired with a floral pattern skirt and tennis shoes was, apparently, a first-rate outfit for an artist.
In the three years we were together she revamped my wardrobe, weeded out most big-label bands from my playlists and threw out my electric hair trimmer, much too precise and therfore inferior to a pair of scissors wielded at a hacking angle.
I was to remain bearded.
Before Molly I had lived on the edge of Hipsterdom, mingled with the (artificially frayed) fringes. But Molly was outspokenly judgmental of other people's fashion. Although she was less direct about my own choices, I was aware of her disapproval of most of my wardrobe and over time grew scared, quite literally frightened, to shop for myself or, at times, even dress myself, depending on the crowd that would be present.
In short, Molly transformed me into a more fully-formed poser, and I remain one to this day. But dammit, I'm going to use this blog (Hipsters blog, right?) to explore, inquire and most of all rationalize the cliches I fall into. My western-cut shirts, squared-off glasses and occasional ugly mustache will be defended against the label of the Hipster.
And I'll complain a lot. Because the web is a good outlet for that.
Stop reading now. It won't get any better than it already is, and it might get a lot worse.
Fashion never used to be one of my main concerns. In thirteen years of Catholic school, where the eighties clique cliches held over throughout the nineties, the jocks rebelled by letting their Abercrombie logos peek through their dress-code appropriate polos. The stoners kept their hair flirting precipitously with the tops of their shirt collars, just out of reach of violation and of the vice-principal's rusty scissors. And I bumbled along in whatever my mom found me at K Mart, more or less uninterested in what I wore as long as it could serve to slim me down a bit and hide the slight manboobs I'd had since puberty.
There was an episode of Doug on Nickelodeon that always stuck with me. For those of you who took a wrong turn at Bush Sr. and missed the nineties, just know that Doug was a cartoon staple wherein all of the characters wore the same clothes each episode. One day, the tradewinds of fashion turn toward the outfit that Skeeter, the main character's best friend, has worn without fail since the pilot. Suddenly Skeeter's friends are harping on him for jumping on the trendwagon.
That sums up my adherence to fashion trends for the first, say, 25 years of my life. Plaid, always the friend of the chubby kid who tends to spill, waivers in and out of style and I go with it. I slid into the pre-distressed clothing era with genuinely neglected articles of my own. The rest of the time, I was my usual, sloppy, un-hip self.
Then I met Molly.
Molly had a style that seemed unique, and in a way it was. She could pick over a thrift store for the garments and accessories that had the most unique stitching, most retro floral pattern, or - well, I don't really know. She was an artist, musician and actress and her style seemed to appeal to others with the same talents, people in professions that I admired. I took that to mean that her tastes were good, refined. Nevermind that occasionally what she wore was downright ugly. Vintage T-Shirts (actual vintage, plucked from a rural Minnesota Salvation Army, not a Wal-Mart artificially faded Lucky Charms baseball tee) paired with a floral pattern skirt and tennis shoes was, apparently, a first-rate outfit for an artist.
In the three years we were together she revamped my wardrobe, weeded out most big-label bands from my playlists and threw out my electric hair trimmer, much too precise and therfore inferior to a pair of scissors wielded at a hacking angle.
I was to remain bearded.
Before Molly I had lived on the edge of Hipsterdom, mingled with the (artificially frayed) fringes. But Molly was outspokenly judgmental of other people's fashion. Although she was less direct about my own choices, I was aware of her disapproval of most of my wardrobe and over time grew scared, quite literally frightened, to shop for myself or, at times, even dress myself, depending on the crowd that would be present.
In short, Molly transformed me into a more fully-formed poser, and I remain one to this day. But dammit, I'm going to use this blog (Hipsters blog, right?) to explore, inquire and most of all rationalize the cliches I fall into. My western-cut shirts, squared-off glasses and occasional ugly mustache will be defended against the label of the Hipster.
And I'll complain a lot. Because the web is a good outlet for that.
Stop reading now. It won't get any better than it already is, and it might get a lot worse.
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