Hipster Revival Now!

Indie Sleaze is a front for something much deeper

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Did you hear? Indie Sleaze is back. You know, like, being indie. Like the platonic Brooklyn. Like Hipster. Like Tumblr-Core-vibes. Like the Arctic Monkeys, LCD Soundsystem, Sleigh Bells. Like flash photography and sexy looks. Like American Apparel. The early 2010s mainstream-underground. It’s back. There’s been a bunch of articles on it. It’s a vibe shift. But isn’t that what people were saying last spring? That we were going through a vibe shift? Did the vibe shift already? Did we change? Am I me? Where do we go when we die?

The trend-cycle can be a strange, destabilizing thing if you choose to believe in it.

Indie Sleaze is a catchall term for a certain subset of aesthetic signifiers that were most prominent from the years 2006 to 2012 and it has come to define a certain concretized idea of mid-aughts “indie-ness” and “hipsterdom.” As Harper’s reports, purveyors of the Indie Sleaze look are harkening back to those who wore “American Apparel gold lamé leggings, sideswept bangs, Richie Tenenbaum headbands, and tank tops with craterous armholes that dipped all the way to the hip bones.” And musically, Indie Sleaze is evoking the time when the young and hip “[listened to] bloghaus, an obscure music genre that mashed up indie, disco, [and] danced the night away to electro-pop bands with perplexing names like New Young Pony Club and Simian Mobile Disco.”

Given that none of these trends happened that long ago, I am very sympathetic to anyone that rolls their eyes at a few choice trends from a recent era being so quickly refashioned into a coherent and referable-to aesthetic movement. Usually, we let time do it’s thing a bit longer before we allow a decade to be compressed into such a sellable package. Yes, these were all tropes that were popular 10+ years ago, but lumping them under a singular banner seems revisionist and sort of corny to me. And noting that a few stray components from that time have made their way back to street style TikToks seems rather insignificant.

But even with my qualms, I do have to say: a certain vibe from 10 + years ago does feel as if it has returned. It’s not so much that a certain style and musical aesthetic has come back, as much as the fact that a certain, stereotypical hipster affect has, maybe, possibly, probably, returned.

My wheels started turning when I read a piece about Perfectly Imperfect’s recent anniversary party in the New York Times. For the uninitiated, Perfectly Imperfect is a Substack newsletter that publishes weekly interviews where an alleged “cool person” recommends the various works of culture and products they enjoy. It’s sort of cute and interesting and maybe marginally useful if one buys into the premise that “cool people like cool things,” as every one of Perfectly Imperfect’s posts begin. Regardless of any skeptical weariness, Perfectly Imperfect is undoubtably a thing and the paper of record covering their big celebratory party was a clear confirmation of that. “I don’t want to seem full of myself or anything,” said Tyler Bainbridge, the newsletter’s founder, “but Perfectly Imperfect will probably be the most sprawling cultural document of who and what was cool during the time we’re in right now.”

While this story of a chic subculture convinced of its own importance may be fairly timeless and thus unremarkable, I found the whole thing to be oddly refreshing. It’s sort of nice, I thought, to see some people be self-assured in their own taste. To see the hipster taste-based warrior back again. They know more than you. They were into X before you were. Their taste is a prized and special thing. Maybe then, Indie Sleaze, or some stereotypical hipsterdom, is back! And thank God. I was craving somebody, anybody, who cared about curation.

honestly haters

Algorithms don’t curate. They recommend.

The two modes are differentiated by the crucial fact that recommendation exists to optimize your consumption. If a music journalist shares a new album with you because it’s cool and interesting, Spotify recommends you a song because it suits your taste and matches an algorithmic prediction of you current mood. So today, you need not seek out the perfect music magazine for your own burgeoning taste. Instead, that magazine will form around you and show up on your Spotify homepage with out any individual mental struggle of your own. And the algorithmic recommendations will probably give you music you “like” in a straight forward way, with no context or story. All simply fed straight to your ears.

And it’s not just music. We get our clothes through targeted ads on Instagram. Even jokes, discourse, ideas arrive to us via the unknowable force of TikTok. In this sense, we are almost never the curators, but the curated. Forces beyond most of our awareness calculate digital signals which stealthily shape our tastes and most of us don’t complain because the calculation usually resonates. But in the process, we lose a sense of what we like and why.

The shift from curation to recommendation happened steadily, but the “Indie Sleaze” era was a time defined by institutions that revolved around some form of human curation. Getting Pitchfork’s “best new music” was the closest thing to making it in music for a certain period, and those that worked at Pitchfork, and were part of the music blog scene in general, spent a whole lot of time, you know, curating and having subjective taste-based opinions etc.

Budding music consumers in an era run by human curators had to contend with others’ perspectives, to negotiate if a music magazine/blog reflected or differed from their own taste. But today, absent a clear curator to point to and deal with, music consumers are left with their own vague algorithm. And that’s a hard thing to wrap your mind around. The code that gives me music recommendation has no name, face or identity. I can complain about how lame and small-minded a given journalist is, but contending with my Spotify algorithm is like screaming at a cloud. In that fuzzy indistinction comes a lessened awareness of my own taste.

And it forces a lessened awareness of what other people are contending with too. We can smoke cigarettes and argue about Pitchfork etc., but when each of us are on our own curatorial island, we have no common vocabulary. We are alone. In an era that operates via recommendation and not curation, we are all our most optimized selves, finding *exactly* what we like, but we are not an optimized culture. We are floating individuals. And maybe not even floating at that. The internet has flooded the zone with content and we’re all just trying not to drown amidst the deluge. One can’t find the shore and catch their sea legs long enough to sneer at their friend. It’s only algorithms that can help us sort through the wreckage, but there’s a cost to that gifted sanity.

Maybe then, 10 years ago feels so retro (and ripe for reappraisal), because the simple curatorial ethos that defined the era’s institutions, feels as if it’s from another lifetime. Blogs, vintage stores, indie labels, magazines, were all led by fallible human curators and gatekeepers. These spaces though have been replaced by a newer internet where we are all the content creators and algorithms are the editors that pick and choose what will be spotlighted. And huzzah, someone like me for example can show up on your FYP on TikTok and suddenly I have a subscriber to my Substack. But the whole process of me reaching you is so inscrutable and singular (surely your friends are not here as well), that the whole process of expanding my artistic network or being part of any somewhat communal conversation is so hopelessly individualized and lonely.

“There is no society” as Margaret Thatcher said.

“Bring back hegemonic tastemakers for us to either agree with or hate, because at least we’d all be talking,” is something I just said.

So if cultural movements rise and fall as basic oppositional forces to the consensus of the mainstream, it makes sense then why an era defined by curation/exclusivity has come back to correct for the over-excess of an era defined by algorithmic sorting. It’s not merely that the trend cycle has quickened and quickened to a dizzying degree, it may simply be that the current cultural subconscious is yearning for some return to pretension, some sort of “cool/uncool” binary. Because in the unclear space that is all of our algorithmic worlds, we may want to construct, however loosely, some new culturally “cool” status quo that we can either opt into or revile.

I think we will see a return of more cultural platforms like Perfectly Imperfect. The hatred of the hipster will return with renewed force as certain subsets try to claim their tastes as distinct and better than the ones shaped by algorithms. And these Neo-hipsters probably will be annoying. And cringey. And pretentious.

But at this point in my life I think there are worse things that being pretentious. You could be basic. For example.