Hipster is over, I think, in part because no one can — or wants to — claim their individuality at this point. It is neither interesting nor logical to separate oneself from the herd. The herd is desirable for safety in the midst of destabilization. The herd must be leveraged as an audience in order to survive as any kind of artist. The influencer is the opposite of, and the successor to, the hipster, because rather than claiming to shun attention or resist fandom they actively court it. Selling out is not an issue when selling out is the sole means of survival.
Hipsters are irrelevant today because our culture is post-authenticity — and we may have gotten there through social media, but the tech we love to blame is intertwined with larger scale societal shifts, both amplifying existing trends and sparking new changes. The tech is not blameless, but nor will banning it solve our problems.
We’re no less interested in signalling than in the age of the hipster, but even the rich don’t necessarily want to stand out as rich anymore: we all want to appear to be an everyperson. Visual “taste” has converged as we observe more people, more trends, and more lifestyles on social media — and algorithms reward sameness. Mr. Beast is the figurehead of this celebration of the average. Social media facilitates this trend, but the underlying want to belong, and near universal perception of precarity driving the desire to not stand out, are social.
Personal taste is paradoxically harder to cultivate when you can listen to any album on Spotify.
This isn’t all of it… I wonder if the labels that we used to categorize things before, to decide whether or not to try them, no longer apply; the splintering of genres of music into a million hyper-niche microgenres both encourages an indulgence in personal preference to the exclusion of our friends’ tastes (and thus shared culture) at the same time it makes genre meaningless. It used to be de rigeur to say you liked any music besides rap and country (guilty 🙋♀️), but that distinction doesn’t mean much anymore when everything’s a mashup — rap can be used in songs of all genres* — and massive pop stars like Taylor Swift and Beyonce cross over into country.
In one sense, I’m glad for the deconstruction of artificial barriers around music — there’s plenty of music I now like that twenty years ago I wasn’t willing to give a shot based on its label. My musical taste is now defined solely by what I like, with little shaping by the meta of “what people like me listen to.” As a teenager, I wouldn’t try Nine Inch Nails because it was the goth kids who listened to them; not that I had anything against the goth kids (I secretly admired them), but I had the sense NIN wasn’t for people like me. (I doubt I would have appreciated it then anyway 😉) I no longer feel that kind of restraint. This is tied to a bigger trend of music becoming less a part of our identities than it felt in the early naughts; what we listen to doesn’t say anything about us anymore.
When you can’t describe what you’re listening to because the genre is so specific no one else has heard of it, or when the old school musical genres are meaningless because there are no limits to what any genre sounds like anymore and any artist might record across genres, it’s harder to share music with others by identifying how your tastes overlap, and it’s harder to explore new music more widely because you keep being served things exactly like what you already enjoy.
In college, I explored music largely through friends’ recommendations, festival lineups, and genres. I was limited by what I had access to or could afford to buy, whereas with streaming the only limit is time. That access is deceptive; when faced with the vast ocean of “all” music that exists, and it’s presented without organization so there’s no easy boundaries for exploring within, or broken into endless microgenres, trying new music becomes overwhelming. I’ve been reading “You May Also Like,” which makes the point that we seem to like things better when we know what to call them — that categorization itself makes things more understandable and more likeable. Wallowing through unknowns makes the project of music discovery even trickier since we don’t know where to start, what way to go, or even how to define what we’re listening to.
The musical subgenre I discovered in the streaming era, synthwave, has such a narrow aesthetic (both aural and visual) that it reminds me of indie published romance subgenres: practically interchangeable book and album covers position works squarely within the niche. This nicheing down lets audiences get precisely what they like, whether books or music. But the challenge I face is that so much of it sounds the same, I have a hard time learning the difference between artists. It’s like how people say, “I got this on Etsy!” instead of the shop’s name; I can say I like synthwave but few details beyond that. Pretty much the only artist I firmly recognize is the first artist that pulled me into the genre (Kavinsky) — because I got the album and listened to it on repeat. This is a musical genre that arose with the algorithm, and it’s now seemingly made expressly for the algorithm to feed to me.*
Without a streaming service, I’ve found it challenging to find more new music of this genre to listen to. I just want a sampler playlist but the playlists are all on Spotify; the system rewards its own use and punishes those who seek to escape it. The listening infrastructure I had and society had before streaming is gone. To leave the herd is a choice of discomfort.