Dispatch from the r/popheadscirclejerk lurker who was there the day "indie" died

This is about the failure and futility of trying to be a hipster in high school.

I witnessed the first wave of "Sweater Weather," The Neighbourhood's 2013 lead single under Columbia Records. Most likely I heard it on an 8Tracks playlist shared on Tumblr. Listening to it filled me with a sense of dread that even its catchiness and enjoyable production could not compensate for. I didn't understand at the time, but I felt the song represented the dissolving identity and legitimacy of "indie." 

"Sweater Weather" was pure tumblr streambait as the platform (which was still probably 70% porn) grew more mainstream. First of all, the idea of "sweater weather" and transitional seasons was a major point of fixation on tumblr in all subcultures. There was the nerdy superwholock adjacent effusive text post angle, a Rae Dunn justgirlythings angle, and a studded cut offs/JC Litas/Blk water angle. The reference to "high waisted shorts" in the lyrics was pure pandering. The song evoked too-long hoodie sleeve-hands hugging a mug of tea in a softly candle-lit room on a rainy morning, like living in Maison Margiela REPLICA fragrance copy.  

Second, the band name, The Neighbourhood, capitalized on American anglophilia was either a byproduct of or bred the popularity of double decker bus-posting, Doctor Who, and Alexa Chung. 

Third, the sound was different enough from mainstream corporate pop like Katy Perry and Justin Bieber while still conforming to that traditional pop song structure. It even featured poor vocals characteristic of indie music. (Since I’m being mean, I have to ask: if indie bands had mediocre singers because they had to bootstrap and couldn't find a beautiful tenor to join their group, what was The NBHD's excuse?) The results were "safe" enough to be listenable while its "alt" elements flattered the vanity of the playlist maker who fancied themselves the "hipster" in their suburban friend group. The idea that an “indie” sound could be “manufactured” caught me by surprise.

This was the kind of song that people would latch onto as proof of their “hipster” sensibility. This marker is not defined by an interest in the experimental critical darlings represented by independent labels, but somewhat alt rock groups that made cool merch and concert stages like Bastille and The 1975. To put it as uncharitably and simply as a teen girl would, it was the kind of music that "basic" people would adopt to feel "different" and vibey. For those listening to those "much cooler" indie artists like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, "Sweater Weather" was Taylor Swift in a different font. 

The dissolution of the "indie" concept bothered me because I was trying to develop my taste at 14. I knew the odds of developing "good" taste were stacked against me because I was a Gleek, from the suburbs, of immigrant parents, and a girl. I had no older siblings to recommend me things, and no one I knew in real life actually cared about this kind of stuff. I had to learn who Neutral Milk Hotel was through JOHN GREEN and the Gen-X writers of Parks and Recreation. I knew there were people with more cultural capital than myself, but it took a while to figure out who they were. ¹

I knew I couldn't be this universally adored white bread Forever 21 dolman top and Converse-wearing American girl, nor did I have the powerful discipline to become the concertmaster/2 grades ahead in math/nationally ranked athlete Asian-American archetype that was so valued in my community. (Fine, fine cue "Your Best American Girl.") I turned to "taste" and "creativity" and the humanities to differentiate myself in ways that were more resistant to grades and rankings. And as long as there was a solid definition and endpoint of indie music, starting from Arcade Fire and Mumford & Sons at the accessible, and ending with someone I still wouldn't know about, I could fastidiously work my way through Pitchfork's Best New Music. By the time I could graduate from Harvard as an editor of the Lampoon, become a writer’s room assistant for an FX show, move into my loft in Williamsburg, decorate it with Anthropologie and flea market knickknacks, and hang out with my friends at Roberta's pizza under string lights I would understand the language. 

I knew that with “Sweater Weather,” Big Media was not feeding me the “real stuff,” the stuff that would make me cool in the world where it mattered to consume media that others “probably haven’t heard of.” The hipsters couldn’t help me anymore, as they were starting families and becoming art directors at ad agencies just when I learned that they existed. The world where “Sweater Weather” reigned was soft grunge tumblr, and that was an aesthetic for children. 26-year-olds were not reblogging black and white photos of cigarettes and band tees. They were smoking and going to concerts and not having to coordinate rides with parents. Too illiterate for N+1, too cynical and Modcloth-pilled for soft grunge--where a young nerd to turn?

I couldn't predict that alongside the dissolution of "indie" came the wave of poptimism and a critical lens directed towards pop without dismissing it. If rock was susceptible to commercialization while still being treated as legitimate art, why couldn't commercial pop be considered art? Besides, even artists with indie cred like Phoenix, Vampire Weekend, and St. Vincent made "sophisticated" and unreservedly enjoyable chamber pop. 

Everything became defensible if backed up with style, rigor, and verve. That's why blind fawning like "Cowboy Carter is the Black Country Album Post-Trump America Needs Right Now" falls flat while an examination of how "Ya Ya's" interpolation of "Good Vibrations" and vocal techniques borrowed from Tina Turner contributes to Beyonce's greater project of African American exceptionalism would be intriguing. 

Defense is no longer necessary with today’s mass poptimism since there’s no longer any threat. Snobs have no power. The suits won and pounded the snobs into the ground, making SEO content specialists out of Stereogum staff writers. Poptimism was also informed by a media landscape dependent on clicks for ad revenue and where content had no value because it was often free. It contributed to a culture where “higher brow” people became more comfortable equating popularity with quality. What started as the condescending suggestion to “let people like things” became “there’s something wrong with you if you don’t like this.” Take the Barbie movie, for example. Was it not enough that it made over a billion dollars and made immense waves in culture? Is it actually sexist that Barbie didn't sweep the awards shows that remain the last vestiges of legacy media? The fact that Barbie was nominated for that many Oscars should be proof that poptimism won. On the upside, now we're all free to acknowledge that establishment media largely DID fail to recognize Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" for its utter genius. It’s also true that sometimes the masses were onto something and people were too concerned with their own vanity to acknowledge it. 

If nothing else, poptimism liberated me from forcing myself to like what “cool” people and pressured me, in a good way, to think critically about my own preferences and examine where they came from. My love for Addison Rae isn’t a countersignaling move to prove my cultural capital. It’s a physiological response to her use of nostalgic production and appreciation for her self-aware artifice. Let’s be clear--poptimism didn’t make me any less of a snob. I was always going to be a gatekeeper, and I have a real appreciation for history and a sense of lineage. I’m something of a linguistic prescriptivist. My resentment towards “Sweater Weather” remains that they made categories confusing before I got the chance to understand them. 

At this point, given the number of people who described Taylor Swift's Folklore as an indie album, it's clear that the term's identity has become synonymous with "alt" or "alternative," referring to a degree of deviation from genre conventions.² Phoebe Bridgers is an indie folk artist signed to Dead Oceans. In this case the "indie" label represents both to her status as an artist and her sound, which lies within the folk convention but is differentiated from genre-representative sounds like "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Even if she signed with Atlantic today, Phoebe Bridgers would most likely continue to be described as an "indie folk" or "indie rock" artist because her come-up was through an independent label, she won a Grammy during that time, and it seems unlikely that she will ascend to great radio-hit heights. Once you're an indie artist long enough, it seems that you're grandfathered in. 

It was a funny interest for a girl to have: a canniness at sniffing out the “fake hipster” without having ever met a real one. If I was that knowledgeable and wearing sweaty plastic Asos oxfords and force-feeding myself DFW essays and wasn’t a hipster, Little Miss Longchamp Tote In High School certainly wasn’t, even if she liked The Kooks (cough landfill indie). But I’d been preparing for knowledge work my whole life, reliant on the narcissism of small differences to manufacture competitive advantage. That seemed to be the only way to win under the conditions of market capitalism. To elaborate, the hipsters’ obscure taste and gatekeeping was their way of hoarding cultural capital. Sometimes cultural capital could be invested or traded for social clout or opportunities like a covetable job or published essay collection. The hipsters seemed to be a source of institutional soft power, and I wanted that status and credibility for myself.  

Hipsters are the marketing VPs at Liquid Death. Indie Sleaze was just a bunch of flash party photography. I’ll always cringe at “Sweater Weather” but will give credit where it’s due. I missed the deadline. Missed it by a solid 15 years, probably. I’m just a woman who memed “the mortifying ordeal of being known” 5 years after the original piece in the NYT came out, but 3 years before the kids on TikTok started saying it. Now I’ll never be a hipster, but I fear I’ll always be thinking, sadly, “I liked that before it was cool.” 

1.  In my teens I had so much fun reading Rookie Mag, AV Club, and Jezebel that I didn't even bother to look at The Paris Review. This is a big reason I used the novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P as a sort of rosetta stone of cultural capital as an incoming college freshman. Although the protagonists were a decade older than myself, I viewed this as a warning. This will be the subject of future writing.

2.  Folklore would most accurately be described as a work of alternative folk-pop. It is pop music with a folk slant, but not a traditional folk slant.