What is bearded hipster music?

These guys used to be bearded hipsters....to some.

 

What is bearded hipster music?

If you haven't heard of it you wouldn't like it. It's quite exclusive.

 

I'm going to keep listening to good old cave man rock - BTO, Grand Funk & the like.

 

Crap, it's even invaded some of my favorite bands (FLA, Delerium, Conjure One etc..)

 

Uh oh....looks like at least half of BTO was bearded. But were they ever hip?

 

Head further North Jones

 

And even if you did like it, I was into it way before you'd ever heard of it.

 

I think it's definitely peaked with this band. The backlash will be painful.

 

Who is they?

 

I don't know, but it looks like the lead singer took over the floor tom.

 

They is Magic Giant, I believe.

 

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Harvard Square as I type this. There are, let's see, 16 men in my direct line of sight. Every single one of us, including me, has a beard. (I'm not seeing any man buns, which were briefly a thing in like 2015, although there are a few guys whose hair is long enough to do one if they wanted.) The likelihood that any of these people have willingly listened to a Mumford & Sons track in the last year or so is approaching zero, since not only were they a major-label approximation of what the accounting department thought "hipsters" might like, their period of commercial success was like five years ago. (Check out Wikipedia: their last album sold about one-sixth as many copies as its predecessor.) Personally, I can't even think of the last time I saw a banjo on stage that wasn't at an actual folk gig. So it's weird that people still see them as emblematic of what actual "bearded hipsters" listen to.

 

I live with the singer's brother though so I was there when they recorded their first demos. It was me who said they should all wear jodhpurs.

 

Or as Mr James Murphy puts it...

I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City.
I was working on the organ sounds with much patience.
I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band.
I told him, "Don't do it that way. You'll never make a dime."
I was there.
I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.
I played it at CBGB's.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I've never been wrong.

 

I imagine Fleet Foxes gets a lot of play by those folks.

 

First impressions tend to stick with people. People went to early 70s Beach Boys gigs expecting surf music.

 

What is your opinion on that? Comfortable conformity or too popular now?

 

Something very ordinary, Foo Fighters? Spotify playlists?
To me hipsters are very superficial people with no in depth knowledge in areas like music.

By the way, the man bun is still all the rage in Sweden.

 

It's not like everyone has the same beard. Doesn't seem like something worth having an opinion on. I didn't get mad when suddenly everyone else was sporting whiskers as well.

 

Yes. Allen Ginsberg was a bearded hipster. Hipsters were originally young urban men who, during the postwar period, threatened the social order by listening to black music, going to black clubs, and experimenting with drugs and literary conventions. The more contemporary "hipster" is a moving target, as Beerice 41 suggests. Is there a modern version of hipster that is a corporate creation to sell commodities and reify the social order? Absolutely. Has the term also become so caricatured and ahistorical that it no longer really means anything at all? I think so. It's generational, and it's a social movement that has changed over time.

As a late Gen X'er I'm not always in tune with millennial trends. But I don't see a reason to complain about young people who invest in music, like good quality food, and prop up The Band, Dylan, et al., as cultural heroes. Most of those folks who play in and follow Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Okkervil River, et al., love the same music most members of this board love. I'm sometimes guilty of feeling contempt for the Crosley set, who drink PBR for street cred while living off a trust fund. But I also try to avoid sweeping generalizations about the very young people who are trying, if not always succeeding according to the blueprint drafted in the 70s, to carry on some of the music traditions and legacies that we (slightly) older folks care about.

PS - I cannot stand Mumford & Sons!

 

My grandson says that Fleet Foxes is hipster music, which is ok by me.

 

Bearded hipster music is what happens to clean-shaven hipster music after it's been stranded on an desert island...

 

Isn't that Air Supply?

 

I dunno; music aside, the beards have got to go. I see these skinny young guys with the big thick facial shrubbery, and I think "You're not fooling anyone; you're an ingenue who wouldn't last a weekend in the woods on your own." Go back to looking like the original Arctic Monkeys or whatever.