So You Realized You're a Hipster

I've recently been in discussions about what it means to be hipster, so I've been thinking a lot about it. There is nothing wrong with hipsters. I have to get that out of the way. Sure, they're easy to make fun of what with their bicycles and their tight jeans and hodgepodge outfits, and their weird bands that only they have heard of (Did I just stereotype a group of people? Does that make me racist?), but when you think about it, isn't it easy to make fun of anything? The thing with hipsters is that when they are made fun of outright, it seems derogatory. For some reason, the term hipster has garnered a negative connotation. Make the insult ironic, however, and you have a TV show. If that wasn't enough irony for you, maybe the target audience is the very demographic you're skewering: Middle class white urban twenty-somethings.

WHO TOLD YOU OUR METHODS?

This TV show exists, and it seems very meta, and it's fun, and it's innocent. Everyone involved, the show, its audience, and the subject matter, it's all done in good taste. It helps that the show is clever and that poop jokes are usually held to a minimum. It largely makes fun of white people, and by golly, we're so ridiculous it would be a waste not to.

This show in question is called Portlandia and it is a hit as far as an Independent Film Channel skit show can be considered a hit. The show tends to reference and satirize indie bands and movies, indie festivals, vegan-ism, bicycles, coffee shops, and other things that white urban twenty-somethings hold dear. And since everything has to have a label, let's call those white urban twenty-somethings hipsters. Although not everything on the show targets hipster culture, the majority happens to include it. And many (I dare say all) urban twenty-somethings are at least a little hipster (I know I'm probably wrong, but no, I'm not wrong). Now, all of that loosely describes a hipster and hipster culture, but it doesn't define it.

Definitions are so mainstream.

What defines a hipster changes so often that I'm not even sure if the above picture depicts how hipsters dress anymore. But the guy on the right looks enough like my friend Phil that it's probably fairly accurate. What can typically be agreed upon is that hipsters are a kind of counterculture.

Hipster culture (or counterculture) holds holy the things that are not in the limelight. If you've heard of the band, it's probably not hipster. If your outfit doesn't include a scarf and/or a fedora, it's probably not hipster. If you wear glasses because you had them prescribed to you by an actual optometrist then they probably aren't hipster. When the obscure becomes mainstream, the hipster trends change, and what we know as hipster culture today didn't really come into being until the early 2000s, and some people think it's already on its way out.

So who is hipster, and who isn't? Is it even possible to tell? I've discovered that that's a very fine line. A line that is defined by your mentality. I realized this when the band fun. became popular, because I liked them a lot up until the very second of that realization. Suddenly I couldn't stand to hear them anymore and the thought of them being nominated for a Grammy makes me want to vomit blood for a year. Hell, the very thought of how awful the Grammys are makes me sick to my stomach, what with all those pop songs and famous people and derivative performances. 

Ask yourself now if that makes me hipster. I'll help you by saying that it's happened to me with other things as well. Did you say "yes?"

Described above is a mentality that has been attached to hipster culture, the idea that something owes it to you to remain obscure. It was designated upon hipsters by people who don't understand hipster culture.  This guy understands hipster culture. He understands it better than you or me. But it doesn't make me hipster. When you assume that a hipster is looking down on you because of your taste, you are mislabeling the person. You're confusing "hipster culture" with "being a jerkstore." The thing that confuses people is that jerks can be hipsters too, but most hipsters could give a crap less what you like. I could give a crap less what other people like, I just don't like the band fun. and I happened to vocalize that dislike. If you do like them, more power to you. It boils down to the insecurity that people feel just because someone doesn't like the same thing as them. 

Or, you know, I'm a giant jerkstore.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T LIKE MINT CHOCOLATE CHIP!!!!????

Hipster culture has brought some more obscure things into the mainstream, and is that really a bad thing? You probably enjoy something right now that you wouldn't know about if it wasn't for some type of counterculture. 

What we need to do is look forward. I'm intrigued about what's coming, especially in music. If the Arcade Fire is mainstream, it won't be long for indie darling Bon Iver to follow. Pretty soon all the obscure bands will have pushed the mainstream ones out of the spotlight. The hipsters will have no choice but to pull the mainstream back into the obscure. Mark my words: In the future, hipsters will replace Monsters of Folk on their iPods with Ke$ha.

I give it five years.





I Wouldn't be so Cynical if the World Didn't Make it so Easy

I was gonna write something uplifting, I swear. I was tossing around ideas about exploring nerd culture and all its facets, what appeals to me and what doesn't, and why I cringe when I see people dressed up as anime characters and when they correct my enunciation of manga.

I was gonna explore all of this and more, and offer my insight as a pseudo-expert/reformed nerd, but it'll have to wait until next week because I saw this on the bumper of a car on my way to work.

Naw bro man, it's cool. She's into me. Bro.

 

And I thought, There is no better way to broadcast to the entire world so clearly that you're a giant dickstorm of a human being.

 

For the uninitiated, that isn't some kind of confusing foreign way of signaling the number 3. It's called the Shocker, and it was invented by bro-happy frat boys an unknown number of years ago after a night of drunken homoeroticism that they swore they would never tell anyone about. So to overcompensate, they came up with the phrase "two in the pink, one in the stink," because things that rhyme are clever. School taught them that. I'll let you figure out what that phrase means if you don't already know, because I'm getting nausious just thinking about it.

 

Anyway, that's what I saw while I was on my way to teach children how to correctly speak and write the English language. High school is a place where kids go to learn about the big four subjects: Math, English, History, and um, art or something. A secondary effect just happens to be life lessons that the students gain while they are there, but when I see something like the above on a car, or I hear a bunch of stupid bros talking about it, it makes me realize that the lesson is often lost on people. That's disappointing, and it's not like I can show students the above picture and say, "If you ever willingly make this figure with one or both of your hands, you are a stupid asshole." And if I see a student throw this sign, I may not be able to say, "No, that's a BAD student," and hit them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, but maybe I would write them up for throwing gang signs.

But I digress.

There is a reason I'm so cynical, and not just about things like the Shocker. That only happened to be what set off this tirade. Things like this perpetuates the problem, because this type of thing is plastered all over the internet. You don't have to go far to find a picture of someone doing something so stupid that it makes you wonder who gave their parents permission to breed. There are so many dumb things in the world catering to dumb people and we're just saturated with it. And I'm tired of it. I really am.

It must be the government trying to control the weather to contact aliens and confiscate our guns!

No, it's aurora borealis.

Naw that ain't natural man, I shoot my gun at it and it don't die. Shucks!

 

 

I do my best to surround myself with smart people and I do truly believe that there are more smart people than dumb people (it's just more fun to write about the dumb ones, and one of my good friends is already writing about the smart ones), but they must be off doing smart things like not watching television instead of watching television. That's why we're stuck with shit TV shows where they put the laugh track on autopilot and pay the "writers" hundreds of thousands of dollar monies to write the most inane tripe they can manage while still being considered legally sane.

Oh my god. LAUGHS. You slept with her? LAUGHS. She sleeps with everyone! LAUGHS. Also, video games! LAUGHTER LAUGHTER LAUGHTER, DIE.

 



The world really is not a horrible, dumb cesspool of a place. It's the internet thing. The same thing acting as an outlet for me to vent my banal frustrations is also acting as a vessel to deliver us the mundane. It's a two way street, and some of us happen to be caught in the shitstorm while others revel in it. I'm not better than anyone, although this piece makes it seem like I think I am. Maybe I do think I am, but most of us think we're better than at least one person out there. It just so happens that the internet gives me proof of my grand delusions and reinforces it on a daily basis. And that's the world we all live in.

So here is what I will leave you with: If you're reading this and you got this far, you're probably not dumb, so congratulations on that. Continue to go out and do not dumb things so we can take back a little bit of the world at a time. And if you ARE dumb, Yay, you read something! See you again in fifteen years!

The Game of the Year that Time (and You) Forgot

Max Payne 3. That was for anyone who just wanted the quick answer. Now you can go back to whatever it is you do on the interweb (pursuing or sharing knowledge, socializing with family and friends from far distances, using memes to express a social or political stance that you don't fully understand and only realized you had because, hey internet!) but I still got your hit, so joke's on you.

Dammit, Condescending Willy Wonka! So help me, if you condescend me one more time I will passive aggressive the SHIT out of you!

Oh yeah, I was talking about a game I think. Max Payne 3 came out of left field only because it was in development for so long the population forgot about it. Hell, I'd been looking forward to the damn thing since before it graced the cover of Game Informer magazine in the summer of 2009. Back then it had a fall 2009 release date (I think. Thanks to college, my memory doesn't go much further back than twelve minutes ago. What the hell is Willy Wonka doing up there?), but it didn't end up debuting at retail until May 2012.

I was excited for the game then, and I remained excited until release day. And unlike almost everything that happened to me after learning how to drive, it was not at all ruthlessly harsh and disappointing (well, harsh maybe, in the sense that it's a game about murdering drug dealing human organ traffickers). The opposite occurred. It turned out to be the game that I probably put the most amount of time into last year. And that was the year that included a brand new Halo. No small feat, Max Payne 3, no small feat indeed.

At its core, Max Payne 3 is simply a cover based shooter that is working off two gaming gimmicks, the youngest of which dominated most shooters for this console generation. The aforementioned cover based, or stop and pop shooting (as opposed to run and gun like Call of Duty and Halo, yeah, I named them both, neutrally, in the same sentence and the the internet didn't explode) made a name for itself with Gears of War before it was aped by nearly every other game that had a gun in it. The even older convention is one that Max Payne 3's progenitor invented (read: Stole from the film The Matrix), Bullet Time, in where the user slows down time to easily dodge bullets while nailing headshots and looking like a god damn pimp the whole time. Max Payne 3 deftly molded these two practices together, and did it with panache. 

Having been invested in Max Payne as a character since his first game, I enjoyed seeing where he ended up since then. The dude's been through a lot, and it shows. Unlike so many conventional video game heroes, Max isn't buffed out and wearing a suit of sci-fi armor. He's old, his hair is just starting to gray, and he's got quite a gut (see also: the three things that best portray hitting a dead end in life). But he still wears a suit in style, albeit a bloodied one by the end of most missions. What hit me the most was how the player assumes Max has hit rock bottom when the game starts. Turns out that doesn't actually happen until halfway through, and afterwards Max shaves his head and throws on a dirty wife beater because he didn't look quite pathetic enough before.

 Rock bottom, rock bottom....ah, there it is!

Image from my favorite gaming website, ign.com. 

 The most immersive shootout I've ever had the joy of playing occurs near the end in which Max, having lost almost everything, chases the villain and his army into an airport and shoots it out with them in a very long lobby. In the scene, the song Tears by the band Health plays dynamically in the background. They composed the soundtrack to the entire game, but this scene melded gameplay, graphics, sound, and music together in a way that I've never experienced before, and I've been gaming since WAY before it was cool.

Max Payne 3 won no awards. No one recognized it for its story. No one claimed that it was art. No one talks about its stellar multiplayer. Why would they when games like Journey, The Walking Dead, Halo, and Call of Duty all released in the same year? Each of those games is excellent, and each really stands out and deserves all the praise and awards that they recieved. But Max Payne 3 did everything those games did, and if it didn't do them better, it at least melded them all expertly. It's just too bad that it came out so early in the year that everyone forgot about bestowing accolades during awards season, and it came out so far into its own development cycle that everyone else just plain forgot about it.

But why should you read a whole article about the game when there's someone else who can wrap this whole thing up a lot faster?

Condescending Willy Wonka: The Einstein of our Generation. Also, a douche.

Anything standout to you this year that you feel didn't get the recognition it deserved? Feel free to post a comment and let me know.

Concert Therapy

I realized not to long ago that in 2012 I saw my three favorite bands within a few months of each other. 2012 was also a year that I saw more concerts than I care to count (hooray for me I guess), though that concert-spree didn't begin until the second half of the year. I don't think I have too much to really say about these concerts other than I really needed them. In addition to how going to concerts is in my top five favorite things to do (the other four will be disclosed and altered when and as I see fit), this year music in all of its forms was more cathartic for me than usual. 

Music is truly powerful. Like almost anything, it can be cruel or it can heal. Ask anyone, and chances are they have a favorite band, or a favorite song, or a favorite genre of music. You can't say that about many other media. It'll only take one person to prove me wrong, but I'm gonna go on record saying that if you claim that you don't know of any piece of music in any form that you care about, you're a dirty liar and I hate you and get out of here. 

I mentioned that music can heal. Maybe not physically (Not yet, but rest easy that I'm working on the logistics), but mentally few other forms of media can be as therapeutic as music. Given what my family and I went through in the first quarter of the year, I needed some kind of therapy, something you puny humans couldn't offer me (I kid, I kid. But seriously, work on that), and the best part was that it started in June, shortly after my grandparents passed away, with Radiohead.

The exciting thing about live music is how in the moment everything is. I'm sure the show is rehearsed and practiced, but something can always go wrong, or an unexpected opportunity might arise that the band can take advantage of to enhance the show, something that other shows on the tour might not get to experience (In the education field, we call this a teachable moment. I think I just got an idea for another post...)

So anyway, you've probably guessed what's coming next. A list of the concerts I attended in 2012. If you don't care to read the words, at least stick around for the pretty pictures. This is a long post, so if you want, please scroll to the bottom and tell me, what were some of the concert highlights from your year?

Radiohead

Venue: First Midwest Bank Amphitheater, Tinley Park, June

Looking back through the pictures I took, I forgot how far I actually was from the stage. Still, you can get an idea of the awesome light show that Radiohead put on. I was excited to see my favorite band for the first time. I can't pick a highlight from this concert, but I will say that Idioteque was like five thousand simultaneous orgasms. Okay, so maybe that was the highlight.

REO Speedwagon followed by Styx

Venue: Charter One Pavilion, Chicago, June

I saw REO Speedwagon open for Styx. I didn't know what to expect from either of these concerts. I'm fairly  knowledgeable of both of their more popular selections, but here I was surrounded by hardcore fans who have been following these bands for decades. It was like being at a giant block party. This was probably the only concert I went to where you actually got to know the people who were standing around you. Oh yeah, Ted Nugent was there too, but he mostly just droned on about the government and talked about guns while trying to hang on to his last tenuous strands of relevancy.

Delta Spirit

Venue: The Double Door, Chicago, August

Delta Spirit is a band that has, unfortunately for me, only come on my radar since last year. They are amazing and brought a unique energy to their show. Shift your attention away from the angry man in the foreground squinting in annoyance at my camera's flash. Look instead at the center of the photo. That's the lead singer of Delta Spirit, Matt Vasquez, crowd surfing back to the stage after ordering a jack and coke mid-song and crowd surfing to the bar to get it.

Of Monsters and Men

Venue: The Double Door, Chicago, August

After Delta Spirit cleared out, I noticed a poster on the wall advertising an upcoming free concert by Of Monsters and Men. The night of the concert, I waited in a line that rounded the entire block of the Double Door. It wasn't until I was inside that I knew for sure I'd made it. At any point they could have closed the doors and I would have missed out. This band was having a damn good time while they were up there. I only knew their single when I saw them, but I've since become a fan. While most of their songs are good, this was the only band I saw last year in which the crowd was only into it during their big radio song. I saw them twice and it was even more evident the second time. More on that later.

Silversun Pickups

Venue: The Aragon Ballroom, Chicago, September

My third favorite band. I was happy to see SP playing before a full house. The last time I'd seen them was when they opened for Muse in 2010, but that was in a larger venue. SP plays best to a medium sized crowd and they blew this one away. Unfortunately, the standout part of this concert wasn't the (very fantastic) performance. It came during the encore when some coked out douchebag started shouting at me in Spanish before body checking me out of the sweet spot I was in. His two equally douchy friends ran up out of nowhere to eliminate any chance I had to fight for my spot back. The guy then proceeded to jump around and hang more than half his body over the balcony while I waited and hoped that he would fall. Don't worry, he didn't, but I like to think he overdosed on something later that night.

Dispatch

The Riviera, Chicago, October

I was late to the Dispatch party. Late by about eight years. I never thought I'd see them play live, but in 2011 I was lucky enough to catch them during their reunion tour. Fast forward to 2012 and I got to see them again, jamming like every song was their last. They began their set with as much punch and energy as most concerts close with, and they didn't let up for a second. Oh, and they gave away a free download of the concert to all the ticket holders. That's fuckin' classy.

Frightened Rabbit

Venue: Lincoln Hall, Chicago, October

Of all the bands on this list, Frightened Rabbit is the one I'd take a bullet for. I was in love with them ever since I listened to the thirty second sample of their song The Modern Leper on iTunes almost five years ago. This was probably my favorite concert I've ever seen. Lincoln Hall was easily the smallest of all the venues I visited, and the crowd was boisterous, but FR welcomed it. The lead singer, Scott Hutchinson, bantered with the crowd very honestly and naturally, recounting a trip across the border of Canada that somehow cost the band several thousand dollars earlier that day. Just before the encore, when Hutchinson usually puts on a solo acoustic set while the rest of the band takes five, there was a malfunction with the electronics. I guess it's possible that it was staged, but what happened next could never happen in a larger venue (and I have proof of that later). He did an impromptu rendition of Poke, an unbelievably somber tune that I'm sure has moved people to tears. Hutchinson asked for complete silence, which he miraculously got. Then he began playing, and I realized a minute into the song that I needed to record this because I'd never hear anything like it live again. Here's what I got. It's quiet even though I was in the front row, so turn up your speakers and prepare for your earholes to be amazed.

Delta Spirit

Venue: The House of Blues, Chicago, November

The second time that I saw Delta Spirit in 2012 was just as great as the first, maybe even better because I was more familiar with their tunes this time. But the standout of this concert was before it even started. I stood in the Foundation Room on the top floor of the House of Blues waiting for Holly to get out of the bathroom (insert sexist joke) when a guy in a black t-shirt stood next to me. We watched the TV in silence as the the 49ers and Colin Kaepernick's arm tattoos pulverized the Bears and I cried deeply inside. At least there would soon be a concert to cheer me up. When the concert started, the guy in the black t-shirt, who stood next to me at the bar and shared a moment with me (whether he knew it or not) as I watched my favorite team get murdered, took the stage. It was Matt Vasquez. Cool story, bro.

Silversun Pickups

Venue: The Rave/Eagle's Club, Milwaukee, December

I'm gonna speed things up. I've seen SP four times now, and this was the best of them all. At the end, they played Kissing Families, a song off their EP from 2006, that led into Well Thought Out Twinkles. If you're a Silversun Pickups fan, you don't need me to tell you how awesome that is.

 Band of Horses

Venue: Chicago Theater, Chicago, December

Alabama Shakes opened for Band of Horses, and while I respect the Shakes, they're not really my bag. They put on a great show, however, and if you're a fan and haven't had a chance to see them in concert, I can tell you that they sell out their own headlining shows for a reason.

Band of Horses, though, is a band that's been on and off my radar for years. I was happy that I finally got to see them, and I'm happier to say that they have a permanent spot in my music rotation now. Their songs run the gamut from fast and poppy to slow and melodic to just plain epic, and few bands can do that with such penache while transition that to a stage performance. And it was very much a performance in grand style, different from anything I'd seen before or since. It's an older tune, and while they have plenty of great newer material, do yourself a favor and listen to The Funeral. Simply haunting.

Of Monsters and Men

Venue: The Riviera, Chicago, December

Essentially the same show I saw last time, just at a bigger venue. That's a good thing. However good they are, it became clearer to me at this show that many of their fans simply don't know their music very well. Crowd participation was spotty, and at some points I could hear people conversing louder than the music. The only time this concert felt like a concert was during Little Talks, the bands hit single, and clearly the song that most of the people were there to hear. Not the band's fault at all, as I reiterate that I enjoy their work a great deal. I just hope the next time I see them, the crowd cooperates a little better.

Grouplove

Venue: The Riviera, Chicago, December

Grouplove took the stage after a month's delay due to illness, having originally been scheduled for November. For better or worse, they exhibited plenty of energy and each member of the band had their standout moments. But it was during the song Time that they really came together and surprised me. I liked them enough, sure, but I was there because I bought the tickets as a gift for Holly. With Time, they melded the impressive light show with haunting lyrics and explosive instrumentals. This led into the encore which began with a faux end of the world (it was December 21st, 2012 after all) as the "power went out." They came back onstage and urged the audience to be quiet so they could play a song on a simple acoustic guitar. Saying the audience didn't cooperate was an understatement as people shouted at them to get on with it and were generally acting like heaping bags of dickholes. Finally, after the band literally told the crowd to shut up (and then apologized) everyone was quiet and the show went on.

And so it goes...

If you stuck with me this long, thank you, and I urge you to share standout concert experiences you might have had last year so I can turn this overlong post into an actual discussion. I've described music and concerts as a form of therapy that aided me throughout the year, and I meant it. But nothing beats the human element. And I truly want to know: What has music done for you lately?