@DiscoRodeo
The way I've always seen the 2000s was as essentially a mainstream manifestation of the very late 90s. That Neutral Milk Hotel album is from '99 or '98 and it already had flannel, beanies and a twee lofi feel. The 2000s were super influenced by NYC, urbanism and architecture were cool. People were sold on a kind of upscale cosmopolitan lifestyle. I don't think any one thing killed the social identity, because that era lines up nicely with the chinks driving up property values and the 2008 recession. I think the decline would have been inevitable.
I fully agree. I think how I'd view things in short is, once the party is over- actually leave.
It's part of what does irk me about subcultures being commoditized, recoupment, etc. The party has been long over. The 90s are over, punk is dead, the 2000s indie scene is over, why are people still trying to live as if that time never ended, why are people trying to revive the 80s, etc.
I mean, there are reasons, Hauntology, Mark Fisher, all that jazz and not going to get into it. Canada in the 2000s very much embodied that indie subculture in the places that I used to frequent. Of course now, that lifestyle is even more flagrantly contradictory when rent is drastically higher, commodities higher, politics has infested everything, the soy started to sour, and the people wearing that skin are the farthest thing from "finding a life balance outside the rat race".
That's the big problem with modern urban culture/indie/liberal identity. These groups have long since ceased being outcasts to the mainstream social norm. Maybe they were more an alternative lifestyle in the 90s (not going to say counter culture, because they fed into the larger culture, but alternative lifestyle may be more appropriate). Either way, they
are the social norm now, yet they are seemingly oblivious to that fact and still seem to go on in life as if they're rebelling against the norm, that theyre the oppressed, they're the brave new vogue counter-culture, that their lifestyle is
different, when its farthest from the truth. The fact they are the
actual mainstream seems to fly right by them. Who would have guessed that the people on 10 cups of coffee larping as slackers would be too intellectually lazy to realize the contradictions in their own worldviews.
But I think that for a lot of the hypocrisies and contradictions in the urban indie lifestyle, they may gave been there to begin with, but they just became more and more obvious as time went on, to the point that in the mid 2010s, it was very, very much in your face, and people
still identified with it and wanted to be
it. I'm somewhat at the point where I'd much rather see someone looking their age over cheap expressions of "identity" that are ironically less individualistic, and more like wearing a consumer brand on your shoulder.
I just view all these neologisms of "lets add a yoga break to work" and whatever else nonsense in the same way I used to view Christian rock. "Don't you see, you're not making Christianity better, you're making rock worse", to paraphrase Hank Hill. Half the guano bagels or work things, I just see as being the cheapening of an older, more slacker or indie lifestyle for the purpose of "making work seem more appealing", with the added bonus of also making work much more annoying with "but bro, you have a pizza break at lunch every Friday, isn't life grand even though Indians are taking over all the jobs and your rent is that much higher?"
