I first heard about the “vibe shift” at the same time most people did: by reading this article. Sean Monahan’s description of the hipster era mystified me:
Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars
Then he went on to describe the era before the current vibe shift:
Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch.
“Woke” is a better term for this era. But I suspect Sean Monahan needed to describe the type of person who replaced the hipster so he went with “hypebeast.” To be sure, the hypebeast was an enormous part of late ‘10s culture, but was it as all-encompassing as the hipster was? Frankly I’m not even sure the writer herself fully stopped being a hipster. Yes she says she likes Drake, but is that all it takes to be a hypebeast? She seems more interested in clogs and UGGs than sneakers. Perhaps she is too old to dive headfirst into the indie sleaze revival that seems to mark our current vibe shift, but does that mean she is not still a hipster?
I was very confused by all this, shrugged and half-heartedly accepted that hypebeasts took over and were replaced by neo-hipsters. Until I had a random shower thought come to me months later about a type of hipster that was never comfortable with the first round of indie sleaze: the indie twerp.
For now, let’s look at what the indie twerp is not. The indie twerp prefers charcuterie to debauchery. While the indie sleaze hipster likes loud rock and electroclash offshoots, the indie twerp prefers podcasts. Are we seriously going to act like the indie twerp variety of hipster went away in 2009?
It’s not even too easy to point out the indie twerps’ beginnings. They may have taken over the zeitgeist in the mid-2000s, but, even though they were not as central to pop culture in the ‘80s, when they began in earnest (in America with college rock, in the UK with twee music from Glasgow) can we honestly say we rarely met people in the ‘8os and ‘90s who loved vintage vinyl, books and cardigans? Especially after Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums were released?
But yes, the Indie Twerp era began in 2004. As The Strokes lost popularity, while garage rock and electroclash spun their wheels in the mud, one thing helped swing the spotlight to these twee twerps: Garden State.
You gotta hear this one song, It will change your life.
Garden State was a commercially successful vanity project for Zach Braff, who clearly was rebranding himself as the Dustin Hoffman of the ‘00s. Though Garden State did not have the impact of The Graduate, this scene was affecting enough to turn everyone into a Shins fan. And the bidding wars began looking for the next Shins.
The indie twerp prefers charcuterie to debauchery. While the indie sleaze hipster likes loud rock and electroclash offshoots, the indie twerp prefers podcasts. Are we seriously going to act like the indie twerp variety of hipster went away in 2009?
The Boomer suits in legacy media not only welcomed this vibe shift, they felt vindicated by it. Perhaps they would need to wait ten years for a new wave of youth activism, but a lot of indie twerp music was based on ‘60s folk rock and sunshine pop aesthetics. From Simon Reynolds’ Blissed Out:
“The sixties and childishness both represent a simpler, happier, more genuine time. The sixties are seen as rock’s childhood, a moment of innocence before bloated middle age, before pop was overdetermined by criticism …A time when the idea of youth was young.”
Though the Indie Twerp era began in 2004, 2006 was to the IT era what 1967 was to the hippie era. In 2006:
John Hodgman and Demetri Martin become regular correspondents on The Daily Show
The Decembrists drop their music video for their antiwar song “16 Military Wives”
Peter, Bjorn and John’s “Young Folks” is released, playing on the soundtracks of movies, shows and video games for almost a decade
This American Life is first released in podcast form
TED Talk videos are distributed online for free under under a Creative Commons license, including on a relatively new video site called YouTube
Twitter is launched with its cutesy cartoon bird logo
Then, in 2007, Barack Obama announced he was running for president. Many indie twerps loved Obama. For one, he was a half-white nerd, who made for a very flattering mirror image for them. But he also fit their brand of center-left politics. Less activism, more voting and consumer choices. From Marc Spitz’s Twee:
Twee rebels don’t want to destroy everything around them. Rather, they want to fix it. And if creativity requires a temporary destruction, as most agree it does, and a few tantrums must be thrown, so be it. Critics of Twee complain that this isn’t rebellion at all, that one must be prepared to sacrifice everything and lose oneself forever in the darkness. The Punks seemed to be in this corner. Not so the Twees.
As time went on and Obama won, the whole planet became Broolynified. Paris had food trucks. Japanese cafes played indie rock. They were playing the smooth sounds of Death Cab for Cutie and Belle and Sebastian more than they were Mooney Suzuki or Fischerspooner.
The Indie Twerp era was not only a sort of golden age for Brooklyn. Nerd unity was at an all-time high. Indie Twerps excitedly campaigned on Twitter for Donald Glover to be the next Spider-Man. The Nerdist was Chris Hardwick’s media empire that brought indie twerps to watch alt comedy at Meltdown Comics (a comic book store in Los Angeles). Even 4Chan was more understood as a forum with trolls and provocateurs than an actual breeding ground for hate.
A few factors led to the decline of the Indie Twerp era. The first among them being Gamergate. Remember that nerd unity I mentioned one paragraph ago? Gamers did not have an easy fit into the huddle. New Games Journalism favored educational and/or indie games while hardcore gamers liked either MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or first-person shooters where you could yell ethnic slurs like Call of Duty.
Gamergate widened the rift between gamers and New Games Journalism to now be between gamers and journalists as well as academics (many of whom, does it need to be said, were indie twerps with their own audience of neoliberal discourse diehards). From Clinton Ignatov’s great series on Gamergate over on Default Friend:
All I want to do is illustrate how deep the split is between these two groups of nerds. Because these two different modes of research are in competition right now for the heart of the public. The academics eke a modest living and career out of funding-targeted research with foregone conclusions upon which institutions can base decisions, and internet schizos bloom and decimate a Cambrian Explosion of mad-cap theories about absolutely everything every week. And each perform these tasks in media.
As time went on, geek chic was losing it luster in the press and increasingly nerds were seen as alt-right gatekeeping incel racist trolls that wanted to keep Star Wars white. The Indie Twerp press took great pains to distance themselves from this group. Which backfired on them: the very same Sean Monahan from the beginning of this article makes a compelling case that video games have replaced music as the center of culture. Tellingly, he even mentions Trevor McFedries tweet: “Gaming is replacing music as the lynchpin of emergent social scenes and it makes everyone 30+ I talk to really uncomfortable.”
This is not to say Gamergate was the only factor in Indie Twerp’s demise. Many on the Twitter left who opposed neoliberalism and colonialism grew tired of Obama-era pop culture like Parks and Recreation and Hamilton. But what’s less surprising is not that this sensibility lost favor, but how long this sensibility survived and what it survived.
The final blow came in the form of COVID. Many Indie Twerps, members of the laptop class , worked from home and excitedly showed off pictures of bread that they baked on social media. Now the Indie Twerps embraced domesticity proudly. Aging had never been this publicly documented before.
As #blacklivesmatter grew as a movement, it would have seemed that the Indie Twerp style would have taken a backseat. And the music might have. But the Daily Show-era political comedic sensibility of nerdy, Amerian history-based liberal humor spread all around pop culture, from the stage of Hamilton to the lips of Amber Ruffin. As more and more groups got more and more offended, edgy humor from Dave Chappelle and Michael Che was overshadowed by clips of Trevor Noah and Ron Funches. This was the time of diversity and inclusion, but as more groups got included, a samey, sexless type of gentle self-deprecation took over. The #metoo era led to less jokes of women having drunken sex and more about women taking down the patriarchy (academic buzzwords were the “new slang” of the Indie Twerp era). LGBTQ+ representation was at an all-time high, but the focus was less on transgressive sex than it was on pronouns and draq queens reading books to children.
Issa Rae and Phoebe Robinson are particularly interesting people to look at regarding the vibe shift in the woke community. Issa Rae had a YouTube series called Awkward Black Girl and Phoebe Robinson had a blog called Blaria (Black Daria). These two were steeped in the black nerd Indie Twerp humor that Donald Glover popularized on Community. But by the time Insecure and 2 Dope Queens both appeared on HBO, there was a noticeably different sensibility. It was still sharp, but it was an Instagram-infused style that incorporated glamour and sex. Many gays loved it.
The final blow came in the form of COVID. Many Indie Twerps, members of the laptop class , worked from home and excitedly showed off pictures of bread that they baked on social media. Now the Indie Twerps embraced domesticity proudly. Aging had never been this publicly documented before. Meanwhile, the young journos in NYC were not required to come into the office, but they did have to get involved in NYC nightlife to get ahead, making this group of media personalities and artists strange bedfellows with angry gamers and vaccine skeptics.
Much like punk was a reactionary movement against the Sensitive ‘70s, fringe (my term for this aesthetic) and indie sleaze were a corrective to the anodyne, relatively sterile era of ukuleles with painted birds. But as we all remember, punk was not sustainable, glorious though its burn was. Just like grunge killed hair metal but rolled over and played dead when boy bands came to the party. Already, this transgression-for-transgression’s sake is wearing out its welcome and it didn’t even reach mass consciousness until this past March.
In the ‘80s, hardcore punk was in a similar dead end. How many songs about Reagan and nuclear war could be written on three chords? Hardcore punks eventually drew inspiration from music before year zero, creating indie rock in the process. The gruff sweetness of Husker Du and The Replacements came roaring out of Minneapolis. Yes, there was also the indie pop cuteness of R.E.M. and Yo La Tengo. But at the time, when most ‘80s pop was pregnant with the synth-heavy fishnet sex of Madonna and Prince, this felt refreshing.
And wouldn’t you know it, it turns out that when people look at the past, they prefer to remember delirious childlike whimsy and innocence than they do drunk rockers who smear themselves with shit. So I will not say I am completely in love with everything about the Indie Twerp aesthetic, but when I hear the songs from this playlist I made, I smile. It’s like I’m back in 2019.