From Young Folks to Old Mids

The Vibe Shift is a shift away from Indie Twerp culture

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.