Carles, The Hipster of the Decade, Is Taking Over the New York Times.
Wow. So, Carles, our anonymous Hipster of the Decade winner, is being name-checked and referenced in the New York Times. Does this mean he's 'over' 4 all alt bros evrwhr? Proof, right here:
Carles runs a blog Hipster Runoff. Hamilton—who wished the word "hipster" away for the new decade, and will tragically have to wait another decade, or at least a few more months, before it does—breaks down Hipster Runoff better than I can, so, here:
The blog is kind of like...Pitchfork mixed with whippets mixed with chat room slang and maybe a certain faux-Rain Man quality? It must be consumed to get a full sense of its essence. If you like internet obscurities in general, maybe you will like Carles' blog in particular!
Hipster Runoff is, at its most simple definition, satire, and at its most complex, something I'm not intelligent enough to articulate better than this, suffice to say: it's absolute genius. It's even inspired its own exegesis site. Unfortunately, to get many of the jokes on Hipster Runoff, you have to have some knowledge of hipster culture, at which point, you become part of the joke. So you might not want to read it at all.
The point, however, is that sometimes, "Carles" does in fact "write" like he has some form of mild autism. And one of the key phrases of that whether or not something is 'relevant.' Whether it's a band, or an institution ('the internets') or a person ('ObamaBro'), the 'relevance' of something in Hipster Runoff's universe is key to both the life force that keeps it in transition throughout "cool" culture, and its value to that cool culture. Which is why I laughed heartily when I saw this:
Right? It's funny that the Times would even use single quote marks around something, especially around a word like 'relevant' in the face of a dying institution losing relevance (which especially—and ironically—obvious in the face of actions taken by colleges the article covers) .
But that's not all. The lead to Ben Sisario's Sunday Arts piece about—yes, you're reading this correctly—the absurd bullshit of various Indie Rock Genres:
A few weeks ago Hipster Runoff, a blog that ridicules bohemian culture with hilarious precision, began advertising a "genre shirt." In photos that seem straight out of an American Apparel billboard, a young woman poses in the T-shirt, which asks, "What kind of music do u listen 2?" and offers, in a matrix of small type, more than 200 underground musical styles, both real (shoegaze, crab-core) and fake (Sufjan-house, crab-gaze).
ROFL. "Crab-core" is real? Also, Hipster Runoff is broken today. Which must be intentional. Like I said: absolute genius.