On Hipsters

I was recently told that I don't know anything about metal. I was told this because I said that I prefer melodic death to death, and like music with a melody or a tune or, at the very least, songs that can be distinguished from one another. Apparently this is neither trve, cvlt nor br00tal, and puts my entire being into question. Which is, of course, nonsense. But it made me think.

These days there is a lot of in-fighting. A lot of people trying to prove that what they like is different from what the masses like. You know the masses; those hideous, uneducated sheeple who just don't get it. And I don't just refer to people who like mainstream pop; I mean those awful people who don't agree with every single opinion and choice of whoever is whining about whatever it is they're whining about.

But heaven forbid anyone agree! If they do, they're obviously either false and into it for the wrong reasons, or they're doing it to be cool and ruining it for the rest of us. The world is turning into a bunch of angry little cliques full of people who profess to know the one trve way and that everyone else is wrong.

So what it got me thinking was that the world is very small these days. Everyone is connected, it's very easy to be part of something massive. We have manufactured boy bands debuting at #1 with a million sales because of the hype machines. We have causes and memes and fury that go global in seconds. So maybe the excitement of being part of something huge has lost its shine. Being part of something small is the new opiate for the masses.

Which is ironic, really. Consider Instagram, beloved by the drive-by hipster for providing a way to be retro without having to actual do anything. And now it's worth a billion dollars. It is now something huge, and it now is the mainstream.

What comes around, goes around, or something. It's fashionable to be unfashionable, but all the little unfashionable things keep being turned into fashion. Hell, if I at age 14 knew that in 10 years people would be voluntarily wearing glasses and buying pocket sized computers I wouldn't have believed it. I got too many black eyes for being an outsider for that to go mainstream. I would have loved for what I liked to be popular. But now it is, I can't help feeling a bit sad about it.

So what can people do? How to preserve the uniqueness and prevent what you like being diluted, ground up, and spat out to give somebody else a billion dollars? Get angry. Get territorial. Get belligerent about it and tell people that they can't be part of their club. And it never works.

I don't really have a point to make. It's just sad that what used to bring people together now drives them apart, because people are terrified of the consequences of popularity on the things they love. They are mortally afraid that if what they are becomes popular, it will be ruined for them and for everybody else. And they're right to be, because it happens every day.

A bit of a miserable post, I know. So I'm going to go look at things in the unfashionable end of the record section. Maybe pick up some album by a band only 10% of the population have ever heard of. Might make me feel better about it for ten minutes.