Yeah late '80s metal production was really, really bad with only a few exceptions. The thing about the late '80s is that it was the short period of time where everything was mastered for cassette. In '85-'86 they were still mastering for vinyl and by 1991 it was for CD.

 

Where we are now is just more of the 80s.  We got back to the 80s by the late 90s and it's just been a broken record ever since.

 

I think pop music in the 80's was far more diverse and interesting than what we have now. There was still a fair amount of experimentation, it seemed. Today most everything seems creatively stalled, or just so derivative.

 

Rock music is completely and utterly stalled out people are recycling the same stuff over and over again then making it sound like it was recorded in an echoy bathroom.  Lo-Fi is great in moderation but when you listen to a "live" recording and it sounds way better than the overly washed out CD version there is a real problem.

 

Right now the innovation is in rap.  This sounds like nothing I'd ever heard before in the rap world (video may be considered NSFW - lots of bad language printed on screen):

 

Even Kanye is picking up on this new Industrial rap style a bit (while being his usual pompous self to raise controversy and sales)

 

 

As little as like 5 years ago mainstream rap was all bragging about the gangsta life, its really branched out lately in to diverse territory thematically and stylistically- this isn't just in the underground either.

 

 

Ironically, punk had more influence on late 80s metal bands than it did on grunge.  Without grunge, the next thing was punk-metal-pop, and "trippy" metal like Enuff Z'Nuff and Mother Love Bone, which just might have been the Seattle band to break out if not for heroin.

 

I still maintain that Poison and Green Day are nearly identical bands.

 

 

 

Same damn song.

 

Listen to Poison's "Fallen Angel" and Rick Springfield's "Love Somebody" back to back sometime.

Has this been posted?

 

http://mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove-why-pop-music-all-sounds-the-same

Rap is changing right now because it has to. In California, EDM completely crushed it a long time ago as the dominant club and party music. Same thing with Vegas. What's interesting now is EDM with some hip-hop influence (this is good since it prevents EDM from being too European while maintaining some connection to American-born music). Anything Diplo touches turns to gold. The resurgence of LA rap like Kendrick Lamar is really pretty limited compared to superstar DJ's (and Drake is by far the world's most popular hip-hop artist with youngsters). Oakland is still to this day rehashing E-40 and Too $hort since no one has replaced them yet. Those Oakland rappers and hyphy movements have had remarkably long careers that just couldn't happen in other cities. No one knows how these guys from the 90's keep pumping out music, but they do. It's pretty hilarious that misogynistic rap is still big in Oakland despite Oakland being the capital of radical feminism and hipsters. It's one of the many juxtapositions of the modern-day East Bay. "Blow the Whistle" is still to this day an Oakland anthem...Oakland may be a trust funded hipster dystopia now, but nothing will stop Too Short!

 

 

Bringing this back to hipsters, it's clear in the Bay that most people my age give zero f's about any of San Francisco's or Oakland's music history. That post on Green Day was pretty funny since I bet 90% of Oakland hipsters have never heard of Green Day, which was arguably the biggest band in the city back in the 90's. But punk fashion still has some influence in Oakland, despite the kids not being big punk fans. The Oakland-Berkeley punk scene is pretty much dead. Rancid, Green Day, etc. don't have influence beyond Gen X and new bands didn't fill the void. Mike Dirnt from Green Day still owns a cafe in Uptown Oakland, but that's pretty much it. The Bay's music scene has gotten so bad compared to LA, that I think kids are just giving up on supporting local bands. Their favorites eventually move to LA anyway...

 

I have yet to meet a hipster who has heard of old SF and Oakland stuff like Sly & The Family Stone, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, etc. Boomer music is not hitting Gen Y much. Hell, I bet 90% of SF and Oakland hipsters don't even know Grateful Dead used to live in Haight-Ashbury. I don't think this is a bad thing as long as new music fills the vacuum that has been left by retiring boomers in the Bay, but it's just not happening. There has been some resurgence in the funk scene here and Fishbone still draws good crowds when they come up from LA, but in terms of innovation, not much is going on with the hipsters (or anybody) here. It's just way too damn expensive in San Francisco and Oakland to try to start a band. Add in noise ordinances and excessive competition for space with tech companies, and it's nearly impossible for bands to survive in the Bay. A lot of talented young people just say, "Screw it, I'm becoming an enterprise sales rep for Dropbox." Who can blame them for chasing money? America is not an easy place to live for Generation Rent.

 

That's the problem I think older people have with Gen Y. A lot of us try to act like creatives, but don't have the chops. Not as many kids are learning how to play instruments (I blame part of this on our declining public school system in America), and Gen Y hasn't produced the greats like previous generations of Americans did. I'd say a lot more interesting stuff is going on with young people in Toronto now, and the fact America's most popular hip-hop artist is a Canadian says something. We invented hip-hop.

 

Gentrification has really killed the scenes in the Bay and increasingly even New York City (though New York City being much cheaper will keep things alive longer). Thank God we still have Los Angeles, but as a whole, not many of our first tier cities have great music scenes anymore. :|

 

Hipsters deserve some of the blame for this, but certainly not all of it. America is increasingly brutal on artists, and it's really hard to make a career of it here. This cuts across all fashion and social movements.

 

Waters is one of the biggest and best Oakland bands (sort of the Bay's answer to Grouplove), and this well-produced music video only registered about 100,000 YouTube hits:

 

 

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift racked up over 500,000,000 hits with "Bad Blood." And even Kendrick Lamar is trying to get on this since he knows it's a good career move...

 

 

It's really, really tough to make it as a musician...it always has been, but things have never been harder in the United States. Has Oakland's Pandora saved artists? Not really (at least not anymore than old school radio did). The royalties are terrible these days. Pandora is considered the best big tech company to work at in Oakland, but make no mistake thinking that it's helping artists more than it's helping itself (it's a big corporation now, and it has to answer to shareholders). It's a novel idea and certainly adds to Oakland's business community, but radio is best looked at as a marketing medium for artists and platform for advertisers. That's all it ever was and ever will be. The big problem is that people expect music to be free. The internet led to this, and it's really hard to get any profit out of radio while record sales have tanked. Oakland likes to market itself as an "arts center" to hipsters (even going as far as the bogus claim that "more artists per capita live in Oakland than in any other major American city"), but it has become an ultra-NIMBY tech center destroying the ability of artists to survive since everything is a zero sum game when it comes to housing or any other sort of space. Oakland is SOMA 2.0, the second offshoot of the original Silicon Valley. Some of these new Oakland companies are every bit as shady and loose on details as anything San Francisco and San Jose have produced (some are much worse since they market themselves as "non-profits" or "arts organizations"). Technology has been brutal on music, broadcast, film, just about every creative medium. It's not the technology itself, it's the mindset that art should be free. That's the battle being waged in California. Hollywood versus Silicon Valley. LA versus the Bay.

 

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/121614/how-pandora-and-spotify-pay-artists.asp 

 

Very few artists make enough money to survive, at least partially because the internet reduced the royalties and piracy is rampant. How much money does YouTube make off that Taylor Swift video? You've got artists today more popular than ever due to social media, but they're not making much money off of it. The social media companies are making almost all of the money. Still, it's essential for an artist to rack up these social media hits, and it's a good barometer of what kind of music is popular at any given time.

 

*"Bad Blood" is a great pop song and the video rocks. It also proves that mainstream pop still dominates American music. LA has the best music scene in almost every genre, but the real reason artists can survive there better than in other cities is because of pop. Even a creative genius who does not have a mainstream background like Kendrick Lamar gets this. Taylor Swift is our Drake.

 

Starting from the bottom as an artist ain't happening as much these days...call it the gentrification of the music scene, but I think an artist has a better shot in Canada these days:

 

^I know I've said it somewhere before, but in the past, and especially for "the MTV Generation", nearly all of youth culture was funneled through music since MTV was the only TV channel that catered to teenagers.  So anyone who wasn't really interested in music was at least familiar with all kinds of stuff -- and during its height what MTV broadcast was much more eclectic than it became in the late 90s and 2000s.  When videos-only MTV2 came out, the original MTV that showed all of the reality shows still got way more viewers because music was never as popular as it appeared to be.  When you see all of that live footage of bands filling stadiums in the 80s, keep in mind that that was pretty much the only thing going on.  Nobody was sitting at home posting on Urbanohio.

 

As for those in the arts, I think it's critical to get into a cheap living situation where you have space to work.  That was no problem in the big cities during postwar urban decay since there were empty industrial buildings with high ceilings all over the place where you could rent 2,000 sq feet for $300/mo.  In NYC and the other big cities, all of those spaces anywhere near the art galleries have been rehabbed into high-price apartments. 

 

As everyone knows, but seemingly few act upon, there is tons of cheap stuff in the Midwest where you can live *and* work on whatever it is that you do.  This listing is in Covington, KY, about two miles south of DT Cincinnati.  You get a livable historic house with three bedrooms AND a *DETATCHED FOUR CAR GARAGE WITH NO PILLARS* + a sink and maybe a 220v outlet for some welding for...$40k.  That garage would be perfect for a wood shop, a print shop, a painting studio, a dark room (if people still did wet process photography), a band practice space, or starting a small business.  With all the money you're saving over living in NYC or SF you could fly to each 10X per year and fool some people into thinking you live there.

 

https://www.sibcycline.com/Listing/NKY/435445/2109-Maryland-Ave-Covington-KY-41014

 

The $40k house:

 

The 4-car garage you'd pay $2,000/mo to rent in a big city:

 

^Which brings us to this article. C'mon, hipsters, move to Ohio! Brooklyn and Oakland are over!

 

It’s cheaper to commute from Cleveland than buy a BK condo

by Conal Darcy

 

...I love living in New York, but with work, commuting, and sitting around afterwards griping about the two, I don’t have much time to take advantage of the city during the week. A half-million dollars is about 1/74th of the GDP of Tuvalu — way too much just to watch Netflix in an overpriced mausoleum on weeknights. With those kinds of bucks I figured it could be saner to buy a similar condo in another city, say, Cleveland, and use weekends to fly back to the borough. But would $500,000 be enough? And how long could I keep that up? To answer these questions, I did some research.

 

It was actually hard to find a place in Cleveland as small as the above decadent shoe box. In fact, finding a 500-square-foot studio was nearly impossible — it’s as if people in Cleveland appreciate “living space” and “bedrooms.” I did find this place, a little bigger at 768 square feet with a little patio, a bathroom, and a bedroom. It doesn’t have chichi Cervaiole marble slab countertops like the Clinton Hill condo, but this is the Rust Belt.

 

It lies in a so-called hipster part of Cleveland, Ohio City, where they’ve got similar “emerging shops and restaurants” hawked in the Clinton Hill ad. It also has a gym and washer/dryer, which are worth their weight in gold and conspicuously absent in the Brooklyn condo. Though the two places aren’t identical, I’m calling it even. The price: only $124,000.

 

For simplicity’s sake, assume I have a half-million in cash (haha, yeah…), because that’s the only way to buy real estate in Brooklyn nowadays. Buying the condo in Cleveland leaves me with $376K in the bank.

 

Airfares to Cleveland are surprisingly cheap. I found upcoming round-trip flights from $190 to $360. Frequent flier miles and fare fluctuations will likely cancel each other out over time, so I’ll take the average of these two, or $275. I figure travel time would be around six hours every week, which is plenty of time to trade stocks, laugh mirthlessly, or whatever the hell it is rich people do in their spare time.

 

Without a place of my own in Brooklyn, I’d have to find an Airbnb to stay Friday and Saturday nights. The life of a weekend nomad will be lonely, so I’d only need accommodation for one. Airbnb says the average price for a single private room in Clinton Hill is $116/night. With the normal service fee it comes to about $250 for weekend accommodation.

 

Add $200 for cab fare on both sides and it’s $725 per weekend trip to New York, or 518 possible trips with our leftover cash. Divide that by 50 weeks in a year (two weeks saved for a real vacation, duh) and you have enough money to buy the condo in Cleveland and visit New York City every weekend for ten years. All for the price of one tiny studio condo in Brooklyn.

 

CONTINUED (and it gets pretty funny)

http://brokelyn.com/half-million-dollar-condo-flights-city-long-long-time/

 

^ I propose we erect a wall......

^Which brings us to this article. C'mon, hipsters, move to Ohio! Brooklyn and Oakland are over!

Its cheaper to commute from Cleveland than buy a BK condo

by Conal Darcy

 

That Cleveland condo is really expensive.  I'm sure that there are decent homes for sale in Cleveland for $50,000 just like the ones in and around Cincinnati.   

 

What I'm amazed by living here in Cincinnati is all of the people I know who bought houses for $85,000 back in the 90s who still haven't paid them off.  All they had to do is get a part-time job of some kind making $10k a year and they could have paid off those houses in the early 2000s.  But also, there are many people who bought houses for $85k here in the 90s and now those are the houses you see selling for 40k.  This incredible dip in housing costs in the industrial Midwest is a boon for everyone coming out of college with a mountain of student loan debt.  But instead of taking advantage of these cheap houses, they are getting locked into $200k+ houses in fashionable neighborhoods.  That or $180k condos with $250/mo hoa fees. 

 

^I know I've said it somewhere before, but in the past, and especially for "the MTV Generation", nearly all of youth culture was funneled through music since MTV was the only TV channel that catered to teenagers.  So anyone who wasn't really interested in music was at least familiar with all kinds of stuff -- and during its height what MTV broadcast was much more eclectic than it became in the late 90s and 2000s.  When videos-only MTV2 came out, the original MTV that showed all of the reality shows still got way more viewers because music was never as popular as it appeared to be.

 

 

Here's the main problem with videos-only MTV, then MTV2 and later VH1 Classic -- songs are usually only 3-5 minutes long. When a song is over and someone doesn't like the next song they change the channel. They don't do that as much with a radio. Then when they change the channel, it's to something that requires more "commitment" than a song. It's hard to get them back to the music video channel once they've gotten sucked into a show, movie or news vortex. It's an example of why mixing media doesn't work. Movies on TV is about the only crossover that has worked on a long term basis.

^Which brings us to this article. C'mon, hipsters, move to Ohio! Brooklyn and Oakland are over!

Its cheaper to commute from Cleveland than buy a BK condo

by Conal Darcy

 

That Cleveland condo is really expensive.  I'm sure that there are decent homes for sale in Cleveland for $50,000 just like the ones in and around Cincinnati.   

 

What I'm amazed by living here in Cincinnati is all of the people I know who bought houses for $85,000 back in the 90s who still haven't paid them off.  All they had to do is get a part-time job of some kind making $10k a year and they could have paid off those houses in the early 2000s.  But also, there are many people who bought houses for $85k here in the 90s and now those are the houses you see selling for 40k.  This incredible dip in housing costs in the industrial Midwest is a boon for everyone coming out of college with a mountain of student loan debt.  But instead of taking advantage of these cheap houses, they are getting locked into $200k+ houses in fashionable neighborhoods.  That or $180k condos with $250/mo hoa fees. 

 

 

What part of town? Did they refinance a couple of times. I see many people renting, especially if they are not 100% locked into the area, or until they get married.

I work with a lot of people who live in College Hill, North College Hill, Fairfield, etc., who saw their home prices crushed during the recession and they absolutely haven't recovered.  So they still owe $60,000 on their houses while ones around them are selling for $40,000 and being rented Section 8.  Some of them still have 6%+ mortgages and I've told them to refinance but they won't do it.  I think a lot of people are so humiliated by the situation that they can't think straight.  Also, guys in the blue collar world who didn't go to college tend not to trust the financial advice of the guys who went to college and who work in the office.  Most of them have nicer vehicles than mine, of course.

 

I work with a lot of people who live in College Hill, North College Hill, Fairfield, etc., who saw their home prices crushed during the recession and they absolutely haven't recovered.  So they still owe $60,000 on their houses while ones around them are selling for $40,000 and being rented Section 8.  Some of them still have 6%+ mortgages and I've told them to refinance but they won't do it.  I think a lot of people are so humiliated by the situation that they can't think straight.  Also, guys in the blue collar world who didn't go to college tend not to trust the financial advice of the guys who went to college and who work in the office.  Most of them have nicer vehicles than mine, of course.

 

 

Makes sense. I bet you could toss in westwood and Mt. Airy into that mix. I grew up in that area, and after I left never went back. Mom got lucky, she sold her house on Colerain Ave for 109K in 2005. When looking for affordable housing still better off with Northside, Covington, Clifton H., Walnut E Walnut. More and better rehabs, investors. There are some very nice homes, and streets in N. College, College Hill, but not much else. Still gotta buy at the right price.

Most cities around the country have seen home prices in nearly all neighborhoods recover if not leap past housing bubble prices back into insane bubble territory.  That hasn't happened in Cleveland (from what I know -- I might be wrong) and certainly hasn't happened in Cincinnati.  Columbus is now getting significantly more expensive than Cincinnati and redevelopment is now pushing into formerly uncool areas like Parsons Ave.  It's conceivable that in ten years there won't be *any* cheap 2/3 bedroom prewar houses left in Columbus. 

 

If you ignore OTR, the usual east side neighborhoods, and Northside, there has been practically zero housing price recovery in Cincinnati.  The West End, Brighton, Camp Washington, and South Cumminsville are still dirt cheap.  Add to that list neighborhoods absolutely nobody is talking about like College Hill, Elmwood Place, St. Bernard, and Reading, not to mention Covington south of 12th, Latonia, etc., and there is no way there still won't be insanely cheap houses in Cincinnati in ten years.  Short of mass inflation of the U.S. Dollar or some mass influx of immigrants and/or hipsters, I'm confident that you will still be able to find decent 2-3 bedroom houses in Cincinnati for well under $100k and even under $75k in 2025.  This really is the cheapest "real" city in the United States, and it was all enabled by the massive postwar housing boom that left the city to rot, then the exodus of its native sons to much more expensive cities. 

 

I think the lure of expensive cities is irresistible to a certain percentage of young adults, and that won't change.  But I think more people are going to get spit out much more quickly and violently than happened in recent decades.  The paradox is that if Midwest home prices start rising substantially, the difference between bright lights and the hometown will shrink, making a better argument for the bright lights. 

Is that one bar where they used to have Metal Night after Top Cat's closed still in Elmwood? That place was probably the biggest draw there.

Is that one bar where they used to have Metal Night after Top Cat's closed still in Elmwood? That place was probably the biggest draw there.

 

Dirty Jack's.  Closed around 2010. 

Most cities around the country have seen home prices in nearly all neighborhoods recover if not leap past housing bubble prices back into insane bubble territory.  That hasn't happened in Cleveland (from what I know -- I might be wrong) and certainly hasn't happened in Cincinnati.  Columbus is now getting significantly more expensive than Cincinnati and redevelopment is now pushing into formerly uncool areas like Parsons Ave.  It's conceivable that in ten years there won't be *any* cheap 2/3 bedroom prewar houses left in Columbus. 

 

True. Cleveland and Cincinnati are extremely undervalued.

Is that one bar where they used to have Metal Night after Top Cat's closed still in Elmwood? That place was probably the biggest draw there.

 

Dirty Jack's.  Closed around 2010. 

 

Incidentally, the Elmwood Place strip is home to John Boehner's family-owned tavern that we always have to hear about:

 

 

 

Ah, I was always under the impression that was in Reading.

 

Starting from the bottom as an artist ain't happening as much these days...call it the gentrification of the music scene, but I think an artist has a better shot in Canada these days:

 

 

Canada has a government mandated "Canadian content" requirement for their radio stations.  As for the Drake song, irony doesn't even begin to cover it.  Degrassi Junior High is not "at the bottom" except perhaps culturally.

wait, so confirmed that andys cafe is the former boehner family tavern?

Yeah, but they don't own it anymore.

wait, so confirmed that andys cafe is the former boehner family tavern?

 

Soon to be former-former owners...the place is for sale:

https://www.sibcycline.com/Listing/CIN/1454827/7201-Vine-St-Carthage-OH-45216

 

It turns out there is a website for Ohio transplants in New York City (mainly Brooklyn). I guess this fuels the fire of the "Go Back to Ohio!" comments that are/were often directed at hipsters in Williamsburg. I will admit that I constantly run into college friends from Ohio whenever I'm in NYC, and some of the Ohio bars in Brooklyn are the real deal. You see a lot of Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, and Cincinnati influence in the nice parts of Brooklyn.

 

http://www.ohionyc.com

 

In San Francisco and Oakland, nativist rage is typically directed at people from Colorado and LA. Though I'd argue there are far more Midwesterners in SF tech than from any other region. Marc Andreesen is from Iowa. Jack Dorsey is from Missouri. Chris Sacca is from Buffalo (which is basically Toledo across the lake). The list of native Midwesterners in San Francisco-Oakland goes on forever...it's not all that different from the transplant situation in New York City.

 

This is one of the Toledo Brooklynites who also went to OU:

 

Toledo-native John Jagos began making music under the moniker of Brothertiger while he was still a student at Ohio University, self-releasing his Vision Tunnels EP in 2010 before hooking up with Akron-based Collective Crowd Records for his 2011 EP, Point of View. This all led up to the release of his full-length debut, Golden Years, released in March by Mush Records. With its soft focus, ambient touches and cascading synth lines, the record is reminiscent of Washed Out, but Brothertiger also shows that he clearly has a voice of his own and pop instincts that transcend any niche.

 

Since the album’s release, Jagos has relocated to Brooklyn.

 

I remember when synth pop was still a novelty...Portland always did this better than any other city, but at least Brooklyn Ohio tried:

 

 

http://www.ohionyc.com/2012/09/16/brothertiger-at-glasslands-tonight/

Chromatics (and Blouse) won this game for Portland:

 

meet antibrooklyn:

 

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/meet-antibrooklyn-hipster-clothings-biggest-troll-7797560

meet antibrooklyn:

 

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/meet-antibrooklyn-hipster-clothings-biggest-troll-7797560

 

That is actually (and I think knowingly) the *most* hipster thing ever...

 

 

I remember when synth pop was still a novelty...Portland always did this better than any other city, but at least Brooklyn Ohio tried:

 

 

http://www.ohionyc.com/2012/09/16/brothertiger-at-glasslands-tonight/

 

 

 

 

I'll argue that France does it the best between Phoenix, M83, Kavinsky, Daft Punk and Carpenter Brut. Of course Carpenter Brut is the "metal band" of the lot

 

 

 

 

I listened to all 50 of these new songs:

http://www.stereogum.com/1838310/stereogums-50-best-new-bands-of-2015/franchises/list/1/

 

I'd love to jump straight into panning 45 out of the 50 songs (I did tolerate or at least like something about 5 of them), but the bigger issue now as always is music writers and their crappy taste. In short, most music writers don't understand rock & roll at all.  They like the attention they get by being able to lord over a scene and their reviews are usually all about them, not about the record they're reviewing.  They like to talk about influences and what some new thing is similar to and what they think the band was thinking instead of just laying out a straightforward description of a new record. 

 

As for all of these songs, I sense a crippling lack of engagement, let alone acknowledgement of the blues...and when you don't have any kind of hard blues sensibility driving you as a person, your band is probably going to suck.  There's really no mischief going on in these songs (i.e. ZZ Top, AC/DC, and tons of outlaw country, as obvious examples)...there is no tease and insinuation and knowing wink.  Few tacky flat thirds, no big obvious fat 7ths, no rude high-hat, garden-hose-up-the-nose uppity beats, no false endings, no blues shuffles.  No call-and-response, no repeating something dumb over and over again until it becomes really clever and fun and celebratory.  Again, seemingly no awareness of hard blues, or big not-obscure people like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Wilson Picket, The Ramones, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, etc.  These people need to quit listening to NPR and tune into real stuff...overnight trucker talk, country preachers, 30-minute reverse mortgage infomercials, etc. 

 

 

^It was that NES you hate. I never thought at the time that thing would become so important to music. We would listen to the songs it played a little bit but then would put on some Quiet Riot or Warrant while we were playing back then. I like a lot of NES music now, but it is unbelievable to me how much it changed popular music.

These people need to quit listening to NPR and tune into real stuff...overnight trucker talk, country preachers, 30-minute reverse mortgage infomercials, etc. 

 

This is the best sentence I have read so far today.

yeesh, getting through that ad-ridden stereogum blog listicle was painful. ive randomly seen two of those acts, fetty & diet cig, and yeah even live they are not going to change your mind senor meck.

 

i also saw a gambier, ohio band on that list called sports. has anyone seen them -- outside of their dorm?

They play them on CD102.5. Never seen them though.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/fashion/npr-voice-has-taken-over-the-airwaves.html?mwrsm=Facebook

this is 52nd st looking east from 6th ave in 1948 (this club strip was between 6th-5th avs).

 

 

^ now if you dig in and widen it out a bit, first look to the right side of the street and toledo people will notice art tatum playing at a club. then if you look to the left side of the street under the onyx club sign you will see harry 'the hipster' gibson is playing at that club.

 

harry was the original hipster.

 

mix two parts benezidrene with two parts cultural theft, cough cough, umm, i mean appropriation and you get harry...

 

 

 

^I think the style of that song is making fun of contemporary pop piano songs of that kind.  So the words are part of the statement, but the corny twinkly piano playing is making fun of people who played that style and "fans" who liked that style.  I think he's making fun of the sort of guy who was the best player in a third-rate town who was a local celebrity but pretty mediocre compared to the best guys out there.  And back then there wasn't much recorded music, so when people were music fans, they were primarily fans of live music.  And because amplification didn't really exist yet (a sound system that could play records at high volume), any hotel lounge (hotels had lounges because TV wasn't invented yet and hotel guests socialized instead of sitting in their rooms all night) or bar needed to *pay* people to play music for hour after hour.  Thousands of people in every big city made their living as musicians who played lounges and bars 4-5 nights per week.  Audience members pretty much only heard live music, so they really knew when somebody was exceptionally good.  I'm sure the legendary big bands were no joke.  I bet they were unbelievably good and the recordings that exist (and Hollywood depictions of it) don't really pay any of it justice. 

 

They play them on CD102.5. Never seen them though.

 

A lot of newer bands don't play much live, until they're established.  Promotion happens on the 'net.

^I think the style of that song is making fun of contemporary pop piano songs of that kind. 

 

yep, nothing more hipster than that.

 

wiki sez: Gibson claims he coined the term hipster some time between 1939 and 1945, when he was performing on Swing Street (52nd st) and he started using "Harry the Hipster" as his stage name.

 

harry the hipster album titles: Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?; Galactic Love

We are in the last throes of hipsters. They're already barely hanging on in San Francisco's Mission District and Lower Haight (all that's left of the SF scene), and they are in rapid decline in most other West Coast cities. Oakland is the only West Coast hipster stronghold where they are clearly the wealthiest and most influential group of people....but that has much more to due with Oakland's extreme inequality and red-lining than anything the hipsters have done. It's pretty easy to have power in America when you are the only large group of wealthy white people in the city. The white transformation of Oakland's core has been shocking and is proof red-lining has come back with full force in America. And the crazy thing is all the riots in Oakland are started by hella white hipsters ironically protesting racism. Nothing about Oakland's hipster scene remotely makes sense anymore. At first, it was just the Mission hipster scene transplanted across the Bay, but now it's something quite a bit different and far more sinister. Any parallels with the hipsters in SF, Portland, LA, and Seattle are long gone. Oakland stands alone. The city is basically a cross between "Mad Max," "Girls," "Looking," "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," and "City of God."

 

The hipster backlash happening in the Bay is the normcore movement crossed with some of LA's sexier fashion sensibilities (with north side SF being the sexiest). Berkeley is undergoing an arguably even stronger hipster backlash than San Francisco right now (lots of normcores in Berkeley). That's why I'm guessing the Oakland hipsters are on their last legs. They're now surrounded by anti-hipsters. Being covered in tattoos is no longer cool in San Francisco or Berkeley. Only Oakland still worships tats. When something gets too mainstream, it inevitably starts to lose influence. And in the Bay, the hipster movement was always a white Gen Y marketing movement with quite a lot of money behind it. SF is moving onto other products and services targeting Gen Z. Few of these new San Francisco brands are targeting hipsters. The white people always had different fashion and different culture, but the Mission/Oakland hipsters had this silent, yet strong undercurrent of racism that ran counter to California's historically inclusive culture. I think that's why native Californians hated them so much and are jumping ship.

 

As UC Berkeley undergrads continue to take over Downtown Oakland since they are now priced out of Berkeley, the culture clashes are growing more dramatic. Keep in mind most UC Berkeley students come from Southern California (particularly Orange County, which is as anti-hipster as it gets). You've got young normcores versus aging hipsters. There is very much a sense in Oakland that Gen Z is growing anti-hipster. Gen Y hipsters still have all the money, but they're seeing some of their flagship hipster bars being taken over by UCB students. Keep coming to Oakland, UC Berkeley students! This aging millennial welcomes you with open arms!

 

New fashion trend 'normcore' a hit among Gen Z

 

There's a growing fashion movement among members Generation Z. It's called normcore, which combines the words normal and hardcore. Normcore is a style that's bland, average-looking and unpretentious.

 

Phoebe Wells describes Normcore as "trying to have a style that's not having a style."

 

"It's when you dress normally," said Alexander Videla. "You try to appear as normal as possible, not sticking out, just blending in."

 

"It's almost an ironic statement," said Kelly Dorney. "Our generation is kind of saying, 'We all dress the same and it's something that kind of unites us, but we're still really individual.'"

 

CONTINUED

http://www.12news.com/story/life/2015/10/20/new-fashion-trend-normcore-gen-z/74053942/

Those guys with no hair on the sides are really pushing out the hipsters. Some are hipster-lite but the irony (the most important hipster trait) is totally gone. Earnestness is back. And the banjo crowd is coming on really strong, but I don't know how big that is on the coasts. No irony with them either... they're more like modern hippies.

We are in the last throes of hipsters. They're already barely hanging on in San Francisco's Mission District and Lower Haight (all that's left of the SF scene), and they are in rapid decline in most other West Coast cities. Oakland is the only West Coast hipster stronghold where they are clearly the wealthiest and most influential group of people....but that has much more to due with Oakland's extreme inequality and red-lining than anything the hipsters have done. It's pretty easy to have power in America when you are the only large group of wealthy white people in the city. The white transformation of Oakland's core has been shocking and is proof red-lining has come back with full force in America. And the crazy thing is all the riots in Oakland are started by hella white hipsters ironically protesting racism. Nothing about Oakland's hipster scene remotely makes sense anymore. At first, it was just the Mission hipster scene transplanted across the Bay, but now it's something quite a bit different and far more sinister. Any parallels with the hipsters in SF, Portland, LA, and Seattle are long gone. Oakland stands alone. The city is basically a cross between "Mad Max," "Girls," "Looking," "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," and "City of God."

 

The hipster backlash happening in the Bay is the normcore movement crossed with some of LA's sexier fashion sensibilities (with north side SF being the sexiest). Berkeley is undergoing an arguably even stronger hipster backlash than San Francisco right now (lots of normcores in Berkeley). That's why I'm guessing the Oakland hipsters are on their last legs. They're now surrounded by anti-hipsters. Being covered in tattoos is no longer cool in San Francisco or Berkeley. Only Oakland still worships tats. When something gets too mainstream, it inevitably starts to lose influence. And in the Bay, the hipster movement was always a white Gen Y marketing movement with quite a lot of money behind it. SF is moving onto other products and services targeting Gen Z. Few of these new San Francisco brands are targeting hipsters. The white people always had different fashion and different culture, but the Mission/Oakland hipsters had this silent, yet strong undercurrent of racism that ran counter to California's historically inclusive culture. I think that's why native Californians hated them so much and are jumping ship.

 

As UC Berkeley undergrads continue to take over Downtown Oakland since they are now priced out of Berkeley, the culture clashes are growing more dramatic. Keep in mind most UC Berkeley students come from Southern California (particularly Orange County, which is as anti-hipster as it gets). You've got young normcores versus aging hipsters. There is very much a sense in Oakland that Gen Z is growing anti-hipster. Gen Y hipsters still have all the money, but they're seeing some of their flagship hipster bars being taken over by UCB students. Keep coming to Oakland, UC Berkeley students! This aging millennial welcomes you with open arms!

 

New fashion trend 'normcore' a hit among Gen Z

 

There's a growing fashion movement among members Generation Z. It's called normcore, which combines the words normal and hardcore. Normcore is a style that's bland, average-looking and unpretentious.

 

Phoebe Wells describes Normcore as "trying to have a style that's not having a style."

 

"It's when you dress normally," said Alexander Videla. "You try to appear as normal as possible, not sticking out, just blending in."

 

"It's almost an ironic statement," said Kelly Dorney. "Our generation is kind of saying, 'We all dress the same and it's something that kind of unites us, but we're still really individual.'"

 

CONTINUED

http://www.12news.com/story/life/2015/10/20/new-fashion-trend-normcore-gen-z/74053942/

 

A tendency towards conformity mixed with a lack of irony and cynicism.  That’s a dangerous mix because it makes them vulnerable to charismatic and unscrupulous “leaders”.  I’m not just talking about socialists or communitarians either.  Nehemiah Scudder leaps to mind, Heinlein’s been right about many other things, I’d rather not add that.

 

P. J. O'Rourke once called earnetness "stupidity that has been to college". The libertarian-leaning right of my generation may have made a strategic error comparable to the progressive-left’s embrace of the Watergate scandal.  Academia did not appeal to us at all.  It seemed to have all the vices of working for a big corporation and/or the government, and none of the virtues.

 

Are sweatpants part of that trend? I was in Brooklyn over the holiday. Lots of sweatpants - bagging from waist to thigh, skin tight below. Who knew my 80 yr old dad was hip.

Let's see if the one-leg-up-to-the-bottom-of-the-knee sweat pant trend comes back.  I can't remember if that happened at the same time as the half-latched overalls, or a little before, or a little after.  But women's stirrup pants definitely came a little after sweat pants, so I'm sure that's next.  Or maybe women with oversized t-shirts tied in a knot on the hip above non-functional bicycle spandex shorts with a neon green vertical stripe. 

Are sweatpants part of that trend? I was in Brooklyn over the holiday. Lots of sweatpants - bagging from waist to thigh, skin tight below. Who knew my 80 yr old dad was hip.

 

Saw the same thing in Paris this past summer and attributed it to being a Euro thing.  Went to San Francisco and LA a few weeks ago and saw them there as well.  It's definitely a trend that's on the way.

Sweatpants are new? That hit in like 2000 and never went away.

No, these are like hammer pants on the top, and taper down to essentially a skinny jean level of tightness below the knee.

He and his nearly $200 sweatpants are perhaps the poster child for fashion's latest obsession.

 

What Is Athleisure?

 

Davis' sweats are part of a growing trend called "athleisure." Gym  clothes are making their way out of the gym and becoming a larger part of people's everyday wardrobes

 

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/08/397138654/for-the-modern-man-the-sweatpant-moves-out-of-the-gym

Well that happened back in the 70s and 80s also when jogging and aerobics first appeared.  But what people wear jogging and in a gym has evolved since then.  So what is making its way into the casual realm is a bit different.  I think it's kind of amazing how ubiquitous the Under Armor brand has become in the past five years.  It's as if some beer came out of nowhere to challenge Budweiser.  I do think that any Nike "casual wear" suffers from a slightly cheesy image thanks to Tiger Woods. 

I have seen 3 pieces of Under Armor litter on the ground so far; all in different cities.

Those guys with no hair on the sides are really pushing out the hipsters. Some are hipster-lite but the irony (the most important hipster trait) is totally gone. Earnestness is back. And the banjo crowd is coming on really strong, but I don't know how big that is on the coasts. No irony with them either... they're more like modern hippies.

 

That's all on its way out too, and banjo buskers have been dead in SF for years (they can't compete with homeless musicians). A couple banjo crowd people are left in Oakland, but they won't last long. It's too dangerous. Any wannabe hipster busker playing annoying music in public in Oakland is crazy, and they're likely to get their banjo stolen by the normcore teenagers. Oakland's normcores overwhelmingly are coming from some of the seedier parts of the city- the only places left you can find teens in mass since there are still a couple public high schools open in East Oakland. It should also be noted that normcore fashion is cutting across racial lines, something that hipsters tried hard not to do here. This is a complete 180 from Gen Y hipsters. I'm encouraged by the racial integration I'm seeing in Gen Z. Locally, that's the most positive thing to come out of this backlash against hipsters.

 

The Bay historically had a strong hipster/hippie class divide. They were sworn enemies since many of the hippies were middle class while the Bay's hipsters were 1%. Class has always been a big part of fashion here, but both groups are dying out fast. San Francisco's hippie scene is long gone. Haight-Ashbury is a caricature of itself. There are only one or two hippie neighborhoods left in Oakland, and the hippie scene has shrunk to barely subsistence level in Berkeley. Some argue Berkeley invented the hippies, so for it to be dying out there says something. Where hippies live on against the odds is Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is far enough away from any major city to have its own bubble culture, and the town is totally in a time warp. It hasn't changed since 1980! It's a fascinating place. Santa Cruz is a hippie oasis frozen in amber. All over California, you'll see elements of 1960's hippie fashion live on, but nobody is going all-out hippie like Santa Cruz. Hell, I even have some hippie outfits, and I'm a blue collar yuppie.

 

Santa Cruz is one of the only real hippie towns left in California, and some people want it to live on as a museum for 1960's coastal California culture.

 

I've also heard kids say "normcore" is dressing like a "Midwest teenager." A lot of the recent trends are just adapting the public high school fashion of states like Ohio. Gym shorts, tank tops, sweatpants, tennis shoes, sports logo t-shirts, flip-flops, New Era baseball hats, etc.

 

*Levi's jeans are also normcore fashion in the Bay, and it could save the brand (I've always loved Levi's). It will be interesting to see the Gap's reaction to Gen Z, since they never connected with hipsters, and the Gap seemed like a 90's staple. It's due for a revival.

 

**Hipsters remain remarkably strong and well-heeled in Oakland, but it's now just counter-culture against San Francisco more than anything else. The scene stopped innovating years ago and got very repetitive  ("More tattoos!" "Skinnier jeans!" "Bigger beards!" "More Tecate!" "More drugs!"). It seems like the Oakland hipsters are just doing things to be "not like San Franciscans." The identity is just trying to be anti-SF, which is a waste of energy. That's why I can't stand the Oakland hipsters (not to mention their elitist, anti-social behavior). It's exhausting dealing with all of these spoiled haters, and hating San Francisco is biting the hand that feeds. Oakland's scene would never have happened without San Francisco. No new trends are coming out of this Oakland scene except the local clothing movement, which is insanely profitable, but might not spread across the country very well since other cities aren't chock full of wealthy Gen Y residents like Oakland is. Nationally, Gen Y hipsters probably can't afford these new Oakland trends. $120 wallet? $75 belt? $250 hoodie? No thank you. I think outside of the Bay, most of Gen Y is still dealing with student loan debt. :|

 

***What killed hipsters in San Francisco is Greek Life. There was a strong shift to fraternities and sororities in tech (the early itineration of this was the "brogrammer"), and the whole San Francisco marketing industry changed. SF has once again become one of the hottest cities for fraternity/sorority types. Greek Life fashion has been around for decades and goes through periodic revivals like this. Fraternity and sorority fashion is a reaction against the fading dominance of Mission hipsters in San Francisco. All of a sudden, looking clean cut and crisp became popular again. People are trimming their beards, or shaving them off all together. They're covering their tattoos or getting them removed. The piercings are gone.

 

All those guys who paid for beard implants must be kicking themselves right now...