jakec asked: Help me understand what you see in HRO. I've been reading articles on-and-off for, I don't know, since the Animal Collective post I suppose. Some I've really liked (the "How Chili's Saved My Life" bit comes to mind) but when I hear people talk about how they really identify/connect with Carles I go blank. So, what should I be getting out of it that I'm missing?
I think it’s best expressed via the generational consciousness I seem to have suddenly manifested. I spent my youth being cynical about stuff and snarky and doubting motivations and analysing the structures beneath social interaction and reading Daniel Clowes comics. So there is a really basic level on which Hipster Runoff, which takes all that to a kind of nihilistic black-hole extreme of doubt (or ‘irony’ if you like) in which every word, every punctuation mark can betray you and you don’t even know what it’s betraying you to or why the betrayal might be bad or why BAD might be bad… well anyway that stuff is likely to work for me, or at least make me laugh. I don’t really pay attention to the messages such as they are.
But this is why I compared it to a boomer me liking Rattle And Hum. There’s a sense in which these are really easy buttons to press and I shouldn’t respond positively to them, and the cultural thing which is pressing them certainly isn’t any kind of unalloyed good or something necessarily to rally around!
