I “grew up” on this shit, 2006 the first festival I ever attended and the most bands I’d ever seen in one place—Mission of Burma, Devendra Banhart, Ted Leo, Art Brut, JEEZ! For thirty dollars, to a ex-high school senior? A-ma-zing.
2008, 2008, 2009—the crowds grew, the pants sizes shrunk, the number of overheard conversations about Built to Spill B-sides increased (and no scoffin’—I took part in a bunch of them!) and you couldn’t even adjust your KEFFIYAH without bumping into someone with a SONIC YOUTH t-shirt, usually complimented with a VINTAGE CHICAGO BULLS CHAMPIONSHIP HAT and a PROFOUND SENSE OF DESPAIR. In fact, my college buddy and I played a game called SPOT THE FLANNEL last year only to realize that we were both offenders… part of the snobby hipster milieu ourselves!
Or not. Pitchfork Festival gets a lot of flak for being hipster central, and maybe that’s true when compared to the Taste of Chicago or the Bud Billiken Parade but why does every gathering of young people in bright clothing get the dreaded “hipster” tag? I don’t even know if it’s dreaded any more, just another signifier of a group people love to look down on but secretly sort of envy, at least a little bit—we wanted the money of the yuppies, the fuck-you existence of the punks, the sheer lack of self-consciousness of the ravers, that killer hippie weed… I mean, I read a classroom definition of one of these mythical creatures as “Someone who embraces a lifestyle that is recycling ideas of past ideas of hipster culture, resulting in something that is a hollow trend moreso than the ideology it used to be.” What!
But Pitchfork 2010 is going to be the pinnacle of that, if you’re really into shneerin’ and shcoffin’. They’ve brought cool bands before, Sonic Youth in 2007, Animal Collective in 2008, Wavves (eckhem koff koff koff) in 2009, but Pavement is the hipster-tome of that of that wanton malaise, that readily definable subgroup. Modest Mouse? LCD Soundsystem? These are bands that are so readily hip, readily critically-acclaimed and readily popular that the year will bring every affected youth for counties and counties around, ready to make a Craigslist missed connection.
These three bands are the perfect cross-section of obscurity and popularity, bands that everyone knows about if they want to be cool but still listen to—you’ll never meet someone who just knows “about” Modest Mouse but isn’t really into their music, shit, even I used to bump “Float On” and “Dark Side of the Universe” when I was pumping out calculus homework in Lincoln Park and I can’t even stand Isaac Brock’s voice! I’m excited, real excited, to see the mass exodus of people just looking to have fun, and more importantly, the indignation of the self-identified cool kids who think their exclusive tastes are more legit, feeling a sense of disgust and shame when they’re too embarrassed to dance along to “Disco Infiltrator” while all the smiling, stoned kids are shaking their legs and soaking up the sun…
It’s going to be the Windy City bash of the summer. If you’ve ever written or read a boring thinkpiece about the “Death of the Hipster,” you will want to be here to see the pretentious excesses of our generation zoom towards a singularity, record store heads backed into a corner to get even more obscure and more distanced in order to maintain their thin hold on a hobby—indie rock—that no one really cares about maintaining besides new dads bemoaning how the new Jesus Lizard isn’t as good as the old Jesus Lizard. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!