Animal Collective previewed their Merriweather Post Pavilion follow up, Centipede Hz, this week, leading to the inevitable high praise and subsequent backlash. Some people think the band is an over-hyped, blog driven, Pitchfork-anointed paper tiger, while others see them as the most important band in music right now.
But let's put all that aside...
Pitchofork's People's List also came out this week, and while it simply confirmed Pitchfork's status as an amplifier of the hype-feedback loop-- it served as a reminder of the different phases underground rock has gone through. From Radiohead and the Flaming Lips' art pop, to Bon Iver and Jeff Tweedy's singer/songwriterisms, to LCD and the xx's post-electronica-- underground music has shifted forms and spun off sub-genres like it had long before the music industry's premier tastemaker came into being.
The List also had This Is It by the Strokes as the fifth best album in the past 15 years. Love em or hate em the Strokes ushered in hipster swagger better than any other band. Skinny jeans, trucker hats, and "irony" were the order of the day. To their credit, hipsters also brought a sense of purpose and community to a post-9/11 NYC that certain sections of Brooklyn picked up and ran with.
However, not long after Brooklyn became the most important borough in the world, hipsters became a self-parody that no one wanted to identify with. Seminal NYC hipster bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Rapture looked to distance themselves from the scene and began openly talking about embracing a child-like and sincere sense of earnestness-- the kryptonite to irony's cynical, faux-hawked Supermen (and Supergirls).
Thus began the long road out of Hipster Town. The YYYs album Show Your Bones came out in 2006 in an attempt to put sincerity over cynicism. That same year fellow Brooklynites TV on the Radio put out Return to Cookie Mountain, a record that heavily referenced the very un-hip and earnest Peter Gabriel.
But laments over hipster culture justifiably persisted for years with many bands, like Liars, tempering their NYC cool with Berlin MNMLism. Zombie hipsters rose from the grave so many times-- they now have their own meme.
Which brings us to Centipede Hz. Yes, Animal Collective had to follow up MPP with something weird. To be taken seriously as the artists they want us to believe they are, a trip back to the drawing board was in order. But something funny happened along the way, AnCo always had that child-like wonder from their earlier albums. As their confidence, prowess and ambition grew, that innocence and earnestness morphed into different forms, but remained central to their sound.
MPP gave the band a pop legitimacy to make a statement with their next record and they did. What that statement was.... well I'll get back to you on that. I'm guessing it has something to do with a post-world-music mentality filtered through an organic jam session, but that's beside my point.
Centipede Hz has one significant side effect. The respect, both critically and commercially, that the band has earned has allowed them to make a record that is well respected, cool, weird, and absolutely un-hip. Just try rocking out to the album's first single, Today's Supernatural, and its hectic jig in a pair of tight jeans with a PBR in the air.
All that being said, we can now officially call it-- at 2:51 PM EST August the 23, 2012: the hipster is deceased. You're welcome.
