Take a sneak peek at this fascinating chart: over the last few months, interest in hipster “indie metal” and “post-metal” bands has been fading like interest in a Justin Bieber death metal album. This could explain the vast nervousness and agitation among that group, who had a ten-year window to take over metal and use it for their own ends by replacing the original metal fans with a larger audience of quasi-mainstream SJW-style indie hipsters.
But they have failed.
As Google trends reveals, hipstermetal has been a flash in the pan, and these bands that received huge media attention from SJW journalists have collapsed. Even much more extreme and abrasive and non-hipster bands maintain a surprising degree of relative popularity in comparison to the dying indie/hipster metal trend.
Even Windir is more popular even today than Liturgy and Wolves in the Throne Room combined. Why is it that even though all these bands try so damn hard to sound like real black metal, true fans can always tell? Moreover, people with the true metalhead personality always end up gravitating to the real stuff. I think that’s because of psychological makeup and possibly even genetics related to brain structure.
In other news, the henhouse is clucking. But how they will be screeching when the destruction specialists appear for the first time. The anticipation is unbearable. The savoring of the flavor of the moment, as SJWs realize their gambit failed and they have now again been reduced to being low-paid entry-level workers in a world that does not care about their “Male Tears” mugs and bold, independent, brave and different social justice opinions…
Tags: deafheaven, hipstermetal, hipsters, indiemetal, sjws, wolves in the throne room
Wolves In The Throne Room saw this coming and made an ambient album ;)
The same thing happened in the late 90s with goth/symphonic poser black metal… Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Ancient etc were “going to take over metal”, now their audience is fading rapidly while Burzum and Darkthrone steadily increase in popularity.
I wonder if the next trend will be “Bro-metal” again…it always works in cycles with these phonies. After the self-pity of grunge we got hyper-masculine nu-metal phase than back to self-pitying metalcore. Will Kim Kelly start pushing over the top Gore bands and write things like, “Finally, REAL men are back!” in order to stay relevant?
Mainstream “pushes” are always garbage and transparent.
You know who is not garbage and transparent? You guessed it…Manilla Road.
No as “Fuck You with a Knife”, “Skin Her Alive”, “Eviscerated Bitch”, and “Dick is Fucking Big” are too sexist.
What really pisses me off is that if you run into a fan of this kind of hipster metal and you call them off, they look at you with a blank stare in their face not fully understanding what makes their bands hipsterish and fake. They truly believe they´re into real metal. And the problema is that indie-metal is always so effete you feel like an iPad customer.
Then there´s the hipster fan that is fully aware he/she does not belong here musicwise, but because of their superior social calibration, they’re able to worm their way into the social sphere of the “metal community” and then feel like they found a place where they belong and feel safe. They are good at name dropping but in their solace you’d never find them listening to any of the classics. These people also have the tendency to mendacious behavior like listening to Wolves in the Room and Mastodon.
But also let’s get real, this blight invasion can only occur on a genre that has been dead since 1996.
I’d like to believe the premise of this report is true but I don’t think this graph, on its own, leads to the conclusion “They have failed”.
As we already know, ‘hipster metal’ focuses on superficial novelty, rather than strong composition and meaningful content. The music lacks the qualities to give it enduring satisfaction, which suits the fans because they’re drawn to novelty rather than substance anyway. So, even though the graph shows that interest has declined in WITR, etc. it could also point to other possibilities regarding those who were fans of WITR and their ilk a few years ago:
1. Many of them now favour whatever the latest fads are in ‘hipster metal’ bands.
2. Some of them became bored and moved back into mainstream culture, but have been replaced by younger hipsters who, following the example of their piers (and not wanting to embarrass themselves as ‘noobs’ or being ‘behind the times’), also favour the latest ‘hipster metal’ fads.
3. Some of them decided to adopt a superficial interest in real metal bands in order to ‘out-weird’ their fellow hipsters (who knows, perhaps even a handful of them even transformed into real metal fans??)
Hipsters are transient in their interests and we’re hoping this factor will, one day, result in most of them withdrawing from metal culture. For this to happen, surely they would need to identify another genre to target that offers them a richer source of perceived ‘dangerous edgy weirdness’? What other existing genre of music would satisfy that craving?
I’m guessing neofolk and martial industrial because all the edgy fascists make that kinda music and being ironically fascist is so far out there, man.
If the neofolk/martial industrial stuff has anything to do with hipsters, they’re OG hipster, because the immediate roots of that stuff go back to the late 70s (the post-punk boom & early industrial like Throbbing Gristle). the merit of that music is debatable, but it sure isn’t some flash in the pan thing like Liturgy et al.