What have hipsters ever done for us?: a retrospective

Throughout its history, one arm of metal or another has been engaged in some form of trench warfare with perceived threats, both internal and external. When I entered the scene in the mid-2000s, protracted wars with old enemies on the Christian right and the forces of commercialisation had all but burned themselves out. Demoralised by the ravages of glam metal, grunge, nu metal, and later emo and metalcore, extreme metal had returned to a liminal state of hibernation. This period was a nadir for serious underground endeavour. A scene exhausted, on auto pilot, its assets stripped and sold for parts.

But nothing gets the juices flowing like an existential threat. And the few remaining devotees of extreme metal – many terminally online by this point – found themselves confronted by a new and arguably more insipid foe.

Paradoxically, despite no one openly embracing the “hipster” label, the aesthetic and social norms were suddenly everywhere by 2005, visible enough for a skewering in the channel 4 sitcom Nathan Barley, ruthlessly savaging a façade invading every area of adolescent life. Although its origins are much older, “hipster” quickly became a mid-2000s slur for any cultural expression deemed disingenuous. This loose application made the term impenetrably nebulous, covering everything from The Mighty Boosh to Wolves in the Throne Room to specialist coffee served against a backdrop of exposed brick. The appropriation of various elements of working class dress, a passion for gourmet street food, a rustic, DIY aesthetic (often deployed to obscure just how ruthlessly curated everything was), and a complete prohibition on ever losing oneself to the moment, never letting the mask slip in public to reveal a genuine and uncontrolled emotional response to anything. This goes some way to defining the look and feel of the hipster. But for metal, the threat stemmed from a very particular characteristic of hipsterdom: irony.

This word became a catch all phrase to describe the ambient pretence and affectation that oozed from hipster environments. Although the term is probably doing some considerable heavy lifting here, anyone who has done time in these spaces will no doubt be familiar with the strange demeanour its inhabitants gave off, a vibe we ambiguously referred to as “irony”.

Linguistic precision aside, this prevailing attitude proved to be uniquely dangerous for metal because it clashed with a fundamental aspect of its psychology, namely, a genuine and often vulnerable passion.

More broadly, as far as the standards of contemporary music and culture are concerned, metal does everything wrong. It behaves in direct contradiction to, nay in spite of, agreed definitions of cool, style, and artistic subtlety. It requires total, unselfconscious commitment to the moment, a heightened sense of melodrama, theatre, a reckless surplus of noise, imagery, activity. Once possessed of this mindset, metalheads are compelled to radically alter their image, and start behaving like Christian missionaries in their desire to spread the good news.  

These are things that brought it into a direct conflict with the hipster. Hipsterdom dissolved the transparent and perhaps naïve passion embodied by metalheads. Although there was (usually) no intentionality or malice behind this process, it was no less damaging. Where previously external forces had simply appropriated and dumbed down metal for commercial ends, hipsterdom contradicted the very attitudes and behaviours of the metalhead. The singular dedication and (often obnoxious) love of metal was absorbed in a mist of ironic shadowplay.

Running parallel to this process was metal’s contradictory self-image. It demands legitimacy from the institutions of culture (validation from music academics, your teenage crush to finally wake up and realise how awesome your CD collection is, YouTube reaction videos), yet we dread the prospect of ever being granted legitimacy from the academy because this would allow us to leave the bunker, thus robbing us of a cherished outsider status bordering on victimhood.

The push and pull between a sense of superiority amongst subcultures and an entrenched (and cherished) siege mentality that refuses to accept institutional legitimacy. Hipsterdom cut through these contractions like a knife, granting the music not only a sense of legitimacy but altering the very psychology of what a metalhead could or should look like.

This is one reason why black metal – as the branch of the community embodying the metal faith to the fullest – proved to be the weaker flank. That, and the fact that black metal is the subgenre most closely aligned to the “avant-garde”. The value of metal insofar as it gives people permission to be ridiculous was under threat from a detached “ironic” cultural veil, a rigorous recapitulation of “cool” arrived at through a uniquely rigid policing of behaviour. The resulting “post” black metal, avant-garde metal, hipster black metal (and later blackgaze), threatened to neuter the music of all excitement, dispossess it of the things that made it both silly and special, replacing it with a “cool” yet decidedly domestic edifice in its place.

This conflict never really reached a resolution. But as the 2000s bled into the 2010s and the internet was dragged out of its wild west iteration, the old forums and hideouts were abandoned, replaced by the limited basket of social media platforms we know and doomscroll on today. The idea that you even had to commit to one subculture lost all meaning. The ease with which music can be produced and consumed has given rise to a smorgasbord of choice. This has all but dissolved the once closely guarded borders of genre, scene, and subculture, replacing it with a daily choose-your-own-adventure from the limitless archives of online content.

These new cultural pastures have allowed an uneasy peace to persist. The hipster siege of the mid-2000s was ultimately a conflict driven by scarcity of cultural resources, conditions that have since evaporated in the face of the vast territories opened up by online spaces. There is room enough for a whole plethora of different and contradictory articulations of metal to coexist, a series of siloed but interconnected communities all claiming different aspects of the genre as their own.

Importantly (and predictably), there was an underlying political thread to all this. Although many metalheads await enlightenment on the musical value of what has since been dubbed “hipster” black metal, it’s clear that on a broader cultural level hipsters were merely the vanguard of a much larger sea change. Metal was opened up to new populations, new ideas, and new identities following in their wake. Terms like “true” and “false” metal often function as proxy for conservative vs. progressive ideas, a microcosm of a wider societal debate. We can decry the hipster invasion and what it did to black metal as an artform, but the dual benefit of reenergising the underground by providing it with a common and existentially threatening foe at one end, and introducing metal to new perspectives, ideas, and populations at the other, these are things that with hindsight give cause for celebration.