question about the Swans
 

trust me, fits here.


i am in total meh; someone told me that swans is totally hipster's taste band.
his friend told me that he was surprised and disappointed that i like the swans.

i dont care about that.
but seriously? am i missing smth?

No, those guys are idiots and probably don't know what hipsters are our what swans are like.

Who were these fools?

Hippies aren't the same as hipsters

You probably get some hipsters who attend their gigs so they can write about how loud they were the next day on their Facebook status and post instagramed pictures of Michael Gira sweating, but Swans are definitely not a hipster band. Beach House, Zola Jesus and that sort of crap are what I'd immediately think hipsters like, even though I can't say I am 100% sure.

This is what hipsters like
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=bHoJL...DbHo JLtUjGUI

and i have been loling.




some friends and they are in their early 30s.
the guy who said that -he is not so close to me, his friend is- well i was in his car one night and the stuff he played..well they sounded like hipster stuff to me.

i mean just like what deathie says here.



ah and he said that swans are like archive whats that band's name, in terms of hipster music.
LOL?
i asked 2 times; perhaps there is some other band under similar name and he is confusing our swans with smth else.

bored to click.

i mean, i am just bored.

i clicked -of course.

i like M.I.A.
dunno the other bands in top of that list.

Not MIA, link came out wrong cause I did it from my phone, meant to be this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?client=...GUI&nomobile=1

Sounds like this guy doesn't have a clue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHES9YAGGkU

What is the archive thing?

I have my own office now!

Think for yourself, you'll be better for it. Why do you give a fuck what someone[s friend think so ofy ou?

I liked them better when Jarboe was with them.

Hipster - poser using the latest fashion and music fads to try to present himself as HIP.

Hippie - hates water

True, my girlfriend is a hippy and she only washes twice/week

You know that linguists and the like cannot figure out the origin to the word Hip/Hep? No one really knows where it all began. hep cats, hip cats, according to Malcolm X's autobiography, were dudes who you knew smoked reefer, or could get a reefer from... but the word was in use for decades before.

"Y'all hip to Easter Island?" - P-Funk

I had an aging hipster (one of the rich boy types you mention) tell me that it is "SWANS", not "THE SWANS" when I posted on the book o' face that I was deeply immersed in Soundtracks For The Blind

nitpicky hipsters.

^^Indeed. First place I remember seeing it used contemporaneously, rather than as a jazz/beat throwback thing, was the liner notes of Belle & Sebastian sleeves in the nid/late 90's, which talked about Glasgow hipsters lazing around in coffee shop, but not in a pejorative sense, just as a quaint term for 'fey indie kid'. As you say, it was the post-millennial Strokes/NYC/Pitchfork-thing that redefined it.
Mind, these days, it says a lot more about the person using it that it does the subject.

Ha. I agree on that one. And it's 'Pixies' too. :)

In LA, the Silverlake hipsters (which are Hipsters par excellence) simply ADORE Swans, however I agree, I don't quite think Swans themselves (in whatever permutation there of) would agree with this or feel themselves to be hipsters or a hipster band or part of a hipster scene.

While they were much more "themselves" in that era, I dig the more melodic and musical direction the sans-Jarboe Swans revival has gone.

hipsters are simulacra.

i think what was really going on from about 03 onwards was the end of any attempt to resist post modernism. so everything became a remix. then everyone was too self conscious to do anything. cos youd just get sneered at by know it all reference spouters. spoilt male brats who couldnt do anything themselves and only wanted to tear down what other people did. so all you could do was just smile blankly and play it safe and light.

post punk is great and i feel at the start it wasnt so much a revival as my generation discovering this awesome shit that we were too young to have heard the first time. lets not forget how so much of it really was obscure for anyone who wasn't there at the time or connected enough to the underground to hear it. certainly for a european hick like me you just DID NOT hear about that stuff. like you had to travel to the city, were it was possible to find cds and lps that were slightly obscure - ie. not in the top100 at that very moment. but not many of them. maybe you'd find a mag like careless talk or plan b. maybe you'd find a few zines if you were lucky. but the early p2p networks had very little obscure stuff on them. when bands like the pixies started reforming, it was cos there was a fanbase that had built for years after they split up.

then all of a sudden you had synths and total unbearable twee and happiness and lightness and utter utter vacuity and i was scratching my head. like - this cant be where we want to go surely? surely there is noone so lame as to want to revive that part of the 80s? i thought that we were supposed to be about negativity and art and substance and that music was supposed to be connected to a greater aesthetic and philosophy and worldview. i thought it was about being a freak! how fucking wrong i was.

look at the ultimate hipster band - animal collective. they just dress up as kittens and sing like toddlers. they are a symptom of the end of the post modern period, which was a competition to see who could undercut the other guy with the most jaded, cynical and indifferent sneer. instead of facing the abyss of nihilism, kids who grew up on this crap were too infantilized and stupefied by consumerism. they didnt believe in anything so they became too stupid to assess anything. their hyper individualism becomes so allergic to anything that might make you not unique you end up not actually being composed out of anything at all. so you get the sound of 00's indie which is utterly pristine cheeriness that at times quivers with astoundingly repressed despair. but its not the despair of emo or goth or anything, its a despair that cant find an expression and cant even be countenanced. being sad would mean have a reason to be sad which would entail actually committing to a position and thus having to do something other than blindly stumble around the shopping mall at the end of history. its like the refrain of "DENIAL" from teen spirit came to haunt us all! the 00's was one of the most conservative decades ever.

animal collective suck. anyone want my mint condition LP's? they are BORING, I must warn you....

Finally, you speak some words of substantive wisdom rather than schlock, schtick, and tripe you usually spew here. Thank you kindly ;)

yeah i have their 7''s of polly and rabbit and grass

anyone want them they are not mint but rare as fuck 2003 can be yours to relive move to the woods start a failed organic mushroom business wear hemp shawls get a permanent anxiety disorder from bad acid get hepatitis from devendra banhart and try to cure it with tree bark and incense. authentic shit.

i didnt mean to imply that they should 'believe' in anything tho. the idea of belief isn't and its supposed necessity is a problem. its a post christian hang up.

Dude, why are you so obsessed with Christianity? I didn't even bring anything up remotely about that, as we would say on the Eastside, "You pulled your own covers homie." I agreed with your sentiments about the debased emptiness of the 2000s generation of art, music, and culture. Can't we agree on things or are you too cool for that?

dude, coolness itself is a post christian affect, its descended from calvinism.

Baudrillard consistently reflects on contemporary culture in its negative relationship to the symbolic world of Judeo-Christian tradition, and this is a key to his significance as a post-Nietzschean thinker. Through the lens of his work, we are made to see that late-modern technological and neo-capitalistic culture is still fulfilling a theologically driven dynamic (one specifically Calvinistic in quality), only now it is doing so in a wholly negative or inverted phase, a radically nihilistic phase, in fact—but one graced nonetheless with a certain ironic joy and humor. Like Nietzsche, Baudrillard is a comic writer, for whom tragedy and horror are mercifully refracted through comic wit. Even as he writes of a total subversion of reality in simulation, and of the human in the inhuman, Baudrillard's writing is funny, provoking a last self-ironizing smile on the visage of the last man, even as his human body deconstructs into its inorganic components, and his human ideality vanishes into the "hyperreal" like the body of the Cheshire cat into its smile.

In order to characterize the negative phase of our age against the background arc of theological history, Baudrillard resorts to an inverted religious language: a language that recalls the vestiges of sacrality negatively though their disappearance and simulated replacement. Frequently employing terms like "enshrinement," "worship," "sacrilege," "excommunication," "resurrection," "ecstasy," "parousia," in a thoroughly ironic mode, Baudrillard registers the desublimation of the quest for the divine as it is displaced toward a cool, calculated, Calvinistic frenzy of innerworldly simulation. If idolatry were true worship, this contemporary culture of the realized ecstatic image, the simulacrum, would have to be recognized as the apotheosis of veneration.


so no, i cant be cool. fuck that. its too christian. its not cool. baudrillard is cool because noone thinks hes cool and he explains how coolness is a result of our christian heritage. so i cant be cool. which makes me cool. but i dont want to be. which makes me cool...

fuck christianity dude.

also, when you said: debased emptiness

why the (christian) phobia of emptiness, which is a highly venerated state of realization in buddhist metaphysics. only when i attain emptiness can i escape the samsaric cycle of coolness begatting things that are not cool and thus become cool by the very fact of their original uncoolness.

thats why i keep bringing it up. cos christianities unrecognized influence is EVERYWHERE around me. cos im in the west. and all the fucking atheists are infected with it despite almost none of them realizing it.

xtianity brah... its not empty.

you blew your own covers brah.

Again, obsessed much? What the fuck does this have to do with Swans or the emptiness of 2000s music culture to which we were discussing? You're being cute, really, but there is a time and place for these kind of middle-school tantrums, and a chat about Swans surely isn't it ;)

so was I, only I was younger than you. also reading the nirvana bio (no fucking sy bios were im from) is one thing, but how are you supposed to find the bands? im from northern ireland. in the biggest city we have there WAS (now there is either one or zero) maybe 5 max record stores at the time. they sold cds and they didnt have much. my entire country only has a few mil people living in it. bands rarely tour here, shit just doesnt wash up here. cant buy no spin alternative record guide. cant even buy no spin. maybe you could for a while. you'd find odd things here and there if you hunted.

swanses music was described by quietus recently as "like a universe ruled over by an insidious dead god" or some shit.

but if you pointed that out without joking you'd be called a hipster and sneered at for trying to be cool or something.

it's... everywhere...

you can kill me but you cant defeat the truth...

well a hipster isn't even an actual thing, but i think to the average non altrocking person pretty much anyone who's heard of swans would count as a hipster.

for what it's worth, swans is one of the headliners of an upcoming local hipster fest.

I am a hipster doofus.

in his defense, i'd say because the christian plague is obsessed with the rest of us

I am reading OCCULT AMERICA, which details the rise and fall of many branches of occult worship and it's developments with christianity ion the USA. (Why does it want me to capitalize christianity? stupid shit)

It talks about Spiritualism, Shakers, quakers, seventh day adventists, Theosophy, Hermetic orders, freemasonry, mormons, etc etc. Good book.

Hipsters outside of New York or London don't count anyway. They are just obeying the commands.

you should watch this 'objective' documentary made by evangelical christians about how new age spirituality is a big conspiracy to create a new world order, destroy the sovereignty of the united states and set up the coming of the antichrist. it's pure gold, if you wanna see some american weirdos talking their beliefs you just can't beat evangelical christians running around northern california talking to all these new agers. it's just the best conspiracy doc i've seen.

The New Age - A Pathway to Paradise ? (1983)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0RRDOh6EM

i love reading about sleazy new age gurus and musicians who make tunes to help you quit smoking or prevent cancer and shit. i wanna go to marin county and infiltrate some hippy aquarian cult and make an audio documentary about it by hiding a mic in my rolls of fat

dang bruh that is some great fucking skaters ish music at the start

and then it turns into age of aquarius.

dang btruh

darng

i def despise new age shit to the point of sympathy with christians

you know i slag off christianity all day here but i really will miss it when its gone

I think you should mention this to Michael.

Make some repairs about the sound too.