Blogging over at Examiner.com, which I use to introduce metal to the “new media” through a popular site that wouldn’t normally care about metal at all, I review the literature about hipster metal and get us a working definition of hipsters and hipster metal:

A hipster is someone entirely dominated by society. Trends, how they look to other people, what they’re eating and how they’re entertaining themselves — these are what a hipster thinks about. They are the ultimate surface people, never seeking a greater meaning in life but only the appearance of it. They are also the ultimate consumers, because they’re always chasing the latest trend (and buying lots of stuff to that end) hoping that it will keep them “hip,” or current, young, savvy and exciting.

Hipster metal is just as shallow. Hipster metal is metal that has been assimilated by the mainstream. Hipsters like trendy new surfaces on the same old stuff. So they make metal-flavored indie rock, and in doing so, hope to make mainstream indie rock assimilate or swallow up metal. That also makes it easier for them because that way, they don’t need to feel bad about us being different. They want us to join the Crowd, to be just like them. – “Hipster Metal,” Examiner.com, July 12, 2010

A hipster is just a trendy version of the average modern citizen. These people are disconnected from any sense of hierarchy or values except an ethic of convenience toward personal comfort. When one of these boring ordinary soulless drones feels that he or she is completely forgotten by the world, they dress themselves up funny, talk funny, and start being “artistic” to show us they’re more important than us. That’s the hipster in a nutshell: a status climber by pretense, especially that what’s “new” is more important than what’s realistic, correct or sane.

In the article “Hipsters:The Dead End of Western Civilization”, adbusters describes the hipster: an ordinary person, a little nerdy, who decides to become a Big Deal drama llama egomaniac and so becomes even less useful than you average modern person and starts pretending to be the undiscovered artistic genius of the millennium.

These people are death for real art. They hate the real; they like the shallow that appears to be deep, and appears to be new, because their goal is to use that art to make other people feel small. When others feel small, and un-hip, the hipster triumphs through self-importance. All of the rest of you who work jobs and take care of your families are idiots, the hipster says. I’m the real deal.

And of course they’re not, and in metal, their hipster moron bands (The Sword, Boris, Mastodon, Isis) are insipid crap you’re supposed to swallow or be considered ignorant. Of course, that’s laughable. They’re trying to take the one thing that took a different path — metal — and convert it to the norm, and they accuse us of being normative if we don’t go along with the great crusade to be average in an ironic shirt with “unique” tattoos.

Jason Netherton from Misery Index thinks so. In a provocative essay, he argues that the old days were better because:

1. The scene was incredibly tight knit and the friendships were earned.
2. The MP3 (had not yet arrived)
3. The mainstream had yet to commercialize death metal.
4. The unity.
5. No one ever expected anything from being in a death metal band.

Worth reading. For the record, I agree with him: before the genre became a means to an end unrelated to the music (money, popularity, status) it was a goal in itself — to make killer metal of this new type — and all of us got caught up in it. Now it’s another genre like any other, about where hardcore punk was when death metal got birthed.

A few odds and ends, from other blogs and the forum:

• Birth A.D. launched a new store so you can now easily get the album, the mp3s, and the new shirt design.
• Blaspherian is recording a new album that will be out in October on Deathgasm in the USA and Die Todesrune in USE.
• Gridlink is recording Orphan, their new blistercore album for release this year. Note: parodic genre names may appear in this update.
• Sacrifice of the Nazarene Child #10 is going to have Mortem, Blaspherian, War Master and Bahimiron playing live in Houston on October 9.
• Doom metallers Sleep have reunited and are playing shows starting in the effete metrosexual northeast.
• After recording the biggest turd of his life with Belus, Kristian “Varg” Vikernes has changed his name, sold his farm, and moved to an apartment in Los Angeles.
• Divine Eve are a contender for best of 2010 with Vengeful and Obstinate.
• Medical science is investigating Ozzy Osbourne to find if the secret to his longevity despite prolonged self-abuse is in the genes, or if he simply lacks the cognitive ability to die.
• Corrosion of Conformity reunites with Animosity-era lineup to play a show in Austin on August 13.
• Birth A.D. played a show in Austin that ended with the fire department being called and warrants issued for unauthorized body cavity searching of fans.
• Old school death metal band Disma have released two new tracks of their melodic take on Incantation and Obituary.
• DLA activists attacked known Crowdist hipster site Reddit with What is heavy metal?, The early history and development of death metal, Old school death metal and The more reputable bands from which known coprophages Pantera borrowed their sound.

In addition, we bring you the uncanny association between Republicans, death metal, and knowitall lesbian news anchors who got promoted for the novelty of hey-did-you-know-she’s-a-lesbian-and-my-grandmother-thinks-it’s-shocking:

That ought to keep you for awhile.

People like to throw terms around and require very simple definitions to use them correctly.

One term that shows up in metal is “selling out,” or changing your music in such a way that you know it will appeal to a broader audience, which by definition has a lowest common denominator taste that is of a very simplistic nature. First, the more people you get involved, the lower the lowest common denominator is, because individuals are so different that you have to really stretch to find something in common; second, when you include the vast masses of asses, you get idiocy because most of them like pre-chewed music and stupid, sentimental memes.

But there’s another form of selling out, which is preaching to the choir. Since dear readers you require very simple definitions, I’m not going to group it under selling out as I have in the past, but instead will give it its own name: selling in. Selling in happens when you change your music to appeal to a captive audience by hitting all the things they love. While selling out happens when bands add groove, dumbed-down riffs, ballads, etc. to make their music more like the majority rock ‘n’ roll, selling in occurs when bands deliberately play up their metal-ness, and make the music more abrasive and less populist so that they can please the metal audience.

A band that mixes country music and hip-hop into its heavy metal and then tells you that its newest album is “unique” and is for “open-minded headbangers only” is speaking in code. They’re selling out. Translation: we added more of what makes other albums succeed with a wide audience, because we want money. So have this simplified dishonest crap that panders to you so you can buy it and we can retire.

A band that suddenly starts wearing bullet belts, xeroxing their black and white covers, and singing adoringly of Satan and suicide while proclaiming “allegiance to true metal” or the “the true kvlt spirit” is speaking in code. All retro bands and ultra-elite occult weirdness fits under this banner. They’re selling in. Translation: we know that all of you who like metal tend to like these surface attributes, so we’ve prepared a hollow course that contains these surface elements so that the broadest segment of this captive audience, being clueless and probably congenitally dumb, will buy it. So have this simplified dishonest crap that panders to you so you can buy it and we can retire.

Selling in really is a subset of selling out. In each case, you know what the audience likes and so you deliver a surface treatment of those techniques, as if selling music by the pound. Gone is the ambiguity, the challenge, the journey between point A and point B that we’re not sure we’ll survive, in which we learn and change inside as we adapt to what we’ve learned. Instead you get music where the starting point equals the ending point. It’s like a television commercial, telling you what you already know so you feel comfortable around it and might buy the product. Needless to say, sold in music is just as bad as sold out music in end result: vapid, depthless, pandering sonic mulch.