I had an argument the other day with my friend over whether or not she could accurately be considered a "hipster". She vehemently objected to this classification, claiming that she didnt have dyed black hair or chunky designer sunglasses to help hide her fashionable coke habit (unfortunately she had a harder time defending against this, since she does have a rather fashionable coke habit) so she couldn't possibly be a hipster. I responded that she was reffering to "scene", that the inherent trendiness (in the pejorative sense) of scencesters is transcended by hipsterdom, that hip is a timeless concept, an extension of hepi, all that we'd like to think it is (you know, Ginsberg's "angel-headed hipsters", the vanguards of the new enlightened Amerika, Huck Finns for the post-everything wage slave trade, etc. etc. ad nauseam). She scoffed at me and said that hipsters were the trendiest of them all, that they're just better at it.
(Note:This next passage posits self as hipster, which prevents self from in fact being a hipster, but since it's hip to disavow hipsterdom, claiming to be a hipster as an anti-hipster stance is some kind of meta-hip, but of course meta is just next new trend...)
I dismissed this at the time but I've realized that there's been a strange symmetry between my (own and my friend's) interests and those in the larger "indie" community. I got into anti- and freak- (fuck you and your "New Age", Devendra, you tricksy bastard, you're just doing that so we have to start hoarding chakra crystals while you buy new beard combs or something with the earnings of you sick endorsement deal) folk through my own Wikipedia research about 2 months before it became a pitchfork darling and started getting popular (sic), and my asshole friends predicted this whole hesh-hip thing by at least 6 months. So what the hell, are we just the elitist-pop music equivalent of screaming tweens, or are we so damn hip (or post-hip, since we disavow hipstersom, or post-post hip, since we're aware that this makes us hip or..(doesn't this fucking meta-text shit get old?)) that we're on the same page as our williamsburg compatriots before it reaches the blogoverse?
I'm not going to answer that question. I know the answer, grasshopper, but it was just a koan to free your mind for this revelation: art is dead, assholes. (I once used this line at a friend's opening;I almost kicked my own ass, even though I was being intentional). Everything you like, every brand new style you find, it's just someone ripping off someone else. Devendra? look up Marc Bolan.Iron & Wine? Nick Drake and Faulkner (I know I'm not exactly breaking new critical ground here, I'm just going for softballs to illustrate how easy this is). These things are cyclical; everything's just a slightly tempered version of someone else's interpretation of one of the (take your pick of Beatles, Velvet Underground, Byrds, etc.)'s studio mistakes.
So my point is (!), suprise suprise kid, twee's back. While Belle & Sebastian have inexplicably decided to start writing anthems for a seventeen year old girl who for some reason finds herself playing shuffleboard on a cruise ship, the rest of the indie world is suddenly happening upon this crazy new wave thing that happened this one time in France and then this other time in Merry old England! Everyone's back to grade-school romance and lamenting that they didn't learn enough french to read the Little Prince religiously in the orignal tongue.
Voxtrot's riding this wave, they're recycling the same conceits as everyone else, but they're doing a goddamn good job. A 5-song EP with only one arguably weak song (Missing Pieces gets overwhelmed by it's high-schoolish vocals far too often, emulating it's idols better but fixing thier mistakes less ably than the rest of the release), Raised by Wolves holds great promise for the future. It's jangle-pop roots and twee sensibility ("If I die clutching your photograph/Don't call me boring, It's just 'cause I like you") are perfectly balanced with a willingness to throw in some rocking when need be, sharing neither a popist fear of real live electric guitar or the irrational tendency to hide the pretty stuff behind fuzz with many of it's progenitors. Lamenting at times, juvenile (in a nostaligic and sweetly concious way) but never to the extent that it becomes grating, Raised by Wolves might be the perfect companion to a high-school cross-country meet. You're not exactly breaking new ground by running these trails, and most of the effort may be for your own sake, but there's something wonderful in the loneliness of the long-distance runner that you won't find find in either the more athletic and dramatic rockouts of Canadians like Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire or the bookwormishness of early Belle or modern Camera Obscura. Sometimes the dorks have to get out and play, but at least they'll do it with a sense of thier own quiet hipsterdom.
