Least convincing / most lol-worthy aspect of The Weeknd's quick rise to Internet fame

the states had no craft beer culture until up into the 80s & even then it was pretty heavily niche-ified. it wasnt til the past 5-10 years that this shit really started growing

i think it had something to do w/ prohibition, like in the 20s all the craft brewers went out of business & only the huge co's could afford to keep going by putting barley production towards ... i dont know what, i feel like i heard some drunk beardo tell me this at a party so its kinda spotty

nah not everyone is into microbrewery or whatever here but it doesn't feel exclusively hipster either. don't old men in the us like microbrewed ales?

x-post ah i see...that kinda answers my question.

ireland is quite weird like this, literally zero craft beer culture, i only started drinking ale when i moved to london. my irish friends hate it.

i think its funny max was the one who brought up rolling rock, my parents arent big beer drinkers but on the occasion my mom wants one with her burger or whatever in the summer she buys rolling rock, so i associate that beer w/ all parental ephemera from my childhood, like 'graceland' & fleetwood mac

Craft beer (and during summer craft cider) is huge over here and it's definitely an inner-urban middle-class thing, but if it codes "hipster" it does so in a way very different to the Weeknd.

Most people into craft beer here would be going to see local live music, if they're into hipster R&B it'd be Sharon Jones but not the Weeknd. They'd be all about "adult lovemaking" but against the specific sonic trappings.

Whereas the audience for the Weeknd wouldn't invest their hipster energy into the alcohol they drink - probably will drink Coopers Pale, which is a fairly "safe" cheap but respectable beer. More likely to be into pills and dope and spend their discretionary income on that.

Maybe Australia is different in this regard but mostly when I read about overseas hipster trends I recognise them around me as well so i doubt it.

Maybe how deej describes holds true outside the NW, but here microbrews are really a common thing to drink, more centered out yuppies than anything. I've had people who were totally square talk shit about me drinking PBR or High Life and it's just like... I'll drink Mac & Jack or some other micro when I have a few extra bucks, but fuck you, I'm poor.

what's craft beer? microbrews? the guys that make their own stuff on the weekends?

more centered on*

i think what tim describes might be more true where Al is, but yeah in chicago right now i think there's a huge overlap between pabst drinking weeknd listeners & craft-drinking sharon jones listeners -- craft beer is all anybody seems to talk abt any more. part of it is we have all these extremely successful breweries right now that opened up in the last couple years

Yeah, I think that stage happened around here like 20 years ago and now it's just taken for granted as part of the landscape.

Wait, is this discussion really going on on two threads at once? Dear god.

some hipsters drink whatevers cheap and available, which is often pbr (i think of these as the young music/art types?)
some hipsters drink craft beers/microbrews (i think of these as like indie/npr types?)
some hipsters drink prohibition-era cocktails with specially-crafted ice cubes (hipster yuppies? rich party-going fashion types?)

one thing i dont see many hipsters drink is wine

coors co. supports extreme right wing politics & i remember flyers the black student org put out on my campus about how u shouldnt buy coors, k*l*ans, blue moon, etc because the guy who runs the company throws millions of dollars at destroying affirmative action

― timbo slice (D-40), Monday, April 4, 2011 7:49 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i did this on the truth bombs thread but every big beer co. supports right wing politics as does almost every big company in general; consign yrself to drinking shitty microbrews i guess. also when pete coors ran for senate he supported civil unions which by itself put him a few levels below straight-up hatemonger.

xpost possibly because being a wine connoisseur takes a shitload more time/money/attention-to-detail.

confused about how not buying the big beer brands consigns me to 'shitty microbrews'

Wine makes me sick and I don't even kinda like the taste of it.

yeah wtf xp

yeah im just sort of surprised, there are a lot of nyc hipsters with tons of money and an affection for "artisan"/"handmade"/"terroir" type-stuff that wine basically invented, youd think theyd be all over it. though here in new york it may just be that you cant make wine out of long island grapes in an old bushwick warehouse?

xxp

it seems to me that the recent explosion in craft brew stuff sorta took that space anyway

which maybe that was your point

My taste in alcohol is pretty butch tbh. If I had my way, I'd drink nothing but ale and scotch.

wine is a man's drink rev dont get it twisted

unless yr drinking like spritzers or bubbly or w/e

Haha, actually now that I think of it, bubbly is pretty much the only wine I can handle.

feel like wine education is still pretty inaccessible.

also wine comes in inconvenient formats and is hard to drink in hectic bars and stuff.

sry i called microbrews "shitty" that was disingenuous of me.

think the lack of wine is cos like.....does anyone get loaded up on wine when going out doing drugs or whatev? like you might drink wine at 7am on an all nighter for want of something else, or at dinner beforehand, but if it's long sessions then always gonna be beer or spirits, at least that's how it appeared IN MY DAY

Yes. Even in gay-hipster world - which for obv reasons should be even more intensely uniform - you get guys in wifebeaters + flannel shirts with fop-tops and five day growth hanging out with shiny-point-shoes bryl-creamed little princes hanging out with tanned tennis-ready preppy types and these are all clearly within the venn diagram "gay hipster" but on any other sensible reading ought to have nothing to do with one another.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 5 April 2011 00:49 (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah it's like, how can you possibly generalise tracks that simultaneously feature grime whine, baltimore breaks, egregious r&b samples, chillwave synths and cowbell. there must be all manner of fascinating nuances at play.

LOL yes but I'm not saying there isn't some kind of underlying sensibility where all these things co-exist, or that the differences make any one of these aesthetic choices (let alone all of them) desirable. I just think the "they all sound the same" line is wrong.

But you know "it all sounds the same" is the one criticism I would not make of avant-frankenstep. The opposite is maybe the bigger problem.

think the lack of wine is cos like.....does anyone get loaded up on wine when going out doing drugs or whatev?

yes

10m xposts - i've always equated PBR here with Red Stripe in UK, mainly because that's everyone drank at gigs when I was a student.

There's a subset of professional/hipster cross types (e.g. lawyers I know who are into post-dubstep) who drink connoisseur wine but you need to have $$$. Actually these people would be well into the weeknd.

There's also a subset of students who drink goon (cheap wine from a box) but although these people aren't necessarily poor they're usually not hipsters.

I made the mistake of fucking around with box wine saturday night. :(

xpost possibly because being a wine connoisseur takes a shitload more time/money/attention-to-detail.

― Tim F, Tuesday, April 5, 2011 1:27 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

idk up to a point... it takes more attention to detail because unlike 'appreciating craft beers' wine connoisseurship is an actual thing

er...think craft beers is a thing...have you ever been to a craft beer shop? pretty sure there is a lot of knowledge there, the people that work in them are mega serious about it.

i know they are

re: pbr

4) as an added bonus it's a brand with a strong tradition that can be "reclaimed"

This is definitely a big part of it in my opinion, its not any good but it has a tradition - feel like there's more regional ones also - Iron City?

Rainier fits that niche around here, but Rainier is ghastly.

and yuengling, as mentioned upthread

rheingold tried to make a hipster comeback along these lines (somebody bought the brand, which had become defunct) but i don't think it really took

Yes but Yuengling is way more drinkable than pbr or iron city!

Sorry to derail, but I'm increasingly under the impression more people would give this act the time of day if it wasn't called The Weeknd.

My half-hearted reservations stem from two things:

1. There are already three bands called Weekend or The Weekend in my record collection
2. The swearing

PBR is not available to hipsters in Toronto. Traditionally, they drink Labatt 50, though IPAs are coming back into style.

Yes but Yuengling is way more drinkable than pbr or iron city!

agreed

http://parallax-view.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/weekend.jpg

It breaks my heart that there are a load of people with valuable perspectives on alcohol that are avoiding this thread because they think it's just a load of critics shouting at one another.

so what I've learned from this thread is that ppl like drinking more than the weeknd

drinking is the weekend

The red wine-drinking hipster is totally a thing by the way.

a hipster's just a drunk friend you haven't met

if you want to use the word "hipster" as basically a synonym for "snob", I think u will quickly discover that there is a nearly infinite variety of hipsters