(2021-06-09) Monahan Vibe Shift

Sean Monahan on the vibe shift.

*Maybe some of you have seen the above meme—maybe some of you have not. Personally, it’s been clogging my feed for the past few days. Most people who encounter it are confused, annoyed, angry, or some mixture of all three.&

This post won’t be an explanation of the meme. If you want to know what it means Google the words, look up the accounts, consume the associated content. Instead, I want to point out that the general anxiety the meme has engendered is evidence of a vibe shift.

In my life, I’ve lived through four vibe shifts.

• Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003—2009)
• Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010—2016)
• Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016—2020)
• [ABOVE MEME] (ca. 2021—????)

What I remember from each of the preceding vibe shifts was the speed of change.

When we started K-HOLE, it was at the beginning of the hipster to post-internet vibe shift.

some did not make it through the vibe shift… “Why are you all wearing the same sneakers!” they would plead. “Don’t you care about authenticity? What’s with all this sudden interest in branding!”
Those people didn’t make it through the vibe shift.

When Post-Internet got clobbered by streetwear and hypebeasts and wokeness—well, everyone remembers that vibe shift. It was 2016. Brexit, Donald Trump, etc.

The current vibe shift has been coming for quite some time. Working in Los Angeles me and my friend [REDACTED] would make jokes about the older creatives really trying to seem young and with it. We called them hype dads and speculated they may have been spending down Junior’s college fund to afford their conspicuous sneaker collections.

One Easter, a friend was visiting from San Francisco. We had planned to go to a brunch in Malibu but realized his plane left too early. Instead, we went to The Grove and had a liquid lunch of Aperol spritzes. The people watching at The Grove is always good and this Easter Sunday we had a front row seat to our current vibe shift. At the table next to ours was a family having a long leisurely meal. The father was wearing head-to-toe Balenciaga, including the then cutting edge “dad shoe.” His son meanwhile was curled in a ball, Airpods in, scrolling through whatever was on his phone. He would look up periodically and accost his father with a glare of pure revulsion. There foretold was the vibe shift.

It’s clearly a return to scene culture, contains elements of Naughty Aughties nostalgia. The players are personalities more interested in the literary than the artistic, more interested in the who follows than the how many followers. Musically—well, I’ve already made my prediction: it’ll be a return of rock.

For those worried the current vibe shift may leave them behind… It may well. But there are worse things than being a hype dad in $1000 sneakers pushing your twins around in an aerodynamic carbon fiber pram. Sometimes there’s happiness in irrelevance. For others, worried they’re too old for another vibe shift… Remember: no one cares if you’re old. They care if you’re boring.