We’ll Miss U, BB
To understand what’s being lost you have to remember the moment: Uffie still relevant, Cory Kennedy the it-girl of the flash-party circuit, Mark Hunter and Merlin Bronques photographing every smoke-lit basement like it was history—because it was, sort of. Everyone’s older sister getting her first unwilling education in dubstep. The blogs that mattered were written by people with opinions and no filter and just enough ironic distance to pretend they didn’t care, while clearly caring enormously. HIPSTER RUNOFF was the best of all of them, and a direct influence on this blog and on everyone who believed that particular scene was going to last forever.
Carles, who essentially no one ever saw in person, made a career out of a paradox: genuine love expressed entirely through mockery. He covered Lana Del Rey’s earliest stumbles, wrote about Grimes before most people knew what to do with her, put Lorde through his particular critical wringer when she first appeared. His hatred was irony. His love was cynicism. The truth lived in the gap between the two, which was exactly where the culture he was covering lived too.
What Carles understood was that the right language for that culture was the culture’s own language—warped just enough. The constant invocation of "relevance," the invented genre names like "chillwave" and "altbro," the breathless have-you-heard-this-band energy rendered slightly too earnest to be pure parody and slightly too parodic to be sincere. He wrote like the internet wrote, which was itself new enough that nobody knew whether to laugh or take it seriously. The answer, as it turned out, was both.
After a year of silence on the site, Carles auctioned off his life’s work online—of course online. The site is as dead now as the species of mid-twenties weirdly-dressed humans it named and outlasted by just barely. The ending was already in the farewell letter he’d posted months earlier, which read less like the voice he’d spent years building and more like someone who’d finally stopped performing: returning to an old scene haunt, finding the same faces, a few years older, still wearing the same stupid clothes, still proud. Still asking themselves whether any of it had been real. Have you heard this band? Have you heard this album? Have you seen this show? Have you seen this film? Are you going to this opening? I heard there’s free alcohol. Did the scene ever exist? Was the scene only in our heads? It was nothing, it was everything. Did I lose myself?
The sale of HIPSTER RUNOFF doesn’t just leave a gap in my digital history. It makes me realize again that what I loved and built things around in those years exists now only as a ruin in memory, and most of the visitors to that ruin are gone or have become entirely different people. Carles, you were a model for how I thought this could work. And I never once saw your face.