There’s something to be said about word vomit – when you say what you want to say without thinking through its consequences. In the immediate aftermath, you feel GREAT, but “telling it like it is” will get you in trouble. People rarely swallow blunt commentary in odorless, pill form, especially if its their essence that’s being attacked. Yet that’s what makes Carles, the voice behind the wildly popular Hipster Runoff blog, such an enigma. His daily tangents – delivered in twelve year old text-speak (i.e. NE 1 4 an alt party?) and excessive use of “quotations” – are well-aimed daggers directed at the heart of the overrated, brand-exploited, so-called “hipster” scene – precisely the population that makes up the majority of his fan base.
How does he do it? Nobody knows. In fact, no one even knows who “Carles” really is. Like a Banksy for bloggers, he just sort of showed up and started mocking the world. “I think I am just kind of like a link between ‘high level ideas’ and ‘people who only have a high school education,’” Carles told the Village Voice in February during an interview that took place entirely on instant messenger. He was explaining how his tiny mp3 review blog came to represent something much bigger. “I think that the ‘music criticism economy’ has changed somewhat in ‘the Internet age,’ though I don’t even really remember life before the Internet. There are always going to be people who appreciate high-level analysis, but I don’t think the generations after Gen-Y will have the intellectual capacity or even just the ‘ability to pay attention to something for more than 30 seconds’.”
Yet despite the short attention span of many HRO readers, the blog’s fame has continued to last well over 30 seconds. Carles has now debuted his own clothing line featuring shirts that say: “I am Carles” for $30. For $3,000, you can get a t-shirt delivered by Carles himself – a ploy that no one has taken him up on yet. Ironically (and intentionally), his clothing line is serviced by American Apparel, the queen of the hipster hen house when it comes to retail, and his t-shirt, designed with the universal proclamation “I am Carles”, further contributes to the mysterious collective identity of Hipster Runoff or Carles or whatever it/he is. It’s an identity that Carles has managed to create while trying to un-create and hate on so many other trends.
At face value, HRO is humorous, highly offensive, and assumed to be self-deprecating (i.e. you can only hate on hipsters if you’re a hipster yourself and most feel they’ve got Carles figured out in this respect). Magazine reviews have called HRO “enthralling” “terrorizing” and “bizarre”, but no one who knows him (I’m assuming someone knows him) has made the moves to out Carles yet. Enigma intact, the HRO keeps on blogrolling and its fan base keeps on growing and I have to say, that’s one brilliant marketing plan.
Village Voice requested a photo of Carles for their interview. This is what they got.
Article By: Ashley Dresser