In recent days, our timelines have broken out into a huge, sprawling fight about when the “hipster era” really was, who hipsters really were, and—by extension—what music they were actually listening to. It felt like an argument that was made for us to step into and settle. 

So, here it is: the definitive timeline of what hipsters were soundtracking their lives with between 2000 and 2014 (even if they’ll now tell you otherwise), beginning at the dawn of electroclash and terminating in Future Islands’ performance of “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on Letterman in the spring of that final year, which always felt like an elegy to something more than one funny little man’s on-off love affair. With 12 years’ hindsight, the footage now registers as a farewell to an entire era of hipster irony that in Samuel T. Herring found both its ultimate expression and final boss: a dancing American dressed all in black, grappling with sincerity and frightening people with his feelings while some synths buzz in the background.

As we said, this week has seen multiple sides engaging in a form of ideological warfare over who and what “hipsters” really were. At some point in the late 00s, for reasons we’ll attempt to pin down later, there was a bifurcation in the hipster chronology that resulted in a “dark timeline” running in parallel to its primary stream. Populating what we might call the “Stomp Clap Hey” timeline, these dismal abstractions—kitted out in lensless glasses, silly scarves, waxed ‘taches, and toques—displayed no real interest in progressive music or fashion (or, come to think of it, fun). As such they weren’t really “hipsters” at all, but retrograde copyists engaged in a twee and stoic reenactment of the hipsterisms they’d seen in ads and social media posts—perhaps on an iPhone, millions of which had been tossed into the world like unpinned grenades in 2007. By 2008, “hipsters” in places like New York City, LA, London, and Paris were utterly different from what a “hipster” was