The other day I was watching some wretchingly adorable Target commercial, featuring an archetypical hipster woman on the go, making her ironic way through life, all the while attempting to save a few cents here and there on her toilet paper and chewing gum. I think the narrator called her a “Frugalista”.
“Frugalista??”
Are you kidding me? Does everything have to have an “ista” on the end of it to make it culturally relevant? First it was “Fashionista”, now it’s “Frugalista.” I remember when the only “ista” anyone ever knew about was “Ista Sunday”… your grandmother made a ham, you dipped eggs in some Paas dye, you got nauseous from eating too many marshmallow peeps, and you threw up on the back seat of your parents Dodge Dart.
Eh, we’re awash in those little “edgy” buzz-words, like “Rock Star” and “Frugalista.” Seems like the advertiser’s most coveted demographic nowadays is that totally self-satisfied/ Brooklyn/Park Slope/McSweeney’s type of couple. You know who I’m talking about… the guy’s a web developer, his girlfriend’s in advertising, they have a little girl named Zooey, the guy plays in his lo-fi band on the weekends, they have a lot of friends with whom they get together for brunch every weekend, and ironically call each other “dude” a lot. If none of this rings a bell, rent “Away We Go,” a movie written by Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida, and you’ll understand.
Anyway, as I was watching this commercial, what really struck me was the insufferable music playing in the background. The breathy, kewpie doll, boop-boop-eedoo vocals, and sacharine Sesame Street melody grated my nutsack to such an extent, I had to find out who was responsible for this abombination of cutesy-ness. Well it turns out it’s from some band called Minnutes, and the song is called “More To Luv.” As I sat and listened, I could swear that I’d heard this song before. I thought to myself, “Wasn’t this in a Gap commercial.. or no,no, it was in an APPLE commercial… wait .. isn’t this the theme song to Grey’s Anatomy?!”
Then I realized…they’re all the same song, whether it’s by:
Feist
Yael Naim
Regina Spektor
… or Ingrid Michaelson
How did this new wave of vomitous-ly cloying, peppermint gum drop betty boop bullshit insinuate itself in our lives to such an extent? From one day to the next, it just kind of grew over us like kudzu, i suppose, while we were all stewing like prunes in our compote of complacency. All these tunes are so similar, they’re positively interchangeable, like different colored cases for your iphone. You’d think in this rough economy we wouldn’t have the money to support a hundred artists all singing the same song, but apparently it’s a genre now -- a one note genre. It’s been so insiduous, that no one’s even come up with a name for it yet! Every major genre of music has gotta have a name for crying eye! You know what, I’m going to come up with one right here in this column, I hereby dub this crap…
“ISTA” music.
All that oompa, doompah, Mary Jane fluff by all the Regina Spektors and Zooey Deschanels…it’s all “ISTA” music -- hipster lifestyle music for the masses. It’s the kind of stuff boring people put on their ipods to make other people think they’re hip and exactly the sort of thing that makes me wanna jump off a bridge.

Why should I care anyway? I’m not Target’s target. I buy my clothes off of Ebay, and pay WAY too much for my snacks and toiletries from the deli around the corner… I’m a dying breed.
More on these topics:
1234 feist, away we go and dave eggers, brooklyn park slope and hipster culture, fashionista, feist, frugalista, hipster lifestyle music for the masses, Hipster music, hipsterm buzz words, I hate dave eggeres, i hate dave eggers, i hate hipsters, i hate target, I love dave eggers, i love hipsters, i love target, ingrid michaelson, insufferable culture of hipsters, Ipod and other hipster icons, joanne newsome, mcsweeneys, minnutes more to luv the song in the target commercials, music in ads, regina spektor, regina spektor sucks, target bargains, target frugalista, target stores, the gap ingrid michaelson, the song in the target commercials, the way i am ingrid michaelson, zooey deschanel





















