The Poisonous Brooklyn Trend Story Addiction

I'd love if someone could explain exactly why the New York Observer has published a lengthy new story entitled "A Twee Grows in Brooklyn." Why? Why? Whyyyyyyyy?

Did you know that Brooklyn is kind of like Portland? Both are full of white people with tattoos and bicycles and arts and crafts and hipster hipster hipsters. If one were to live in Portland for a while, then live in the white parts of Brooklyn for a while, one could write a story pointing out the multitude of similarities between the youth culture of both places. Here; let the New York Observer do that for you.

We're not talking about some fusty old fake New York Times trend piece that's a year behind the curve, or some famous mainstream media figure poking gentle fun at the place where all the kids are hanging out these days. The NYO is part of the self-aware media, meaning they know damn well just how oversaturated, trite, and ultimately doomed the Brooklyn Trend Story world is these days. "Brooklyn is full of white kids doing white kid things" stories are, all of them, dead on arrival at this point in the grand news cycle; not because they're necessarily untrue, but because the sheer weight of them in recent history has turned the entire genre into a cliche that is far too strong to be undone just by tossing in a few knowing remarks to indicate that you're aware of its existence. The self-aware media outlet that thinks it can circumvent the awfulness of Brooklyn Trend Stories by going meta on them makes the same miscalculation that the fauxhemian himself makes when he thinks that he can do shitty '80s synthesizer music in a new and fresh way: the fundamental material that they're working with is rotten to the core. It cannot be redeemed. White People in Brooklyn stories contain no new or undiscovered angle; they can only be sequestered far away and ignored until they all decay into dirt, at which time we can only hope that their dessicated corpse can serve as fertilizer for some new, more worthwhile journalistic venture. Ridiculous Brooklyn Trend Stories do not need your help, reporters. They're perfectly capable of writing themselves.

This has been a blog post about a Brooklyn Trend Story.

[NYO. Photo via Hrag Vartanian/Flickr]