1859 EDITION: Hipster Refuses to Listen to Brahms; “Popular Music is an Abomination”

EVANSTON—Up-and-coming composer Johannes Brahms keeps pumping out the pop hits, but some of today’s hippest youths simply are not buying it. Despite the popularity of his breakout hit “Piano Concerto No. 1,” these so-called hipsters are avoiding Brahms at all costs.

“He’s just so commercial, you know?” said 19-year-old Bartholomew Hibbons. The youth, sporting straightened black mutton-chop sideburns, continued, “It’s just so predictable. Honestly, if I hear another A minor with a raised sixth and augmented ninth chord I think I shall gasp to high heavens.”

Hibbons’s comments are not unusual. Rather, they are part of a growing movement of “alternative” young people. These youngsters sport ill-fitting, tight trousers, ironically wear powdered wigs that haven’t been fashionable for over a century, and listen to Mozart instead of today’s popular Romantic music. Cried one lad, “I think it is time, by Jove, that the Opera houses stopped controlling what we listen to!”

This growing youth movement is similar to New England’s transcendentalists; however, these young men wear more black and act far more effeminate. With their signature “We-do-not-give-a-rat’s arse” attitude, it appears as though these lads will be around longer than Brahms’s career will.

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