Best of What's Next: Carles

Website: HipsterRunoff.com
For Fans Of: Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, meta-commentary

Like lonelygirl15 before him, the anonymous indie-music blogger “Carles” is one of the Internet’s great unreliable narrators. He loves “scare quotes,” is fixated on “authenticity,” and peppers his two-year-old Hipster Runoff blog with posts about Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear to the point of self-parody. His brilliant and incendiary website satirizes alternaculture from the inside out; Carles is the Andy Kaufman of indie rock, and the only people who could possibly get his jokes are the very hipsters he implicates.

“I feel like we are all sharing a collective experience, so HRO is a place for people to reflect,” Carles tells Paste in an instant-messenger interview, drifting in and out of character. “There are moments when we all feel proud, insecure, meaningful or insignificant. I am just trying to relate to the common alt.”

To wit, when Merriweather Post Pavilion leaked late last year, Carles penned a reality-check post titled “Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet,” puncturing the hype with a devastating picture of a pitchfork (get it?) with the caption, “This is a metaphor about mob mentality.”

“When it comes to confronting alternative topics and showcasing indie bands, I feel like I ‘take my voice to the extreme’ to make a point, but it also might be my honest opinion,” Carles says. “I feel like HRO is a ‘breath of fresh air’ in the music blogosphere. I feel differentiated, but in order to properly monetize, I think you have to ‘sell out’ and start writing terrible blurbs about indie-band news.” Hipster Runoff draws about 400,000 visitors a month and is indeed monetized, running American Apparel ads and selling “I Am Carles” T-shirts—which, for $3,000, Carles will personally deliver. It’s even spawned a satellite radio show. The playlist? Indie rock, of course.

The site “theoretically” makes enough money to be a full-time gig, though Carles (a recent college grad) has kept his entry-level day job. “I waste 80 percent of my day on the Internet. I am very unproductive at my job, and I have been called into Human Resources for seeming like I ‘don’t care.’ It seems like I am ‘hitting the wall’ and possibly need to move into a new industry.”