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Old man doesn’t understand young people, assumes they’re wrong

By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 21 March 2016

Today’s young people are boring, too demanding and go to bed too early. And this is why Bloc Festival is closing down, says co-founder George Hull.

As previously reported, it was announced in February that the 2016 edition of the Bloc weekender at Butlins in Minehead would be the last such event for the company. Speaking to Resident Advisor, the festival’s other co-founder Alex Benson said that operating a venue and providing studio and workspace to a community of artists had become more of an appealing mission to focus on.

Putting things in more blunt terms in an article for The Spectator last week, Hull said that the end of the festival had come about because “young people these days just don’t know how to rave. They are too safe and boring”.

The last generation who actually knew how to have fun are now middle-aged and can’t come out anymore, he added. “Instead we have hipsters – a subculture so spineless that it had to borrow its name from its parents. Hipsters are an uptight bunch. They like dance music, but they lack the sense of abandon that made raving so much fun”.

He then hit out at “regulatory pressures” that mean outdoor dance music events now generally finish, rather than start, at 10pm. And also at ticketing systems that offer cheaper tickets to those who book early, which ensures that spontaneity has been all but removed from nights out. Though the real problem, he mused, is not so much that these problems exist, but that young people quite like them.

“Organised and particular, hipsters know to detest big business”, he writes. “Instead, they fetishise the authenticity of an independent operator. Yet they expect a level of service that can only be delivered by a multinational corporation”.

He concluded: “Under the hipsters’ watch, dance music has become tedious and diluted. A monstrous cabal of overpaid circuit DJs titillating a precious and unimaginative bunch of wimpy pseudo-hedonists at a carefully designed ‘safe space’. In broad daylight. If that’s your idea of raving, you can keep it. I’m out”.

Yeah, fuck off young people. Read Hull’s full article and find out why you/they are idiots here.

UPDATE 21 Mar, 6pm: Bloc has, perhaps unsurprisingly, distanced itself from Hull’s comments.