Ireland’s renowned music festival Electric Picnic is promoting its new lake as a means of combating the rising numbers of insufferable hipsters attending their event. Organisers fear that if drastic actions are not taken to reduce the hipster swarm the festival risks becoming too obscure and experimental to be marketable to the general Irish population.
We asked one of the organisers, Stradbally native Scaldy Callaghan, how the lake will thin out hipster numbers; ‘Look, we’re all for promoting this event as an eco-friendly socially liberal music festival but if I have to hear one more arsehole tell me that grinding your own coffee beans is a more intimate and genuine experience than buying coffee in a café I’ll reach for my shotgun. The lake is a more ethical way of getting rid of these gobshites. We’re hoping to tap into that part of a hipster’s mind that makes them feel they’re connected to the majesty of the cosmos, when they’re actually just being an egotistic prick. Let them pretend they’re latter-day hippies on the water before they drown or explode from the sheer pretentiousness of the experience. The lake is like flypaper to these muppets.’
Hipsters from all around the country are already practicing their routines to be at one with the water.
EP organisers have recruited local hipsters to test out the new lake. Buddy O Brian, a self-identified hipster with 90s sensibilities, told us what he thought of his experience swimming in it. His response was suitably full of shite talk and pretend intellectualism;
‘When I swim I feel like I’m in one of Woody Allen’s dreams or that I am a character in an arthouse film. Just gazing skyward as fish nibble my dreadlocks and those synth tunes flow through my heart … It’s so magical. You don’t even need a bag of ket to enhance the experience. You don’t need to blog about it on tumblr to capture that intangible sensation of tranquillity. You don’t even need to take your scarf off before you dive into the lake because societal dress codes don’t matter anymore. The lake and the tunes become one with you. All else is meaningless. It lifts you out of yourself man, you feel like you’ll just float away.’
Buddy later disintegrated into the fabric of the universe as the combined euphoria from his beloved tunes, and his immersion in the natural world, elevated him out of the material plain of existence. Out of seven hipster test subjects, five followed Buddy towards paradise, one assimilated with Ben Howard lyrics and another drowned while trying to write an intimate real-time Facebook post about hearing both ducks and Bon Iver simultaneously in his overloaded brain.
Nature became too much for Buddy. He underestimated her power.
Many more hipsters are expected to perish beautifully while floating on the lake, thereby disappearing from our world forever. Organisers hope the waning population of un-ground coffee zealots will allow them to market EP to a wider audience of normal people, not just those who drink alcohol for the sake of irony, wear scarfs in 20-degree heat and consider James Franco as foremost a literary scholar and not just Seth Rogen’s acting buddy. Lifeguards will be patrolling to drown any possible hipsters who haven’t achieved the awaken state of being, their bodies being used as eco-friendly biofuel to power the main stage, as they would have wanted.
It just goes to show, you might not lead a horse to water, but play some Alt-J beside a cryptosporidium riddled lake and you’ll lead hipsters to their extinction.
Ryan Murphy.