Hoodie Allen

I thought that none of my friends had heard of up-and-coming pop rapper Hoodie Allen because he hasn’t yet broken into the mainstream. I thought the suburban-raised musician’s fanbase was made up of music aficionados like myself who crave unknown indie artists. Turns out, I was looking at the wrong demographic.

Allow me to explain: I consider myself a pseudo-hipster. I don’t read Jack Kerouac or scoff at consumer culture, but I do like unusual clothing and listen to music none of my friends have yet heard. That’s one of the things that originally drew me to Hoodie Allen a few years ago. Not only does he perfectly combine rapping and singing into a relentlessly catchy mix of saccharine pop, but no one I knew had heard of him. Bingo.

So, it’s with some level of disdain that I tell you how the Hoodie Allen concert my friends and I attended last week caught me completely off guard.

 It hit me the second we arrived at The Fillmore in Silver Spring. Despite being an hour early, we were met with a line trailing down the block, around the corner, down another block and around another corner. And the people in line? Almost every one was a shrieking high school-aged fangirl.

It took me a second to register what I was seeing. The overwhelming majority of people coming to see my beloved Hoodie Allen were wearing multiple articles of his merchandise, carrying hand-lettered signs professing their obsessive love for him, and squealing his name as one might expect to find at a One Direction concert, rather than a rap show.

Not exactly the eclectic indie crowd I had expected to bond with at a Hoodie Allen concert.

Passing through security at the front door, I noticed a bored-looking usher with a fistful of unused 21-and-older wristbands. Once inside, I assessed the average age of the crowd to be around 17. Of course, that’s not including a few outliers: One mom braced herself in the mosh pit and a line of parents waited in the back of the venue to pick up their darling kids.

The show itself was great. Mainstream or not, Hoodie is a great entertainer, and his buoyant, eager-to-please energy was infectious. His almost 90-minute set featured all of his hits, from 2010’s “You Are Not A Robot” to the radio-ready jams on his album People Keep Talking, which dropped in October. 

And as a performer, Hoodie excels at engaging his audience: He threw cake and streamers into the mass of screaming fans and accepted offerings of bras and panties tossed on stage (which actually seemed pretty crass, considering how young the crowd was). He even crowd surfed in an inflatable raft that unexpectedly upended him into the arms of his adoring fans, to his good-natured surprise.

All in all, it was a fun show. But that didn’t change the fact that, as a 21-year-old alternative rock-loving quasi-hipster, I felt somewhat out of place.

In my defense, my misreading of Hoodie Allen’s musical identity has its explanations. His impeccably groomed hair and boyish Disney good looks I mistook for GQ suaveness. His teen-focused Facebook and Twitter presence I mistook for a grassroots campaign aimed at the plugged-in music community. In all, the difference between mainstream appeal and indie cred isn’t so wide these days.

In short, I thought my friends had never heard of him because he was an underground indie rapper. In reality, they probably hadn’t heard of him because his target audience seems to be high school teenyboppers. So yeah, I feel more than a little bit silly.

Ultimately, I’ll still always love Hoodie’s undeniably catchy brand of pop rap. But now that I’m moving him to my guilty pleasures playlist, my love for his music will be mixed with equal parts irony.