The slogan used to mean something about independent businesses and genuine weirdness. Now it's on coozies at the airport and a bar near 6th Street. Who actually killed it?
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Add your commentI'd argue South by Southwest killed it before tech did. The moment your 'weirdness' becomes a product that outsiders buy tickets to, the game is over.
I moved here in 1997 and the city that exists now shares nothing but geography with the city I moved to. I am not being dramatic. I have genuinely grieved it.
Hot take: the people who killed weird Austin are the ones who moved here because they heard it was weird. Including, possibly, me. I got here in 2009 and I see my fingerprints on this.
Weird is classist now. The venues and spaces that made Austin weird are too expensive for the artists and musicians who filled them. The aesthetic remains but the community left.
Austin was never as weird as it thought it was. It was a mid-sized college town with some cool spots and great music. The mythology always exceeded the reality.
Alamo Drafthouse went bankrupt and got bought by a hedge fund. Maybe don't use it as an example of surviving weirdness.
The tech industry killed it. Not maliciously. Just by bringing monoculture money and monoculture tastes and replacing everything local with something scalable.
The slogan was coined by Red Wassenich on the radio in 2000 to support local businesses. It was commercialized within about four years. It was always going to end this way.
I work at a local business on South Congress and we fight every day to stay independent against rising rent. Keep Austin Weird isn't dead it's on life support and it needs actual support not nostalgia posts.
Esther's Follies, Alamo Drafthouse (original one), BookPeople, Waterloo Records. Some of the weirdness is still here. Stop writing the eulogy while the patient is still breathing.
weird is not a fixed thing. Austin is still weird, just different weird. the problem is people want the weird they remember personally not the weird that actually exists now
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