wow mumford and sons milkshake duck, what a time to be alive. I mean that dude just had to stay quiet and he could have have gotten into the same kind of career that the Toad The Wet Sprocket dudes doubtless currently enjoy.
My thing with the Tanglefoot and similar is just that I’m having trouble picturing someone who’s into bikes enough to want to do deep country bikepacking and who also hasn’t heard of Tumbleweed, and/or who also doesn’t know how to put together that kind of bike out of a vintage hardtail mtb. Clearly I don’t really know how people are getting into bikes now… only through ads on instagram or something? Unusually persuasive tiktoks?
People (very online, instagram-marketing-driven millennial techbros) want to feel like they can drop everything at a moment’s notice and go on a deep-woods bikepacking trip because it appeals to their inner urges of back-to-the-landism. This same cultural affect of back-to-the-landism pops up in bourgeois Anglo society every 80-100 years , in response to technological change and is quickly channeled into curating an aesthetic of earthiness from handcrafted luxury goods. Take a peep at the dude in the picture at the bottom of the post - both of those bikes are pushing the center of gravity on the loads as high as they can go - it would be really hard to do serious off-road, backcounty travel with those loading schemes - hella flopfest. But the dude is projecting the instagram aestetic to a T - bespoke, carradice-style bag, front basket four inches above the wheel, cavernous potato sack of a front back.
The luxury goods that come from these waves of aesthetic primitivism don’t actually need to function in these harsh, backcountry conditions - a morakniv is going to do the same thing as a $700 knife in the hands of a techbro on a weekend outing. The form of these objects hints at their function, but their function does not need to be realized in full, ever. Someone concerned exclusively with function would convert an old steel MTB and use the remaining $3000 to fuck off to the mountains
For more than 1600 years, long distance travelers have relied on hardtack for sustenance. The Hardtack frameset is inspired by this tough, durable food. Simple, durable, no frills. Just what you need.
i think you’re right about what’s recurring in popular culture, and it happens more frequently than that! a lot of 70s pop culture at least countenanced it, as a counterbalance to stagflation or whatever
I think this back-to-the-land trend has something to do with the increasingly rapid cycles of financialized capitalism, as described by Giovanni Arrighi, in a way that I haven’t quite found the language for but hope to soon. I’ve been meaning to plot out the dates of when these previous woodsy aesthetic movements happened with relation to big changes in capital. This is not an aesthetic movement of the working class, per se.
Almost all stems 120 years ago were 0 or 30mm long. Why? Because short stems help keep reach in check and allow you to run bigger tires with no toe overlap. Win, win. Twitchy? Nope. If it worked for the Wright Brothers, it’ll work for you.
Their schtick is really interesting because they seem to specialize in fitting the millennial techie who rides <15 miles a week to the gnargnar, gravgrav all-city they bought and don’t feel comfortable on in jeans. I’m not afraid of upright bikes in the slightest and that fit strategy works great for some people, but I think it’s a pretty awful one-size -fits-all fitting strategy for every modern, semi-performace adventure bike . But I also can’t buy a production bike big enough to throw a 0mm stem on and I don’t intend to commission one, so maybe I just have never experienced it
Yeah fair take. I think iwillbe is correct that this is a thing that recurs more frequently than every 80-100 years, and would posit that it’s probably an ever-present background theme that waxes and wanes as a result of the collabo of settler frontier mythology x dead-eyed capitalist soullessness that always has its adherents in the fringe of the mainstream and is just getting ever so slightly more co-opted nowadays. Rivendell has held on all these years. Bestmade was a thing bikesnob laughed at like 15 years ago. Camping is booming again. This is just the weird output of the same impulse as expressed by the current breed of alienated but mostly comfortable folk who can afford to indulge it.
When people either have crushing jobs or no job/no job security there will be escapism: vanlyfe and the like. Or if you want to ignore that it’s all going to hell. See: Roaring 20s/Great Depression, Weimar Germany. Anyway, vote Bernie.
I mentioned 1970’s stagflation half seriously. The faux-lumberjack look for men with soft hands jobs and the artisanal axes and bikepacking and all of that happened around the same time that the economy shat out its own skeleton as the mortgage crisis deepened.
I’m not going to argue that there’s some kind of economic base atop which culture rests as some sort of superstructure or any wild notion like that, just… interesting how these things seem to bob back to the surface at roughly the same time.
These guys are fun to drink beer with around a fire outside their yurt, and boy do they know how to put together a hard/bad/unfun bike route, but I think they got a little too high on their own supply
I’m a licenced
ⓦⓗⓔⓔⓛⓑⓐⓡⓡⓞⓦ ⓞⓟⓔⓡⓐⓣⓞⓡ
and if you 𝒸𝒶𝓃’𝓉 𝒽𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓁𝑒
how much 𝖌𝖊𝖆𝖗
I can 𝕡𝕠𝕣𝕥𝕒𝕘𝕖 over a boulder field
then get back on your รยקקɭє Ŧгค๓є
and ride away ᴘʀɪɴᴄᴇꜱꜱ
𝒸𝒶𝓃’𝓉 𝒽𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓁𝑒