Special Two-Part Coverage of the Most Hipster Thing I’ll Do All Summer
Part 2: There Will Be Merch

I’ve been writing this blog for three and a half months now, and (sigh) it’s time. It’s time I shared with you that… here goes… I have a merch addiction. A raging one. Show me a merch table, and I’ll show you all the cash I have in my wallet. My triggers include concerts, NASCAR races, baseball games, basketball games, political campaigns, SXSW was a t-shirt collecting shit show… it’s bad, OK? So when I walked into Saturday’s Animal Collective concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion, my love for merch and my vinyl habit teamed up, and things got a little out of hand. I snagged a t-shirt, a copy of Animal Collective’s Fall Be Kind EP on vinyl, a 7″ single of Panda Bear’s “Last Night at the Jetty,” and a lime green Merriweather Post Pavilion bag (What? Sometimes a guy needs to tote some stuff around for a few hours). Did I feel a little guilty? Sure. Did that stop me from tweeting about it once I saw that the venue’s giant screens were set to scroll through posts related to the night’s concert? Nope! I informed the entire Merriweather Post Pavilion lawn that I was “All merched up,” and gleefully watched the post scroll by a handful of times. The other tweets were far more entertaining, though. Post after post of hipsters making fun of other hipsters. It was a sight to behold — through thick-rimmed glasses, of course. While I can’t condone my merch-first-ask-questions-later approach to money management, I can wholeheartedly endorse the music I picked up. Panda Bear’s single is fantastic (as is the rest of the album) and Fall Be Kind is one of the best EPs I’ve ever heard. Check out “What Would I Want? Sky,” which is historic, in that it features the first licensed sample of a Grateful Dead song, and grab the album here.