That whole ironic hipster thing is pretty much over.

For a while there it was pretty bad. We cared so much about not caring, unhealthy or looking like we didn’t care. To care was to be vulnerable, medicine to betray weakness, see to risk ridicule – to risk being the next Rebecca Black. We all saw what reward the Internet had in store for those who put themselves out there, and it wasn’t worth the danger. So folded our arms and took refuge behind opaque sunglasses and waited around for someone else to fuck up so we could laugh at them.

In short, it sucked. The good news, though, is that it’s almost over. Something snapped. If before we cared about not caring, now we don’t even care that we care. Caring isn’t something we set out to do – caring is something we found ourselves doing, as if snapping out of a drunken stupor to find ourselves in the middle of a mosh pit with tears in our eyes and deciding that, whatever the hell this was, it felt good and we were going to keep at it.

That was the lesson I took from the show at TT the Bear’s on 6/9. What linked the bands that played that night – Destruction Unit, Milk Music and Merchandise – was, more than anything, how willing all three were to risk looking, or sounding, like they cared too much.

Sure, they had other things in common as well. For one, all three are rock ‘n’ roll bands, with guitars and basses and drums – worth mentioning, seeing as it was only a few years ago that it seemed like everyone was trading them in for samplers and 808s and vintage synths. And they all see fit to cover everything in a thick layer of scuzz, which does me a world of good.

Not that they sounded the same – on the contrary, between Destruction Unit’s balls-out sludge, Milk Music’s old-fashioned, jammy riff-rock and Merchandise’s 80s- (as in “Boys of Summer”)-tinged anthems, it was quite a varied program.

But on Sunday night, that all seemed beside the point. The only point, I found, was that all three bands rocked the shit out. All three beat the living shit out of their instruments; all three sang like to exorcise bad spirits; all three had no compunctions about jumping off the stage and barrelling through the crowd like mad bulls. It was a night of sublime catharsis, and most everyone in the crowd seemed like they needed it every bit as badly as I did.

2013 is shaping up to be remembered as the year that rock ‘n’ roll came back. After several years spent in chillwave limbo, sitting there with our eyes shut pretending we were on the beach, we’re finally getting hip to the fact that this shitty, post-Recession world-in-shambles is not changing anytime soon. We’re realizing that we’ve all got nothing to lose, that we’re all too broke and drunk and exhausted to give a shit anymore what other people think of us, and that all that’s left for us to do is squeeze all the juice we can out of every shit moment the world flings at us. That’s what rock ‘n’ roll meant in 1954, that’s what it meant in 1977, that’s what it meant in 1991, and shout it from the rooftops, because thank the gods, that’s what it means in 2013.