THE EDITOR’S DESK: What it Means to Be a Hipster
In defense, and definition, of hipsters. (image by Gretchen Robinette)
I came across this beautiful, flannel wearing, songstress soon-to-be YouTube star via Fimoculous. Here she is singing “Hipster Bitch” (that’s the name of the song!). What’s so interesting and weird about this is the mutation of the term “hipster.” According to this song, whose ramifications I can feel twittering across the Internets even as I write, the “Hipster Bitch” wears daisy dukes, compares her poetry to Dylan, and snorts cocaine at overpriced New York bars. I thought hipsters wore flannels, played accoustic guitar, called people out for misquoting Dylan, and posted their songs on YouTube?
Here’s someone I thought was a “hipster” at the American Apparel protest with a sign, “no more hipster scum.”
I would like to reclaim the term and adopt all the angry young hipsters in my neighborhood. A hipster is not someone who lives in mid-town, the Marina, or the Miracle Mile (depending on your city). Hipsters don’t listen to Britney Spears. They certainly don’t wear Daisy Dukes AND snort cocaine. If hipsters are snorting cocaine, they’re doing it in their pajamas before heading out to a Flaming Lips concert. They’re on their way to a Meth problem, not business school. And they don’t want their neighborhood to resemble a shopping mall.
portrait of the hipster as a 37-year-old writer
I’ve often been referred to as a hipster, or an aging hipster, because I haven’t done much in the way of growing up, i.e. owning property, holding down a job, getting married (or carrying on a successful relationship), and having children. And because I wear earrings, plain t-shirts, and blue jeans. But I like hipsters. Recently the word hipster is starting to take on new meaning, and I want to take it back.
If, like me, you were born between 1961 and 1977 (according to Jeff Gordiner), and you still think Doolittle by The Pixies is THE perfect album, then you are a member of Generation X. You probably remember the kids in college wearing tie-dyes, sitting cross-legged on top of the table in the cafe reading Baba Ram Dass, and listening to “classic rock.” Those kids wanted to be part of an earlier generation, the boomer generation, but they were too late. Their generation came and went right about the time they were born. They rejected the sullen individuality of Gen X.
Well, those twenty-somethings that we call hipsters, they are that version of us, our version of the twenty-year-old wearing a tie-dye in 1990. Hipsters are Generation X, but they were born too late. Hipsters reject being called hipsters because they don’t like to be grouped. To assign a collective consciousness is an assault on individuality. But hipsters don’t want to be millennials or “Generation Y.” And who can blame them? Who would want to be part of a generation that likes being told what music to listen to? Who would choose Britney Spears over Frank Black?
Here are some traits of Generation X, shared by hipsters:
More than anything we hate to be marketed to, that’s why our hero appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a t-shirt that said Corporate Magazines Still Suck.
We’re suspicious of corporate America (with good reason). We don’t like to join groups. We usually don’t like anything once it’s become popular (which is a dumb and lame way of looking at the world, but no cohort is perfect). We don’t like to spend a lot of money on clothes that make us look like everybody else. We shop in thrift stores or, if we’re rich, we buy expensive clothes that look like they were bought in thrift stores. We listen to music that was created by an artist, as opposed to music that is created by a marketing team and assigned to the next hot young vacuum. We take huge pleasure in finding great art no one’s heard of before.
The girl in this video singing about the Hipster Bitch, is herself the hipster. The boy protesting the chain-store moving onto Valencia Street is a hipster. We shouldn’t let “hipster” (or “aging hipster”) become a bad word the way “liberal” became a bad word. It’s time we embrace the term, though perhaps doing so would be too much like joining a group, or starting a movement.
Nonetheless, all you hipster kids are welcome in my shared one-bedroom apartment anytime. We don’t have a TV (of course), but we have a projector and we show movies on bedsheets (we’re a clichéd version of ourselves!). Tonight we’re screening Bottle Rocket.
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More from The Editor’s Desk
See also: Why The Hipster Must Die
March 15th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Meth problem? We’re headed for a Meth problem? Dude, that is not what I wanted to see in my future.
March 15th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I’m sorry if this is rude — but you really come across as an immature narcissist, which is pretty much the definition of hipster. So you’re a hipster complaining about people making fun of hipsters? Aren’t you a little late?
March 16th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Here is what hipsters are to everyone I know:
Hipsters are the enemy.
A hipster takes pride not in knowing things, but in knowing about things. They are “hip” to stuff–that is, aware of its existence and basic cultural valence of everything from roxycodone to America’s Next Top Model.
A hipster is someone who sees passion as a source of weakness and thus affects boredom with anything that isn;t itself boring and passionless. A hipster may attack, usually with humor, but never defend. And never attack passionately or earnestly.
I think the pre-eminent hipster statement was made by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth when they asked her if she was going to be a “cool mom” and she said something like “Of course not, you can’t entertain a baby by acting detachment and bored”
In other words, hipsters think being cool is a pose rather than a result of having actual ideas or feelings about whatever individual piece of stimuli happens to be in front of you.
To a hipster: Thinking hard is “nerdy” feeling hard is “emo” and believing in things is “cliche”.
The hipster is generally a libertarian, a cokehead, a rich kid (so he or she knows all about the next big thing because s/he has a subscription to everything and can afford to buy new shit all the time), a social person, and is headed to business school and meth addiction simultaneously.
A hipster is aware that almost everything good is made by the committed and the romantic, but is unable to commit to the idea enough to actually make anything good.
The hipster is aware s/he will never make anything good (except when really high) but knows it would be uncool to complain about it, especially since they are hiply aware that this won’t stop it from making money which they like because they’re not, y’know, against capitalism or whatever.
The hipster style is calculated pseudo self-sabotage: wearing stupid glasses because looking good might imply you actually wanted to get laid, wearing American Apparel because cheaper and better clothes might imply you needed to save money, or believed in it, liking Britney Spears because not liking it might imply you had serious ideas about the way music should sound.
The hipster aims to seem as though s/he is aware of all things–all products, all the meanings of those products, all the implications of what they’re wearing or saying–and yet has resisted the urge to think seriously about any of them.
March 16th, 2009 at 12:02 am
god that was full of typos, sorry
March 16th, 2009 at 12:26 am
oh yeah:
a hipster is someone who tries hard to never appear to be trying hard.
so, as artists, their preferred media are:
turntables, appropriated images, video, photography
and their prefferred genres are:
the conceptual, the minimal, the faux-naive, the stoney
March 16th, 2009 at 7:21 am
wow. that was embarrassing. the following reads like it was written by a person who swallowed the transcript of a “what you need to know about generation x” episode of “60 minutes” circa-1991:
“More than anything we hate to be marketed to, that’s why our hero appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a t-shirt that said Corporate Magazines Still Suck. We’re suspicious of corporate America (with good reason). We don’t like to join groups. We usually don’t like anything once it’s become popular (which is a dumb and lame way of looking at the world, but no cohort is perfect). We don’t like to spend a lot of money on clothes that make us look like everybody else. We shop in thrift stores or, if we’re rich, we buy expensive clothes that look like they were bought in thrift stores. We listen to music that was created by an artist, as opposed to music that is created by a marketing team and assigned to the next hot young vacuum. We take huge pleasure in finding great art no one’s heard of before.”
March 16th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Being a hipster, I think, also entails leaving disparaging/critical comments on other people’s blogs to show that you are more clever than anyone else. (Way to go, Peter/Brad!)
March 16th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
I’ve always felt there was an important distinction to be made when it comes to hipsters and their more loathsome cousin the scenester. I would write more but then it would look like I was trying.
March 17th, 2009 at 6:48 am
danni,
feel free to call me a hipster. i don’t think being a hipster is a bad thing. under the many other names they’ve gone by, hipsters have done a lot of good–certainly more good than bad. that said, “aging hipster” would probably be a better description for me.
i merely wanted to point out that members of “generation x,” who are supposed to be so aware of marketing and advertising–more aware than any previous generation, it is falsely claimed–and more averse to being defined by others, have done exactly what the boomers did, which was buy into and perpetuate media representations of themselves.
from 1993 ny times article about generation x and advertising
“The new campaign’s print, outdoor and transit advertisements are emblematic of efforts by marketers to aim sales pitches at younger consumers who are almost cynical in their disdain for traditional advertising puffery.”
from 1994 ny times magazine article about generation x and advertising/magazine industry
“The 60′s were revived, then the 70′s, and from the ashes of 1980′s decadence arose Generation X, a group of young network television dropouts who didn’t buy the traditional marketing methods used by magazines and advertising agencies.”
from 1996 ny times letter to the editor by member of generation x
“While Mr. Rich’s Harvard class of ’71 was busy “entrenching its social revolution” for the last 25 years, we were growing up on a steady diet of advertising messages and marketing gimmicks that interrupted re-runs of “Charlie’s Angels” and MTV videos. We know when we’re being marketed to; we’re too smart to fall for any politician’s — or publicist’s, or movie star’s or newspaper columnist’s — rhetoric.”
March 17th, 2009 at 11:12 am
An interesting article, which I’m sure many people here have already seen but which I’ll nonetheless link to, defines a hipster as one who appropriates countercultural fashions and aesthetics without any inclusion of that counterculture’s rebellious positions or ideals.
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
March 17th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I think reading regularly or writing an article for ad busters is probably one of the bigger insurances of hipsterdom.
March 17th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
assurances rather. when I ruined that one.
March 17th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
“A hipster takes pride not in knowing things, but in knowing about things. They are “hip” to stuff–that is, aware of its existence and basic cultural valence of everything from roxycodone to America’s Next Top Model.”–Pfff, of course. Knowing things is overrated. Knowledge is bullshit. Knowing ABOUT things, on the other hand, is what used to be called “having class.”
“hipsters think being cool is a pose”–OF COURSE that’s what being cool is.
“Thinking hard is “nerdy” feeling hard is “emo” and believing in things is “cliche”.”–Thinking hard is “nerdy”? The hipsters I know are among the smartest and most philosophical types I’ve ever met. Feeling hard, on the other hand, IS dumb. “Feeling hard.” It sounds so intentional. And that’s the problem with it. Feeling isn’t something you do as hard as you can. It shouldn’t be something you do on purpose. It’s something that occurs, so subconsciously controlled that you almost do it on accident. People who “feel hard” are people who FAKE hard. And believing in things, quite often, IS cliche. Want proof? Every hippie in the universe.
“The hipster is generally a libertarian, a cokehead, a rich kid (so he or she knows all about the next big thing because s/he has a subscription to everything and can afford to buy new shit all the time), a social person, and is headed to business school and meth addiction simultaneously.”–I don’t think you read the piece at all. Stephen’s entire point is that the person you just described ISN’T a hipster, or he used to not be a hipster. He used to be a frat boy. To me, he still is, he’s just maybe a little smarter now. A hipster might be a libertarian, but that’s more because he likes to do drugs and fuck a lot than because Ron Paul is politik-chic. He might be a cokehead, but he’s more likely to be doing acid, which fuck you up harder for cheaper (at least where I’m from they’re cheaper.) He might be a rich kid, but he probably lost all his money and got disowned by his parents if he was one, and he’s more likely to be a middle-class kid, a slight permutation of the old Kevin Smith/Ed Brubaker slacker.
“The hipster is aware s/he will never make anything good (except when really high) but knows it would be uncool to complain about it, especially since they are hiply aware that this won’t stop it from making money which they like because they’re not, y’know, against capitalism or whatever.”–You sound like an aging Sinatra fan ranting about these rassin-frassin gol-darned punks with their loud guitars. You know next to nothing about this group of people, and are making accusations about them that, in my experience, aren’t based on diddly-shit. Yeah, hipsters drive me up the wall sometimes, and I have huge reservations about this subculture I’ve chosen to attach myself to, but I’ll take ironically detached hipsters over hippies that foam at the mouth about veganism. I’m almost as far-left as you can get, politically and socially, but that doesn’t mean I have to put my hair in dreads and wear a fucking ratty Bob Marley T-shirt. I happen to like showering. I tried the hippie thing for a couple years, and it was fucking stupid. What happened to you? Did a hipster pour his latte on you outside the SOA protest or something?
“A hipster is aware that almost everything good is made by the committed and the romantic, but is unable to commit to the idea enough to actually make anything good.”–You mean like, well, everybody in America? Also, I challenge you to find people who work so substantially harder on their art and craft than hipsters like Todd Barry, Paul F. Thompkins, the Flaming Lips, Patton Oswalt, Louis CK, and most of the people who worked on Arrested Development.
“liking Britney Spears because not liking it might imply you had serious ideas about the way music should sound.”–Yup. You’ve never met a hipster.
“resisted the urge to think seriously about any of them.”–God forbid we have a sense of humor. I doubt I’ve changed your mind, Zak. So let’s just both move on. Enjoy your ulcer.
March 17th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
“the conceptual, the minimal, the faux-naive, the stoney”–Yeah, fuck Picasso and artistic experimentation.
March 18th, 2009 at 2:07 am
Should I destroy that argument in merciless detail, ignore it, or just ask who the heck this Jono is and why he seems to have a problem with trying hard?
March 18th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Sometimes a person is kind enough to say something that lets everybody know that nothing they say could ever possibly be valid.
Thanks Jono, now we know you can be safely ignored forever!
March 18th, 2009 at 10:27 am
poor jono just had to go there–give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself
March 19th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I’d have to side with Jono on this one. I think people get really riled over something that essentially boils down to aesthetics (i.e. why Stephen’s piece is very good). Do some douchebags dress like hipsters, whether it’s flannel or ironic daisy dukes? Yes. Do some people who actually like things, care about things and like to try and create things dres like hipsters too? Yes. I think it’s an interesting aesthetic, and I tend to like the art/music/literature that’s associated with it, but am amazed at the vitriol it inspires. For a legendary D.C. case, see the comments on this story: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=2008
March 20th, 2009 at 12:08 am
the issue with Jono isn’t even about the pro- or anti- hipster stance at this point, it’s the personally aggressive way he argued his point. then there was stuff like–
” “A hipster is aware that almost everything good is made by the committed and the romantic, but is unable to commit to the idea enough to actually make anything good.”–You mean like, well, everybody in America? Also, I challenge you to find people who work so substantially harder on their art and craft than hipsters like Todd Barry, Paul F. Thompkins, the Flaming Lips, Patton Oswalt, Louis CK, and most of the people who worked on Arrested Development.”
that’s like two sentences in a row that say completely opposite things from each other.
March 26th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
I would like to comment not on this article but on the comments.
I didn’t read them all however I can say that the first comment is my favorite.
I will quote it here:
“Meth problem? We’re headed for a Meth problem? Dude, that is not what I wanted to see in my future.”
-Jono
June 5th, 2009 at 9:39 am
fuck…I think you actually nailed my inner hatred of hipsters down to a T. As a gen X’er (a cookie cutter one at that) I clearly see the mirror placed in front of me. Think I am going to head down to Urban Outfitters now and hug one of those sum bitches.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:54 am
I had my 58th birthday yesterday, so I’m probably the least qualified person to weigh in on this discussion, but it seems to me – someone who now appears to have been a hippie though my friends and I would have recoiled at the term – that ‘hipster’ is reaching its sell-by date. I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and it seems like hipsters have been around for so long and that the cultural changes wrought by the Great Recession are quickly dating them as a term and a group. There are few writers of your generation I admire as much as I do you and I would never in a million years have thought of you as a hipster. I think it is, like ‘hippie,’ mostly a media construct. As James Baldwin wrote, “People are too various to be taken lightly.” The times, they are a-mutating, and the hipster is about ready to go into the diorama at the Museum of Cultural History alongside the hippie, the flapper, and all the other generational types.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Thanks Richard. That’s awful nice of you.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Ha!
June 5th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
The extent to which you deny being a hipster is the extent to which you are a hipster.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I think every hipster should be required to listen to “Admit It!!” by Say Anything on their iPods every single morning.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
To my understanding, Gen X, Hippie, Gen O, et al are, really, marketing terms created by a consumer driven capitalism anxious to slice, dice, and commodify people, their tastes — everything.
If one’s “belong” to a “generation,” then one is automatically wedded (so theory and, apparently, practice go hand-in-hand) to certain songs, movies and beliefs – a cultural narrative that comes to represent a personal narrative.
Whereas that narrative once reflected politics that were wedded to change, agitation and discomfort with the status quo, terms like “hipster” reflect the cooptation of politics by consumer culture. (Barbara Kruger’s once critical sloganeering being the apotheosis of this phenomenon & Morrissey, gut hanging out and staggering around, not just like an aging Lothario but an aging Lothario, the stage becomes the performative spectacle.)
The essay’s Rolling Stone / Nirvana image illustrates this perfectly: I can think if a no more prominent (and self-inflated) example of this demographicization and political / cultural misappropriation and exploitation than R.S. Jann Wenner’s obsession with “the 60′s.”
To dial back a bit, the “sixties’s” (that Jann et al have exhaustively chronicled and exploited) were an outgrowth of the earlier hipsters, as described in Norman Mailer’s essay, ‘The White Negro,’ & later referenced in Bruce Benderson’s brilliant, ‘Towards a New Degeneracy.’)
The single most astonishing exclusion from this essay is the AIDS epidemic. That – inarguably far more than the heteronormative Nirvanas and Winona Ryders and Douglas Coplands – defined and divided one generation from another. A brief period (about twenty years) of the most distruptive political event – sexual liberation – imaginable was abruptly brought to an end by the HIV Holocust.
In the terms presented here, all this dilating and parsing of these various definitions of “hipster,” aging or otherwise, and doing so SO uncritically isn’t just tiresome and mainstream. In the extreme. (Rolling Fucking Stone? Why not, US Weekly? Or, Life & Style?)
Given that the comments reflect the fact that there are endless definitions of hipster (which, for me, can be distilled in, ‘Whatever’), I’m still not clear: what was the impulse for writing and publishing this essay, the sum of which reads like a roll call for the McDonald’s of hip?
For me, the question is not one of articulating differences so much as finding commonalities. Average age being 80 or thereabouts, where do we intersect as human beings with precious little time on this planet?
June 7th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I applaud your attempt to redefine the hipster in positive terms, but I think it’s fair to say that in the time since grunge (the time in which your hipster status gained the prefix aging-) the creature of hipsterdom has mutated from what you describe. There are, no doubt, still cool hipsters who know how to make shit and think, close relatives of the flannel wearing, pensive, communally oriented outcasts you so commend. But there is now, also, the new, much loathed hipster (see the aforementioned adbusters article, or for first hand horror, http://thecobrasnake.com/) described in many of these comments.
I guess the inevitable issue is that when something really cool and something really lame are called the same thing, people get all hot and bothered about it.
watch the hipster olympics, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAO4EVMlpwM
and remember that Jack Kerouac talked about hipsters in On The Road, long before Kurt Cobain, or Calvin Johnson, or the members of Kings of Leon where a twinkle in anybody’s eye.
June 7th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
do you people ranting and flaming here realize how inane you come across, spending so much time banging away furiously at your keyboards to argue about the relative merits of persons dressing in one particular way or another, taking an interest in one particular form of music or expression over another, and adopting one general public attitude over another? the vast majority of people in the world go about living their lives without knowing or caring what a hipster is or whether they should be reviled or embraced. and lest i win the award for least relevant comment, i am an unapologetic hipster, on the cusp of being an aging hipster actually (though not a scenester, kudos to DW for acknowledging the difference), who is preoccupied with my hipster hair and clothes, plays a classical stringed instrument that demands years of disciplined training and practice to master, works for and with successful striving professionals with whom i would never choose to socialize outside of a paying job, values laziness above most other qualities, and has spent years working and volunteering with adults and children with developmental disabilities because it is something i feel passionately and earnestly about. i also say “thank you” and “please” and hold doors for other people whether i think they look like utter twats or not. i’m occasionally derided for being a hipster, but i find that the people who pass such judgements tend to be among the unimaginative majority of the population who i generally wish well but don’t have much interest in communing or bonding with, anyway.
good article, btw.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
HERE HERE! Boys and girls just want to have fun. I like new things, I like fun things, I like unique things. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some people are far more culturally informed than I, some are far less. That doesn’t mean I hate either group, and neither should anyone else.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
“Hipster” is an empty, all-encompassing term to describe the unwitting little foot soldiers of the Corporatocracy whose endless quest for “authenticity” has become the the ultimate expression of conformity among white, smugger-than-thou urbanites exploited by the same same cynical marketing “geniuses” who branded “grunge” for Wal-Mart back in the ’90′s and later launched the career of Coldplay. While a “hipster’ might cringe at the comparison of their precious pursuits of “art” and appreciation of whiny ditties performed by some guy named Josh with a cult like following among the connoisseurs of organic wasabi in his Williamsburg ‘hood to the bland offerings of the copyright cartel record labels should realize that Hipster is just another word for the unpaid marketing tools of corporations who reinterpret their “edgy”, “authentic” unbranded lifestyles into flavored coffees for suburban shopping malls.
If anything, Hipsters are the gift that just keeps giving to corporate America, not only as clueless shills for consumerism, but as non-violent enforcers of homogeneity in urban centers, driving up real-estate prices as they supplant non-whites on fixed incomes in newly gentrified neighborhoods. I wonder if the author of this piece recognizes the unintentional irony of screening “Bottle Rocket” on his bed sheet for his slacker trust fund friends in his pricey studio apartment, conveniently situated in an ethnically cleansed neighborhood where a low-income black family was forced to move out, unable to afford the rent when this tragically misunderstood demographic took over. I would like to hear their thoughts on the unfairness of people labeling him a “hipster”.
June 10th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Hmm, people arguing variant points based on semantic differences. How about if I address what, among the comments, is completely wrong.
“hipsters think being cool is a pose”–OF COURSE that’s what being cool is.
- Jono
Oh lord, it’s easy to see where Jono’s problems arise. Being cool is a product of complete ease with oneself. It’s understandable that though he claims, “I’m almost as far-left as you can get, politically and socially,” that caring (and knowing) about things is a dead end. Because he tried being a hippie and it didn’t work. Damn it, he put it on the uniform and his life didn’t get better.
Might I suggest dressing as he damn well pleases while writing the occasional letter to his congressman and conscientiously recycling? It seems to safe to assume that he’s a fairly recent college graduate (from a “good school” though he’s still angry about not getting into Brown), but that he didn’t learn to think all that well and that he’s stuck in the college culture. Really, in the real world people can be committed without being one of those “hippies that foam at the mouth about veganism.”
And I hate to break it to him, but those who feel hard don’t necessarily fake hard. Those Emo kids really do feel a lot, but like Jono, they need some outward manifestation of their personality to feel at ease. And it makes them the object of ridicule. Some will come to put the overwhelming feelings in perspective, many more will continue to be dramatic their whole lives.
Jono, and those he reluctantly identifies with, back away from both the difficulty of feeling and the ridicule that comes from wearing it on his sleeve. But as Zak points out “almost everything good is made by the committed and the romantic”, and that’s where Jono’s beloved detachment fails him. That is, if he wishes to ever do anything good. It’s only in caring, and being unafraid of being seen as such, that accomplishment is possible.
Now resume arguing about “hipster” using the different meanings of the term that reach radically different conclusions. And congrats to Richard Grayson for his suggestion that the definition(s) of today are about to be mothballed. The longitudinal perspective on this one deserves credence.
Or maybe we could begin a discussion/attack on the scenester.
June 10th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I like how Richard Grayson said it – especially the “sell by date” part.
Generation X, in reference to my generation, was coined by Canadian author Douglas Coupland, who gave that title to a book in 1991. I couldn’t get through the book, but a lot of my friends felt a special kinship with the characters, felt Coupland nailed life in the Reagan-Bush era’s economic and social stagnancy. The issues he portrayed resonated with me – e.g., exiting college into a McJob – I just didn’t care for the writing.
Incidentally, on my campus, tie-dyers were usually playing Hacky Sack, not sitting on tables, and they and listened to Reggae.
June 15th, 2009 at 2:46 am
I’m amazed by how many people got really worked up about hipsters. Hilarious and sort of absurd.
As a side note: very few people I know who were born in the early 60s consider themselves Gen Xers. Most consider themselves Boomers, although that doesn’t really fit for us either. I was born in 1961, and I don’t feel like a Boomer and definitely don’t identify with Gen X.
The marketers seem to be calling those of us born between 1954-1965 “cuspers” these days. (With the rise of Obama, born in ’61, the marketing geniuses finally had to come up with a term for us because, you know, otherwise we wouldn’t really exist.)
June 15th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Having been a big-city dweller, turned country-gal, seems to me that the criticisms against hipsters change according to geographic context. In the city, there’s this incredible backlash against the “hipster” largely having to do with issues of gentrification, politics and corporate invasion of culture. In the country, though, it’s the hipsters that are the classic white American outcasts – like the goths or the punks of another time.
‘Hipster’ has become one of those insults that stings even though we can’t agree what it’s about. Kind of like when you’re a little tike, and someone calls you a faggot, and you say, “Shut up!” and run off the playground in tears. Later, after you’ve calmed down, you ask your best friend, “What’s a faggot?”
June 16th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
My dad (who was a hippie) called the beatniks “hipsters” but not in a derogatory way.
Kerouac’s On the Road references hipsters a couple times. Usually as coffee shop “faggots” or college kids. In other words, people like Kerouac. He probably meant it ironically.
In Big Sur there’s even more commentary on hipsters and poseurs and the over urbanization of the Bay Area.
Point is, this conversation has been going on for decades. It’s only now that people seem to be all hateful about it. Just relax. Hang out with people you like. Don’t hang out with people you don’t like.
January 18th, 2010 at 2:01 am
Wow. What a bunch of lame douchebags.
January 26th, 2010 at 7:14 am
I think that hipsters “know about” things rather than “knowing things” not because they are indulged rich kids but because they have a certain sensitivity to and curiosity about culture. The portrait of the cokehead brat conjures another profile entirely to me.
January 29th, 2010 at 11:49 am
“Cool is studied insouciance.” I wish I could state who first wrote that. Street cred is different as it’s an assessment by others, and if you have to wonder if you have it then you don’t. Why does style matter? Even if you’re not a fashionista there is value in fashion because it is always changing, so it reminds us of progress. Some neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness (Damasio, e.g.) believe consciousness is the story an individual’s brain constructs for itself to help make sense of the world, so the person can move through it. Everyone needs to create an identity of belonging to ward of insanity–now we’re fully in my territory, nothing I’ve botched from half-remembered reading. Stephen wrote a good article. There will always be hipsters though they will be known by other names. The labels are useful for discussion, and fun. Borders and excluding others from a labeled group happens and can be hurtful to some, but that’s life–no one learns anything without contrasts in descriptions. Contrasts illuminate and keep cultures alive. There are groups you can be proud to count yourself among, and “hipster” is one of them.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Help me here–but aren’t hipsters the people spreading the “news” as opposed to the “originators” who are the cultural groundbreakers? This seems to be common through any “named” generation in any country. The hipster tends to be in a clan or clique while the originator is out there on his or her own.
February 8th, 2010 at 12:42 am
Hmm Harry, I suppose someone could be ahead of their time, an originator, initially dismissed by others known as hipsters. This same originator could later be embraced by hipsters as a visionary. If the originator rejects the “in the know, hip to it” flock maybe he remains on the outside, or maybe he becomes an uber-hipster, which sounds like someone trying too hard and so wouldn’t be ironic enough for many hipster tastes so an uber-hipster can’t ever exist. Hell, I really don’t know.
February 11th, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Well Vicki, the originator is ripped off of their vision by hipsters who will move on at some point to the next originator, repeat process while feeling smug and HIP. Hipsters are just another dumbass product of consumer culture.
February 12th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Oh yeah…and hipsters are not searchers….just consumers who deal in culture as trophy, one gotten to outfit their “trip”. And they are not adapters but instead buy into a watered down product sold by the HIP bussiness and promoted by the HIP media. Nice and safe within a tidy little construct not the least revolutionary, and always changing for the wrong reasons…mainly $$$.
March 14th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
Doolittle IS the perfect album.
March 18th, 2010 at 9:08 am
When I think “hipster,” I think of Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans” — “angelheaded hipsters,” that sort. And for me (and in that context), it’s a beautiful thing.
Those “hipsters” (or “Beats,” if you prefer to call them that) weren’t afraid to feel (read any of Kerouac’s or Ginsberg’s stuff for proof), they weren’t afraid to hope, and they weren’t afraid to believe. That’s what makes them so great.
March 25th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
It’s all in how you say it, the tone of voice;
Doolittle is a great album, but Surfer Rosa is better, more raw and authentic, not so produced and slick.
A lot of hipsters can actually think, and actually have mastery of some meaningful profession, but don’t need waste their time shoving it in everyone’s face.
I always thought I was early Gen x, by definition (1966), 1961? I don’t know, sounds too early.
But if the word evolves, all you newcomers can have it, who cares? I’ll still be what I am regardless of the label of the day, because I’m not defined by the label, that’s part of the attraction to the whole notion in the first place. The un-lableable. For a while the label works as a description, then it gets co-opted and abused, we get called something else, then start the whole thing over again.
March 26th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
“A hipster moves like a cat, slow walk, quick reflexes; he dresses with a flick of chic; if his dungarees are old, he turns the cuffs at a good angle.”
- Norman Mailer, Hipster and Beatnik: a footnote to The White Negro.
March 27th, 2010 at 11:35 am
I’m sorry, just watched the video. I’m shocked you dignified the song with a whole entire post on the rumpus; it’s an ignorant, derivative, arrogant attempt to be? what, cute? waste of time even to think about it.
I assume you have evidence that it’s indicative of some larger misunderstanding permeating the culture? Let it permeate, that’s verging on pure pop culture anyway, not why I’m here in the first place.
March 29th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Some of this (the better parts) reminded me of this, 6 years ago (6?) trying to reclaim hipster.
http://www.yankeepotroast.org/archives/2004/04/excerpts_from_t.html
April 14th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
stephen; i think that this is a rather insightful reading of the current state of hipsterdom — as alt 90s rerun. so much time is wasted yammering about hipsters it’s really rare to see something fresh.
April 27th, 2010 at 12:40 am
I’ve been called a hipster, but I think people are really saying stylish or flamboyant or referring to a malleableness in interests and appearance. Fair enough, as I like variety and feel no reason to be beholden to any one behavior. I feel the most prominent thing about being a hipster is wanting to look different, shaking up expectations and I don’t see what could be right or wrong about that. The second is that hipsters are consumers, who want to consume outside of the normative cycle of events as much as their means and time will allow. Since the present is occupied by people telling other people what to wear or what music is enjoyable the past and the future are more ideal places to look for the new artifacts that will sate the desire for something to address and question the monotonous expectations of mainstream life. It maybe true to say it is a contrarian culture by its nature and could not exist without what the mainstream throws away or disregards. The hipster is the champion of lost and under appreciated culture. They are hip to something others are not, like how great tin ray-guns are, for a while, or that band from Silver Lake is, until they get to big and their sound changes and come-on the first albums are usually better, because they had more to say, before they had to be told how many units they would have to move to remain relevant and profitable. Kurt got that. One something enters the mainstream’s range of interest it loses value to the hipster, like a best friend that is everybody’s best friend and ultimately a friend to no one. The relationship between the consumer and the consumed is no longer special and unique and the value becomes more and more specific. A hipster will spend thirty-five dollars at a thrift store for a old logo Mickey Mouse t-shirt because whether most people care or not it is unique and makes them happy and they saved it and gave it a home. Later when they put it on and dance to a Dennis Wilson record they are saying I am a part of this lost world and this part is mine, for now.
April 27th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
Oh, the irony! Hipster is the new Punk just as Indie is the new Hipster. Eventually every counter-culture eats itself or is eaten up by Corporate America. Labels are comfortable, they’re easy, and they’re profitable. They’re a way to identify one’s unique self with a group of like-minded people. Ironic, huh? I wonder what would happen if we used the time we spend on debating and theorizing cultural labels and instead put that time and effort into creating new art forms and ideas. Maybe we’d actually come up with something worth talking about.
April 29th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
hipster is not a cultural movement it is a consumer movement. do not get them confused.
May 8th, 2010 at 2:48 am
Is it too late to say that hipsters don’t like being labeled so most of them will deny even being hipsters in the first place?
May 15th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
I apologize for my unmedicated vituperation of past posts. Thanks for letting me spew. Nothing personal toward the author. Reference points from the past that influenced me in forming my statement that hipsters are a pox.(Now children these here are the Real Deal): Miles Davis RIP, Kent State 1970, Emmett Grogan RIP, Neal Cassidy RIP. Song: Tower of Power’s “What is Hip?”. Unh-huh… One question-Was Bill Buckley a conservative hipster? Well, thanks again.
May 19th, 2010 at 6:48 pm
NÃO FALEM DO COBAIN SEUS MALDITOS , ELE APENAS ERA UM JOVEM PROBLEMÁTICO , QUE NÃO SOUBE LIDAR COM SEUS SENTIMENTOS ………..
May 29th, 2010 at 11:50 am
Quick note to all who would like to fancy themselves hipsters and you know who you are –
If you buy your outfits straight out of the Urban Outfitters lookbook, you’re not a hipster.
If you’re constantly going out for dinner with a purposely rotating group of four or more people and taking pictures of your meals, you’re not a hipster.
If you’ve ever posted a review to Yelp, you’re not a hipster.
If you had your picture taken in front of the Elliot Smith wall on Sunset Blvd anytime within the past three years, you’re not a hipster.
If you view venues, coffee shops and restaurants around town as a check-list to be completed and then broadcasted about on social media (especially Four Square, ugh) you are not a hipster.
If you’re still scanning your photo booth pics from the Elbo Room, The Short Stop and the Cha Cha lounge and uploading them to Facebook, you’re not a hipster.
I’m not a hipster either and that’s good with me because I’m old, but I’m just saying, if you answered yes to two or more of these…
May 31st, 2010 at 10:27 pm
Surfer Rosa was better.
June 1st, 2010 at 10:37 am
I agree w/ what a lot of what you’re saying. The original “hipsters” where like any counter culture that has, or will ever, ever exist: people who don’t want to be part of a totally fucked system. But, unfortunately, like the grunge trend of gen x, such movements are ultimately exploited (by the very corporations that such people love to hate) and it just becomes mainstream. Such is the case with hipsters. By defining it, it simply becomes another image – one that’s sold to the masses and bought up like hot cakes. Case in point, the daisy dukes on sale at Urban Outfitters. It’s an image, that’s all it fucking is.
BTW, I don’t think that girl singing is a hipster – her hair is too clean – and plenty of hipsters are doing coke while wearing those stupid f-ing shorts. Just check out these hipsters:
http://www.latfh.com/
Bottom line: if you’re truly your own person, you don’t need to be defined by a label like “hipster” and you can wear any damn thing you want to.
June 8th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
I think the bottom line here, that we all can agree on, is that people don’t like to be labeled or put in boxes (whether or not that box has a negative or positive connotation). We all like to believe that we are truly unique and special beings — even those who a “hipster” himself might deride (suburban soccer moms, corporate shills, “the man”, whatever).
The thing is anyone, that belongs to any group (either through self-identification or because of perception, based on fashion trends etc)is still a human being, and as such has something in common with us. From the basics (eating, sleeping, defecating etc.)to the emotional(the need to be connected with others, to be loved and understood, to have a voice, to be treated with respect) the problem here seems to be that everyone is forgetting that we all start with the same piece of paper doll (oh they come in different colors and grades of paper but they are paper dolls nonetheless)and then it’s how we dress them up, how we accessorize, we think, that makes us different. But it’s what makes us the same that really matters, it is those things that make us human, in which, we can all connect.
We try so hard to share our uniqueness, through a cobbled together list of likes and dislikes- things we identify with, this effort to try to share ourselves, try to make sense of this life and connect with others — That is the beauty of humanity, it lies in our desire to be connected.
Maybe this is why the disaffected persona, that is purportedly projected by these “hipsters”, is so polarizing in its effect. It is in denial of our basic humanity — we do want to connect and to be understood — we do care (hipsters included). And pretending that you don’t or adopting an image that you don’t, denies this humanity which in the end doesn’t protect you from the hurt or criticism you were trying to avoid but instead invites it in.
Maybe that is what is at the heart of Stephen’s piece and why he wants to invite all the hipsters over to his place for movies a la projector.
Thanks for the piece Stephen.
July 21st, 2010 at 10:34 pm
You’re right, this girl does have quite a skewed perception of what it means to be a hipster. Too bad, too, a catchy song entitled “Hipster Bitch” is such a great concept.
July 25th, 2010 at 8:49 am
I thought we had finished arguing about what the hipster is, means, does, looks like, sometime around 2003. When an accurate, agreed upon description eludes a term, like “hipster” for long enough, it’s time to put it out of use. No fewer than 7 New York based writers have tried to “claim” or “reclaim” the term. Holy shit people. Give it up.
August 14th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
I like to be put in boxes and labeled.
Also. I agree with Richard Grayson. And I’m closer to a discounted Metrocard than he is.
I don’t believe I’ve met a hipster in years. Did you ever see Rick Shapiro, downtown comic, former junky, etc., perform? Rick is a HIPSTER. Also nice. Hipster is an in-the-blood thing. All sorts of computer guys, systems and ad agency design, think they are hipsters because they have a neck tattoo and live in Williamsburg or the L.E.S. but they don’t meet intellectual requirements (there are!) and are strung out on affectation and condescension. If drug partakeage is the criterion, every other Goldman Sachs trader or Westchester commuter is a hipster. There’s something to living beneath the radar that lends itself to hipsterism.
I know a small group of poet musicians living communally, 20s, 30s, who are hipsters and would never consider themselves such which is the trick, as is often the case… to lose self-awareness.
August 14th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Quick rethinking of above, having looked at your photos. There are hipsters aplenty but I tend not to pay attention unless there’s a reason for an intro. A genuine hipster is a beautiful thing, and, anymore, sweet.
September 2nd, 2010 at 6:08 pm
On behalf of Gen Y, I would like to reclaim the term “Hipster Douchebag.” It’s a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with it.
September 21st, 2010 at 7:58 pm
i’d say this is pretty spot-on if you want to enumerate a hipster:
They remind me, more then anything, with their long hair, intellectual seriousness, endless cigarettes, thrift shop clothes, fondness for taverns, and sexuality-redefining social conduct of the kind of circles of poets, novelists and artists that sprang up in late nineteenth century Scandinavia and Germany around August Strindberg and Hans Jaeger, and that included Edvard Munch, and later, tangentially, Knut Hamsun. In a very real sense, they are new bohemian existentialists, enacting their rebellion against a backdrop of the most serious economic decline since the Great Depression. Poverty and struggle are very real among these poets. At times, having known hunger in my own youth, I have seen it, real hunger—the physical kind—in their eyes.
from http://www.evergreenreview.com/124/new-sf-underground.html
September 27th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Gawd, this entire conversation is making me feel old, dull and irrelevant. And sort of glad to be past giving a toss.
October 31st, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Zak Smith – I think I love you.
November 11th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Look, all you dudes dissing hipsters are, in my opinion, dead fucking wrong about hipsters. Zak, Hezbella, Harry, you’re wrong.
That is a classic example of something the hipsters I know would say. We are FULL of passion and ideas and music and we are the enemies of detachment. Most of us are awkward outside of our own communities of hipster, so we seem detached, but in our own communities is where we know we’ll be respected and loved. Where we know we won’t be accepted by boring, willfully ignorant fuckers. It seems like the people you’re describing are they type of people we would call ‘Shit-sucking posers’. They are not the kind of people real hipsters respect. They are the people we hate.
I think that thing that sets real hipsters like me apart from whatever you call yourself is our defiance. The hipsters I know buy from corporate America because we’re broke. We don’t want to. We want to grow our own food and have eco-friendly clothes and net neutrality. We want to be real and want to be loved.
If you call yourself a hipster and you’re just some stupid twat without ideas who listens to Bon Iver and wears plaid, you’re not a real hipster. We’ll be nice to you because we are nice, but we won’t give you an iota of respect. Like you seem to do for us.
(scenesters on the other hand, are stupid little shits I’m not at all fond of.)
November 18th, 2010 at 7:23 pm
Hipsterism and the attendent mystique have jumped the shark. Let’s move on to something more mystifying, more imaginal, more alive, like, say modern African music.
December 21st, 2010 at 7:25 am
I guess the author is not very schooled in satire and how an artist might use it in a song and performance by wearing said “hipster wear” in the performance to further mock herself and said hipsters. Lelia commonly refers to this song as pretty much a true story that happened to her, and after a night of watching an old flame with his new friend, wrote this song as a fun little tune aimed at mocking the people in question as well as herself. But sure go ahead and make a dig at her, that’s what real authors do.
December 21st, 2010 at 8:28 am
I can’t believe someone would mock someone for mocking someone, especially when they were also mocking themselves.
January 16th, 2011 at 6:35 pm
Why attempt to reclaim a term before the cycles of cultural narcissism allow for reexamination, anyway?
One problem is that people seem to be conflating two types: yuppies and beats. They seem to be claiming the hipster is a kind of media-absorbing beat who has sold out in just-visible ways because commodification is inevitable even if you’re a Marxist, let alone, a conservative libertarian. The idea is that no idea, no matter how good or specific, will escape the marketing pyre, so enjoy that anonymous moment just before it happens. It never seems to occur to people that do so means surrendering their lives to *reacting* to marketing instead of finding value beyond marketing. Shostakovich “sold out,” in the sense of acquiescing to the Russian government, yet from the POV of content, his later symphonies and string quartets are better than those of many minor composers who didn’t. I’m using an example that’s as remote as possible to hipster-labeled culture to make a point.
You’re either using the term pejoratively or you’re not. Kerouac and Mailer (however smirkingly) were not. Christian Lorentzen is — and with unusually good turns of phrase.
One thing I’ll add to a thread of lists carefully constructed to show that posters could be called hipsters if they wanted but are too cool for that:
One of the prevailing annoyances I find in Williamsburg is not ironic detachment but sentimentality. No disrespect, but whether he realizes it or not, Elliot’s channeling the quality I detest most in that culture, whatever epithet might apply: The need to dismiss people with “not-so-passive-aggressive snarkiness” and then emote about things that touch them or make them cry but probably don’t deserve to.
It isn’t that emotions are bad. It’s that real emotion is not mindless sentimentality, which is as far from passion as reflexive post-Simpsons irony is from thoughtful irony. Real emotion makes people photograph badly and scalds their lives to the point that posing becomes a distraction.
January 16th, 2011 at 6:49 pm
You could winnow it down to a sentence that has more to do with the behavior of individuals than the sweep of generation-stereotyping epithets:
“Notice how much more modest we are than anyone else: We even put ‘modest’ in quotes.”
The problem is that believing it exempts you from the self-examination that would lead you out of the self-obsession you’ve mistaken for modesty and toward actual modesty.
January 20th, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Wow, Stephen, you have some tough readers.
I am 23. Hipster, for me, has always been a bad thing. Was Cobain, at one time, considered a hipster? I’m very surprised. I never would have put the grunge scene and the hipster scene together.
I just graduated college in the hipster haven of Boulder, CO.
A hipster, there, is a kid who shops at American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie. They spend 80 bucks on a T-shirt that they may as well have gotten at the thrift store. There is a lot of unnecessary head gear (see the hipster head band), and a lot of new items made to look old. Hipsters strive to be smart and arty. They come off a little holier than thou, a little precious. Hipsters aren’t the worst thing ever, though. I mean, the things they are trying to be are good enough. Smarty and arty…nothing wrong with that. I want to be those things, too.
I guess people hate on hipsters because they are considered posers. Also, hipsters have a general confidence and coolness many of us can’t pull off, and they do it all with their silly outfits and headgear.
February 9th, 2011 at 5:52 pm
So, I like hipsters, I think. I’m 54 and as a kid I desperately wanted to be a hippie, but never fit in anyplace.
The last couple of years, I’ve come out as an aging artiste and been embraced by a whole cadre of SF young people who seem to fit the profile of “hipster”. Yes, they wear thrift store clothes, goofy glasses, aggressively unattractive hair styles (which they carefully maintain)and pride themselves on being outrageously judgmental college drop outs. They live on Facebook and You Tube, have video cameras and I-Phones permanently cemented to their fingers except when sitting in over-priced cafes drinking designer coffee and fingering their laptops like a lovers private parts. They are incredibly masterful at multitasking 100 different meaningless projects. They make art. They appreciate art. They love artists. I adore them. Finally I fit in. You know, it seems to me they love each other – a lot – without all of the hippie posturing with the flowers and stuff.
The hipsters have made a hipness for the “terminally unhip”, like me. Long may we wave.
February 11th, 2011 at 11:42 pm
I like the way Frank Black’s belly protrudes over his belt buckle. But only when I’m watching him perform in Atlanta.
And my meth habit hasn’t ruined my teeth because I choose intravenous methods.
March 7th, 2011 at 7:14 pm
Well bitch… I try not to be a hipster, but Bottle Rocket is amongst my favorite movies… and a lot of this sounds like me. Crap basket!
March 13th, 2011 at 9:24 am
I’m all for not letting the term “aging hipster” become a bad term, the way that liberal did, especially since I consider myself to be the stereotypical aging hipster. Nice post, by the way.
May 23rd, 2011 at 8:24 pm
This is a great article. I’ve become facinated with hipster culture recently and this is the best description I’ve found of what they’re really about. I’m way too mainstream to be a hipster, and I know it, but part of me really likes their style.
June 16th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Having read the article I am surprised to notice that I resemble a hipster quite a bit. I hate the same things they do, apart from nice clothes, especially joinig groups… Still, I think I’m just being myself, not a real hipster.