What We Talk About When We Talk About Hipsters

Suburbanites, small-town folks, and people of color: you can safely ignore this post if you’d like. It will probably sound like a bunch of frou-frou jibber jabber about an incomprehensible, unimportant, and hopelessly insular subject that doesn’t merit mention in regular conversation, much less the written word.

And you might be right.

But if you’ve lived anywhere remotely near an urban area in the last decade, it’s one topic you’re forced to have an opinion on, one heated debate where opting out is not an option. You have to have an answer to this question.

How much do you hate hipsters?

I’ve framed it as a question of degree and not kind, as you’d be hard pressed to find anyone actually defending hipsters as a group. It’s that rare subculture known only in the pejorative, and finding someone who would say “Yeah, I’m a hipster” is about as easy as meeting a self-proclaimed pedophile. This is not too surprising, since there have been articles denouncing them as the death of Western Civilization, numerous calls for the hipsters themselves to die, and at least one obituary claiming their long wished-for demise has already happened. Given the mold growing on this debate, I’d be inclined to believe the death sentence – except I continue to read anti-hipster screeds every other week not to mention serialized tales about the much-feared “Hipster Grifter”.  They must still be around.

But what exactly are they in the first place? How would we know one if we saw one? Perhaps not surprisingly for a group with such a uniformly negative reputation, there is little agreement about what actually constitutes Official Hipsterdom.

THREE DEFINITIONS

At a symposium (yes, they get symposiums now) entitled “What was the Hipster?” sponsored by N+1 last month, editor Mark Grief separated them into two types, both emerging in the early aughts. I found his taxonomy a helpful starting point, though notably lacking one species that I took it upon myself to describe.

***********************

1.  The first is the trucker-hat wearing, ironic-mustache sporting breed that seems to exist solely to throw air quotes around the actual experiences and tastes of lower-class American whites. He calls them the aggressives, but I prefer “Off-White Trash”.

[Identifying Marks: Vice Magazine, PBR, t-shirts about fishing or ex-wives]

***********************

2.  The second group is as earnest as the first is ironic, and defined more by the art they consume than the clothes they wear. For lack of a better word, their main aesthetic is “twee”, a faux-naif stance characterized by a suffocating cuteness, a precocity bordering on infantilism. They skew older and nicer than the other two groups. Grief labels them the non-aggressives. I can’t think of anything better than “The Quirksters”.

[Conspicuous Consumption: Miranda July, Belle & Sebastian, McSweeney’s, Flight of the Concords]

***********************

3.  Grief’s designations are a good jumping off-point, but somewhat dated – the aesthetics of the types he describes have either been abandoned or so diffused into the mainstream that they’re no longer that relevant. Furthermore, I feel he misses the one type people usually mean when they mumble “fucking hipsters” under their breath on the train these days: namely, those annoyingly colorful club kids, whose pastiche of fashions from every era (particularly the 80’s) combine into a gaudy whirlwind of mismatched ugliness. Their hedonistic exploits and aesthetic abortions are captured on party websites like Cobrasnake and have penetrated slightly into the mainstream via the widely mocked – and clearly successful – American Apparel ads. In honor of the infamous site (now a book) that documents their exhibitionism, let’s call them “Last Night’s Partygoers”.

[Telling Details: low-cut v-neck shirts for men, oversized neon sunglasses, brightly colored leggings]

THE CRIMES OF THE HIPSTER

All that demographic throat-clearing was in service of a larger point: people rarely make any sense when they engage in hipster bashing. The three aforementioned groups couldn’t be less similar in terms of clothing, artistic tastes, and general interests, yet they are all, at different times, what people mean when they kvetch about the habits of hipsters.

Let’s survey the hipster’s rap sheet:

• Mean spirited irony

• Embarrassingly naïve earnestness

• Kneejerk adoption of liberal causes

• Complete detachment from/ apathy about politics

• Obsession with fashion above everything

• No fashion sense whatsoever

• An obsession with being the “first” to discover something

• Following everyone else like a herd animal

• Listening to overly earnest, whiny indie-rock

• Listening to shallow, vapid dance music

As these schizophrenic complaints can attest, it’s clear the hunting party has been sent out with everyone getting a different map. In this amateur ethnography, hipster ends up being shorthand for “anything young people do or wear that’s stupid”. Would it help matters if critics were more specific in their denunciations – if they actually used the categories above to direct their venom more accurately? Perhaps – or maybe it would be most helpful to think about why we need the Hipster so badly as a cultural whipping boy.

First off, I’ll admit that I’ve been as guilty as anyone at involuntary hipster bashing. I’ve laughed my ass off at Blue States Lose, Vice’s Do’s and Don’ts, Hipster Runoff, and The Hipster Olympics. There’s even a couple of captions on the sub par latecomer site Look at This Fucking Hipster that kinda make me giggle. And, of course, I’ve played the popular NYC game “Hipster or Homeless” more times than I count. But a recent post by author Carl Wilson has made me rethink what my membership in the anti-hipster lynch mob actually means.

WE HAVE MET THE HIPSTER AND IT IS US

As he demonstrated in one of my favorite books of last year, “Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: Journey to the End of Taste”, Wilson has a knack for describing what a brutal contact sport culture can be, and exploring why we go to such lengths to lower other’s status (by demeaning their tastes) in order to bolster our own : I am this by not being that. In this same vein, Wilson points out on his site how hipsters are an awfully handy container to dump all our own insecurities and failings. Since the hipster is always an unspecified, un-confronted “other”, something always over there, it’s easy for white urban liberals in particular to pin ailments like gentrification, apathy, and aimless hedonism entirely on this phantasm, and in the process, completely exonerate ourselves of any excess. This villian is such a suspiciously perfect combination of straw man and scapegoat that it leads Wilson to doubt its existence at all:

“There are no hipsters, only anti-hipsters – or at least the ratio is approximately the same as that of actually existing Satanists to anti-Satanists during the heavy-metal and Goth panics of the 1980s and 1990s. The question is what in turn the hipster allows the anti-hipster to deny, and what’s being lost in that continuing deferral.”

 

I think you can also blame the boom in hipster-bashing on the rise of blogs and internet culture generally . By obliterating the geographical boundaries and financial constraints that used to limit exposure to different groups and ideas, the internet has accelerated the already rampant nichification of culture. With such splintering comes more freedom, and a further democratization of taste. And as Joseph Epstein has pointed out, the more democracy you have, the more snobbery you get – since where status isn’t fixed, it’s there for the taking. But this fluidity leads to anxiety and uncertainty and jostling to secure your own position necessarily entails bumping against another person’s. After all, status is a zero game. And if someone has to take some licks, why not the hipster – especially since they don’t exist?

Well, unlike Wilson, I do think they exist, and these lazily nasty photo sites are showing picture of actual people – even if the photographed would never cop to being one. But I, for one, hope these kids keep doing what they’re doing. Even though their tolerance for flamboyance and mismatched patterns far exceeds my own, I’d hate to see some cowardly blogger’s snark limit some kid’s self expression. One of the main reasons people move to a big city is to escape the petty judgments of small town folk – judgments like “What the hell are you wearing?” One of the great things about New York, for example, is that you can sport purple pajamas, a coonskin hat, and cowboy boots in public and no one will even look up from their paper on the subway.

And what about the dig that they have all the outer markings of a subversive counter-cultural youth movement with none of the substance? Good. Great, actually. One of the most annoying and counterproductive aspects of American political life in the last four decades has been the inextricable linking of left-wing politics with the fads, whims, and fashions of pouty teenagers. This spurious connection has allowed exhibitionist contrarians to play revolutionary while real radicals do the unglamorous heavy lifting of organizing and activism. Not to mention that reactionaries can paint those trying to affect real change as unserious dandies that should leave the real business of governing to the grown-ups. The faster liberals can finalize the divorce between hairstyles and ideology, the better. Thank God hipsters aren’t expressly political – imagine the anti-Obama ads that could’ve generated.

Having said all that, I’m not promising that I’ll never roll my eyes at another ridiculously dressed kid on the subway. But I’ll try to keep in mind what Carl Wilson said in his book about facing the horror of other people’s taste, and trying to make our lives less about status and cultural capital and more about genuine engagement with each other:

This is what I mean by democracy – not a limp open-mindedness, but actively grappling with people and things not like me, which brings with it the perilous question of what I am like. Democracy, that dangerous, paradoxical and mostly unattempted ideal, sees that the self is insufficient, dependent for definition on otherness, and chooses not only to accept that but to celebrate it, to stake everything on it. Through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves.

Maybe you and I aren’t so different, Hipster Kid. But that doesn’t mean I’ll ever believe in the concept of ironic facial hair.