Journal of the mental environment
I‘m sipping a scummy pint of cloudy beer in the back of a trendy dive bar turned nightclub in the heart of the city’s heroin district. In front of me stand a gang of hippiesh grunge-punk types, who crowd around each other and collectively scoff at the smoking laws by sneaking puffs of “fuck-you,” reveling in their perceived rebellion as the haggard, staggering staff look on without the slightest concern.
The “DJ” is keystroking a selection of MP3s off his MacBook, making a mix that sounds like he took a hatchet to a collection of yesteryear billboard hits, from DMX to Dolly Parton, but mashed up with a jittery techno backbeat.
“So… this is a hipster party?” I ask the girl sitting next to me. She’s wearing big dangling earrings, an American Apparel V-neck tee, non-prescription eyeglasses and an inappropriately warm wool coat.
“Yeah, just look around you, 99 percent of the people here are total hipsters!”
“Are you a hipster?”
“Fuck no,” she says, laughing back the last of her glass before she hops off to the dance floor.
Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.
But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”
An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.
***
Take a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.
The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.
This obsession with “street-cred” reaches its apex of absurdity as hipsters have recently and wholeheartedly adopted the fixed-gear bike as the only acceptable form of transportation – only to have brakes installed on a piece of machinery that is defined by its lack thereof.
Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.
“These hipster zombies… are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents,” wrote Christian Lorentzen in a Time Out New York article entitled ‘Why the Hipster Must Die.’ “And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.”
With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of “hipsterdom” is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture. Most critics make a point of attacking the hipster’s lack of individuality, but it is this stubborn obfuscation that distinguishes them from their predecessors, while allowing hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements, sub-cultures and lifestyles.
***
Standing outside an art-party next to a neat row of locked-up fixed-gear bikes, I come across a couple girls who exemplify hipster homogeneity. I ask one of the girls if her being at an art party and wearing fake eyeglasses, leggings and a flannel shirt makes her a hipster.
“I’m not comfortable with that term,” she replies.
Her friend adds, with just a flicker of menace in her eyes, “Yeah, I don’t know, you shouldn’t use that word, it’s just…”
“Offensive?”
“No… it’s just, well… if you don’t know why then you just shouldn’t even use it.”
“Ok, so what are you girls doing tonight after this party?”
“Ummm… We’re going to the after-party.”
***
Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of Vice, who recently left the magazine, is considered to be one of hipsterdom’s primary architects. But, in contrast to the majority of concerned media-types, McInnes, whose “Dos and Don’ts” commentary defined the rules of hipster fashion for over a decade, is more critical of those doing the criticizing.
“I’ve always found that word [“hipster”] is used with such disdain, like it’s always used by chubby bloggers who aren’t getting laid anymore and are bored, and they’re just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable,” he says. “I’m dubious of these hypotheses because they always smell of an agenda.”
Punks wear their tattered threads and studded leather jackets with honor, priding themselves on their innovative and cheap methods of self-expression and rebellion. B-boys and b-girls announce themselves to anyone within earshot with baggy gear and boomboxes. But it is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it.
***
“He’s 17 and he lives for the scene!” a girl whispers in my ear as I sneak a photo of a young kid dancing up against a wall in a dimly lit corner of the after-party. He’s got a flipped-out, do-it-yourself haircut, skin-tight jeans, leather jacket, a vintage punk tee and some popping high tops.
“Shoot me,” he demands, walking up, cigarette in mouth, striking a pose and exhaling. He hits a few different angles with a firmly unimpressed expression and then gets a bit giddy when I show him the results.
“Rad, thanks,” he says, re-focusing on the music and submerging himself back into the sweaty funk of the crowd where he resumes a jittery head bobble with a little bit of a twitch.
The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks. While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states – be it the head-spinning b-boy or violent thrashings of a live punk show – the hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-committal fear of expression typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist. The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves into oblivion.
***
Perhaps the true motivation behind this deliberate nonchalance is an attempt to attract the attention of the ever-present party photographers, who swim through the crowd like neon sharks, flashing little blasts of phosphorescent ecstasy whenever they spot someone worth momentarily immortalizing.
Noticing a few flickers of light splash out from the club bathroom, I peep in only to find one such photographer taking part in an impromptu soft-core porno shoot. Two girls and a guy are taking off their clothes and striking poses for a set of grimy glamour shots. It’s all grins and smirks until another girl pokes her head inside and screeches, “You’re not some club kid in New York in the nineties. This shit is so hipster!” – which sparks a bit of a catfight, causing me to beat a hasty retreat.
In many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger’s snapshots no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night’s debauchery. Red-eyed and bleary, they sit hunched over their laptops, wading through a sea of similarity to find their own (momentarily) thrilling instant of perfected hipster-ness.
What they may or may not know is that “cool-hunters” will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.
Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.
An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over.
***
“If you don’t give a damn, we don’t give a fuck!” chants an emcee before his incitements are abruptly cut short when the power plug is pulled and the lights snapped on.
Dawn breaks and the last of the after-after-parties begin to spill into the streets. The hipsters are falling out, rubbing their eyes and scanning the surrounding landscape for the way back from which they came. Some hop on their fixed-gear bikes, some call for cabs, while a few of us hop a fence and cut through the industrial wasteland of a nearby condo development.
The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
Recent Issues
Culture Jammers Network
We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives who are working to change the way information flows and meaning is produced in our society.
Current Issue
User login
Web Feeds
Note: If the links don’t work, please copy the feed URLs and paste into your news readers such as Google Reader.
Comments
frist!!!
this is... so narcissistic and ignorant of real social and musical and political movements (although the author does briefly nod at sources for hipster trends)... what about genderfucking? what about all the new kinds of music and art that have continued to show up in house shows all over the country since the early 80s?
This article is fucking stupid. I agree that "hipsterdom", whatever the hell that is, something identified a long ass time ago and continuously referenced by corporate "alternative" media & culture, is disabling to social, political, and cultural revolution.
But come on, that isn't the only thing going on right now. and those people living that way are actually taking their cues from all sorts of legit movements, which are actually getting stronger.
I bet whoever wrote this article uses terms like "pomo" and is going through a (loudly) existential myspace crisis.
and needs to universalize [his] [white] crisis, because if he's feeling it the rest of the world must be, too.
Sorry to go on the attack like this but the way the author attempts to define what he attempts to define is profoundly violent and disabling to the very things he's supposedly bemoaning the destruction of.
TEAR IT DOWN. REVOLUTION REVOLUTUION REVOLUTION.
That was a cover story? Is there more in the magazine? I've been curious about this article since I saw in on the newsstand a few weeks ago but now that I've read it I'm a little disappointed. Mr. Haddow is on to something, Hipsters are not the end of the world but it does seem almost too appropriate that in an era of total media saturation, when when the divisions between real life, entertainment and commerce have almost completely dissolved, for all youth culture to be suddenly replaced with the insincere pageantry of hipsterism. It's not about what kind of bike you ride, or the cigarettes, or the glasses, it's the irony and and lack of sincerity that reduce everything to an aesthetic; to a world of surfaces.
you can't be serious?
If you look at the history of recent "hipster" movements and their relationship to materialism you can see how totally vacuous this current subculture is. In the late 80's the REM kids were rebelling against the materialism and warmongering of the Reagan era, and looked back to an idealized version of the 60's radicalism and social change movements for inspiration. In the 90's this rejection of materialism continued to some degree, as those of us in high school in the 80's went to college, lived through the lows and highs of the Clinton era and entered the workforce. Grunge, in some ways a rejection of materialism, ultimately became the beginning of the current end, with the mainstreaming of what had until then been considered "alternative" music. Still there were those who kept the faith, dressing in funky clothes of whatever they could get at the Village Thrift for less than a dollar.
Fast forward to the current scene. All "vintage" and most used clothing has been appropriated by "hipsters" and repurposed as boutique and designer, relabelled and remarketed. Since when is it a rejection of materialism to buy $30 t-shirts?
In the hipster movements of the 80's and 90's there was either an ideological purpose or economic necessity behind the music, the aesthetic and the fashion. What the fuck is the point of an ironic repurposing of past pop culture? How is this a critique of anything?
So many people act like that and have that kind of lifestyle. I enjoy wearing v-necks and riding bikes and drinking beer but that doesn't classify me under a label. It classifies me as a person, I do what I like to do. It's pretentious of you to think you can lead a revolution against people you disagree with for stupid and inane reasons. It's difficult to classify anyone by those kind of characteristics. There are people who are only interested in being indie and not being the norm but there are also people who think the same way but dont advertise it in the same way. It's the same symptoms but a different disease.
writing about how awful hipsters are, is maybe the most hipster thing ever.
You're wrong. Not only is this not of much importance, but the "hipster" is no real threat to anything. Genuine counterculture still exists, and, like the "hipster culture," always will. And I don't wear glasses.
This article is important because it adresses. Just because no one has an answer doesn't mean the question shouldn't be asked. To say this article is pointless and that the writer should focus on something important is just ignorant and probably said from behind unperscribed, black-rimmed glasses.
hipsters have been around forever... allen ginsburg, andy worhol to name a few... its not just something that has emerged in the last 10 years, every generation has had the equivilent of the v neck wearing pabst drinking hipster.... i think what the writter should really be concerned about is the lack of authentisity.... when someone is trying to achive a social reaction wich will boost how they feel about themselves, yet there method of doing so is based on superficiality and there only motivation is to be part of a group, this is seen as un-authentic... there is always something sickening about public ego masterbation and this often comes in the form of over-thought about outfits/costumes.... its the enfrachised wanting to feel unenfranchised... its the rich wanting to feel poor, its the unimaginative wanting to feel origional... its the fishyness in 'max fish'
"when someone is trying to achive a social reaction wich will boost how they feel about themselves, yet there method of doing so is based on superficiality and there only motivation is to be part of a group, this is seen as un-authentic..."
I----> and it tends to support fascism.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night..."
not exactly complementary, is it?
While reading this article, I almost thought you were on to something. While you pointed out many faults with today's culture you failed to offer a solution. That is the real problem, all people do is observe, interpret and recycle things past. There is no inspiration anymore. I don't have an answer, but if you had the time to write this this extensive article about our troubled culture, perhaps you can take it further by offer a fresh outlook of what being "cool" is.
Great job!! Go Deeper!!
bottom line, stop worrying about what other people are doing and make yourself a better person.
Article summary:
"hipsters suck."
why is any of this important?
agreed. why is this information on hipster important, if it is at all accurate?
Spoken like a true Hipster.
people thought I was crazy for hating on urban outfitters, and noticing how all the mannequins in the store looked like all the mannequins in the clubs, errr people.
It's absolutely ridiculous and I'm glad someone pointed it all out with such eloquence.
I actually bought my keffiah from Palestine, in solidarity of the kids throwing rocks against tanks, and getting their land stolen, and swear on my mother, two weeks later it became a trend and I had to store it away in order to not blend in with hipsters... it's such a struggle to have to keep implementing something you deem fun or important and meaningful and having it cheapened by modern consumerism.
I rebel against just that hipsters, and the cheapening of culture.
i know what you mean, the same thing for me, i wore it for palestine(my background)
and then everyone started wearing them and have no clue about it, they use it for the style and dont know what their representing. Not only the scarf but many other things have had the same result
I might also add that hip hop is less comparable to many other counter-cultural movements: punk, for example, represents white people responding to their own culture; hip hop develops out of Afro-American cultural tradition that is directly linked to African cultures in pre-slavery times, and so represents less of a dropping out of North American society as an escape from its gaping maw. Hip hop gave Afro-Americans and many other minority ethnic groups (particularly Carribean-American and Latino-American) a cultural context that was distinctly their own, in response to marginalization by the dominant Euro-American cultural milieu. Hip hop continued from the traditions of soul, funk, jazz, and blues, themselves continuing from earlier oral traditions. European/American hippie, rock, and punk movements co-opted elements of ethnic subculture in order to reject the culture native to them, making them countercultural. Hip hop can only be considered counter-cultural insofar as all Afro-American culture can be considered counter-cultural for not embracing and merging with the dominant Euro-American culture. To suggest hip hop is fundamentally counter-cultural thus seems to be somewhat paternalistic, since it presumes that hip hop arose in response to the dominant culture, whereas I believe, with Timothy Leary for one, that Afro-Americans had "dropped out" of the dominant culture long before hip hop ever emerged. Indeed, they were never allowed to tune into it.
I agree with several other posters that the "hipster" movement has, at its core, those people who are authentically counter-culture, for whom the style, music, and all other aesthetic accoutrements of the culture are irrelevant, for whom, fundamentally, "hipster-ness" represents a spiritual-political movement more than a material movement. But these people are rare. I think the current hipster movement has developed out of grunge and punk, via emo and pop music. But where punk and hip hop cultural types are marked, as the author notes, but the vivacity with which they embrace elements of the culture, and the pride with which they proclaim themselves, hipsters are nihilistic. Hip hop and punk, at their best, embrace and affirm life, politically rejecting society at large while creating a space for shameless self-expression. Hipster culture does not. Hipsters seem to consider it a virtue to be "skeptical" of everything, including their own culture and its practises. I laughed at his description of the dance party, because I know it's true. When I've been to hipster dance parties, I've been made to feel self-conscious because my dancing is too energetic, too enthusiastic. As I see it, hipsterdom embraces insecurity, low self-esteem, and faux-intellectualism. Hipsters want to question everything, simply because everything is questionable; they want to have shit to bitch about, so they make themselves out to be poor and hard-done by; and they don't want to stand out, so it becomes a virtue for no one to stand out. Overall, the hipster movement is nihilistic, thus defeatist, superficial, and empty. It says no to everything, including its own existence.
Insofar as bourgeois youth embraced the "street" elements of hip hop and punk, it was mostly insofar as they embraced the more down-to-earth spirituality of these movements, rejecting outright the values of the Western consumer culture in which they were raised. The attempt is to tear something down, or to drop out, to start over. There is no starting over with hipsters, they are simply tearing down and dropping out for the sake of tearing down and dropping out, then recycling their own vomit. When I see most hipsters (many of whom are university students ashamed to admit that they, themselves, are bourgeois, and using the term bourgeois as some sort of insult to make invalid anything anyone with any form of wealth says, including themselves), I can't help but be reminded of lyrics from the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia:"
Play ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin that you know
How the n*ggers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul.
100% agree.
One can sum up the ironic tragedy of the hipster "movement" in three consumption-driven words from American Apparel: "Organic Tall Tees"
To Ariel:
Revolution and commitment didnt end with the 60's. Punk, Hip-Hop.
Bloody Ridiculous. This article, with the use of modern hipster rhetoric, is telling a whole sub-culture of people that their uncertain stance in these uncertain times is a mark of the end of western civilisation, that they symbolise the defeated and utter pointlessness! The writer is simply saying what has been already said about every cultural movement in the history of man. All "cultures" and "sub-cultures" are simply recylced developements of past times.
There is such a strong stress on what we call originality in our western culture, but in the horrible truth, it is unbelievabley rare that someone even has the mental capacity to come up with something truely original. as Elliott said, we are the product of our past and we should not be ashamed of it! Past influence is inescapable, it's all we have to base our very selves on!
Don't be ashamed to be in our times, the writer is just doing his job, he probably doesn't even agree with what he says.
I agree with what the writer from Vice said.
Also, this sort of thing has been going on for awhile. Subcultures don't necessarily have to have a meaning behind them, and they don't have to be 'revolutionary' either. The 60s generation were revolutionary. The beat generation were revolutionary. Everything after that was just a faux rebellion of sorts, in my opinion. This isn't a new phenomenon, and it doesn't represent the end of Western civilization either (fatalistic much?). Leave the kids alone - they're just having fun. They'll grow up and this fad will end just like any other, and western culture will live on no matter what people like yourself say.
Nice work painting those club kids in the worst way possible btw. And you accuse them of being shallow?
the club kid ref. came from a hipster. Be made at her if you have to.
lol @ 'fatalistic much?"
Post new comment