The Indie Rock Fag: Better Than You?
Q: What did the hipster say when he walked into a bar?
A: Ugh, there are so many hipsters here!
Being a hipster is a lot like being really promiscuous. Just as you can fuck 15 guys in one weekend, but fend off criticism because your friend fucked 20, one of the central tenets of the casual hipster is that they are not, in fact, a hipster. The guy in the skintight CSS shirt is snide towards the guy in the corduroy cutoff shorts, who doesn’t notice because he’s laughing his ass off at the moron with the coke bottle glasses riding his fixie into heavy traffic .
So it takes courage to say this: I, Zack Rosen, am a hipster.
I would never use the term to describe myself, as I find it to be more of an epithet than a neutral descriptor, but if it walks like an American Apparel model, talks like an American Apparel model and dresses like an american apparel model, its probably a duck. Or something like that. I was too distracted reading Pitchfork to correctly finish that sentence.
I have enough self awareness to see what cultural trap I best fit into. Right now, I have my Mac laptop at a coffee shop. I’m a professional blogger with an ostentatious tattoo on my right arm. The tattoo has a deeply personal story behind it. I’m wearing white Rod Laver sneakers, skinny grey Chip N’ Pepper jeans I was pants-pissingly excited to find at Filenes, and an old aqua-marine Levys hoody I got at a thrift store. I’m listening to Twin Cinema on my headphones and would be really excited if the cute guy next to me in the black Cheap Mondays was too, because that means we’d probably have something in common. I’m that guy.
But isn’t everybody right now? What The Hippie was the the ’70s and Grunge was to the 90′s is the role that the Hipster fills in the twilight of the aughts: Its a term that serves as reduction for the way a great number of people dress, socialize and patronize the arts. It so encompasses the feel of the end of the century that its tenets will forever be a shorthand for the years 2005 – 2009. In twenty years, Vh1 will premiere “WAIT!: The Karen O Story” and an 8 year old girl will wear thigh high tube socks and a glittery leotard to go trick-or-treating.
Former TNG writer Stephanie often compares to Hipster-ism to Hip Hop. She elucidated why for me below:
Yeah, I think that hipster is a cultural thing: clothing, music, and social scenes. Like, yes, “hip-hop” is a genre of music, but it is also a cultural movement that evolved around music, dancing and street art.
Also like hip hop (but for white people) the hipsters habits have pervaded the formerly untainted reaches of what is cool, so much to the point that the inevitable backlash has begun in full force. Hipster trashing is, these days, as ubiquitous as the iPod. Its only a matter of time before Andy Rooney ends a 60 minutes segment by saying “Why do they make their pants so tight? Who are they trying to keep out of those things?” “Naked boys first, news second” blog Queerty published an article the other day called “Are Hipsters Stealing Gay Style? Or Something Else” that contains the following sentiment:
Hipsters are defined by a vapid, superficial purely external identity that could emanate from an Excel spreadsheet
This is true, but its true of every social group. Yet you dont see people lined up around the block to take such vitriolic pot shots at punk rockers, jocks or yuppies… at least, you don’t anymore. But the Queerty article itself was even written in response to a Time Out New York piece called “Why The Hipster Must Die.” And since I kinda, sorta am a hipster, I think its time to defend my own.
First we must understand what defines a hipster. More than anything, more than clothing style or music snobbery or general grime, the urban hipster can be traced by a clear specificity of taste. All the carefully chosen t-shirts and obscure tunes just point to someone that has an extremely well-developed taste in something that interests them. It may seem ridiculous to know the difference between vintage LaCoste and LeTigre where there are fine wines to be tasted and cuban cigars to be smoked. How frivolous to be educated in what seperates Swan Lake from Sunset Rubdown when there are whole worlds of Beethoven and Rachmoninoff to be explored!
But that’s the crux of hipster-hating: There is a painstakingly compiled fetishization of culture, of things that define us as a people as much as any art museum or political happening, no matter how superficial or inconsequential or of-the moment they might be. And that is read by the world at large as inferred superiority. Behind every rayban people see a sneer, an implied statement of “I am better than you. You are nothing but a square.”
Those who think this dont fully understand the roots of the thing they deride. What is a hipster, truly? A hipster is a grown up dork who has found a network of people just like him. However, some accident of fate or cosmology has brougth that network into the vogue. The same conditions that made Liz Lemon a national sex symbol, or David Foster Wallace a martyr, has given the dork their day in the sun.
It’s not as if they have an easy pass either. That dork will still get called a fag if he walks into a sports bar in knee high socks and thigh-length jean shorts. His Grandfather still bugs him to trim that disgusting mustache, same one he’s had since he was 14. Like a small-town gay boy who adult flamboyance acts as retroactive armor, all the pain of an outsider’s childhood on the outside has been turned into plumage. Grimy, snobby, contrived plumage, but it gleams nonetheless.
A lot of hipsters can easily cross the line into ridiculous, but who doesn’t? In another three years the whole trend will be dead and we’ll find some other social arcehtype to make king, then whipping boy.
In the meantime, lay off the hipster. They only bite when cornered, and are usually content to be left alone.
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Bravo!!! I was thinking of writing up a defense of the hipster too, but mine was going to be more of an attack on the anti-hipster. This is much better. I don’t understand anti-hipsterism. Why is my thrift store t-shirt threatening to you? Why do the glasses I wear irritate you so? Why do you care what music I enjoy? I think anti-hipster sentiment says a lot more about the person trashing hipsters than it does about hipsters themselves.
It’s also just thoughtless. The articles you cite are not even the half of it. It’s as if people who fancy themselves cultural critics find themselves searching for a topic for their next article and realize that they haven’t regurgitated the same old tropes against the so-called “hipster” yet, so they shit out their 1000 words railing against hipsters and call it a day’s work. I have yet to see a definition of the word. People should at least define what they criticize.
Thanks, Zack. I am also a hipster, if for no other reason, than as a big middle finger to the anti-hipsters. They need to get over themselves.
let it be known, it is very important the difference between swan lake and sunset rubdown.
people think i am a hipster for many reasons:
white ray-bans, check
obscure taste in music, check
obscure taste in movies, check
skinny jeans, no way in hell, pfft that shits over
but i could care less what label i get called. the things i like i like not to be cool or to fit into a social group (otherwise i’d be in love w/ sufie: http://www.sufjanbeat.com/sb-1.jpg by now)
now lets leave all the hipster love/hate behind us and curl up to some hipster runoff (hipsterrunoff.com)
http://www.sufjanbeat.com/sb-2.jpg
http://www.sufjanbeat.com/
The first step is admitting you are a hipster, so kudos, Zack!
I’ve only been able to achieve a vaguely hipster aesthetic, with completely the wrong tattoo to boot, and given the unidirectional nature of time, I will probably never achieve the full hipsterism I aspire to before being rendered totally inutile in the eyes of both the hip and the gay.
Still, you’ve given me hope. Maybe I can run some tattoo designs by you sometime?
I have a lot of friends who are hipsters and I don’t discriminate, but I still think this site is hilarious…
I think part of the problem is that the term “hipster” first came into play at the same time as the word “emo.” For a while, these terms were misused and I think some of the attributes of “emo” (young, angsty, a little irritated) are still associated with “hipster,” usually incorrectly.
Like some of the more charged labels, the term “hipster” is one perhaps more frequently used by folks outside of the group itself, as a means to describe “them.” I have a lot of hipster traits, apparently, but wouldn’t necessarily use the label to describe myself. It’s not that I have any issue with it and, really, if I had to fall into some sort of social grouping, hipster might be closest to what feels right. It’s just that I don’t think I’m hipster enough to start calling myself that. And the one label that nearly anyone can spot and no one wants is “poser.”
All of this just points out how silly it is to get wound up about what other folks are doing. Hipster? Jock? Yuppie? Punk? Non-descript-perfectly-fine-everyday-person? Cool. Live, let live and settle down.
Cool post Zack, thanks!
Do you know Zack Rosen is a crazed rapist criminal on “One Life to Live”?
What is a hipster if not a flapper or something?
my fave: http://hipsterorgay.tumblr.com/
Ad busters did a really fascinating piece about hipster culture last July and how it defines its status as a counterculture on narcissism and apathy, rather than the merely aesthetic guidelines that you set out here. Personally, I love hipster stylings and tend to prefer “alternative” bars, clubs, music they play there and people they attract, but I think that there is a certain political attitude associated with the hipster that goes along with the pejorative connotation that you don’t discuss much here.
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
i think people should be into whatever they like and stop trying build an exclusionary sense of identity around it (hipsters, anti-hipsters, etc.). a defining characteristic of DC (and honestly most u.s. cities) is the need to perform your community identity all the time (yuppies in georgetown; frat kids in adams morgan; hipsters in shaw — but no overlap!). it makes for atomized cities that are boring and predictable. if someone opened a “hipster” bar in georgetown, that would be interesting.
I like your take on hipsters just being grown up dorks who found a crowd. I’d never thought of that, and it’s kind of sweet.
The bad thing about hipsters is that their presence usually signals the total disruption of a neighborhood, gentrification, etc. For the most part, I don’t think they really care about their complicity in that phenomenon.
As far as the fashion, they look just like all my friends in art school in the early 80s, right down to the Raybans, corduroys, and keffiyehs. Back then our cheap working class beer of choice was Rolling Rock, now it’s PBR or whatever.
“In another three years the whole trend will be dead and we’ll find some other social arcehtype to make king, then whipping boy.”
Zach, I liked this post and agree with your overall analysis (all people are just networks of dorks) but, while I could be wrong, I’m not buying the three year lifespan. The current idea of “Hipster” has been around for nearly 40 years…and our culture thrives on the sustained marketability of identity.
I don’t believe “Hipsterism” is a consumer movement for how a “great number of people dress, socialize and patronize the arts”, and I do not buy Stephanie’s analysis that Hipsterism is a “cultural movement that evolved around music, dancing and street art.” This seems formulaic and received, as you rightly put it: a “reduction”.
While “Hipsterism” actually started in the 1940s, today’s idea of “Hipster” began in late 80s – early 90s Williamsburg Brooklyn as a real estate movement. Poor New Yorkers who could not afford Manhattan rents were forced to move to Brooklyn, at that time dreaded and feared as irrelevant and uncool. Prior to that coagulation the Hipster was not labeled as such and roamed freely through the canyons of lower Manhattan living in forbidden, crime ridden Soho (in the early to mid 70s) and forbidden, crime ridden Tribeca (from the late 70s to mid 80s).
Everything after that, everything post 1990 is pure rampant capitalist consumerism and the Commodification of Identity, i.e. the American national pastime. It is at precisely this moment the “snobbery” and “carefully chosen t-shirts”. American Apparel et al are amusing and embarrassing to those first Manhattan refugees, the Hipster archtypes now old and therefore irrelevant.
Williamsburg is now Disneyland and looks today like Soho of the late 80s: all boutiques and bars that the original homesteading hipsters would not recognize or be able to afford. Ever hear of Northside Piers or No. Twenty Bayard? Three words: real estate development. Back in the 80s I used to say Soho is the new attraction in the theme park of Manhattan, then it was Tribeca. Now it is Williamsburg and soon to be Greenpoint or Red Hook all doomed to the encroaching “Soho Effect”.
Hipsterism was nothing more than poor dorks trying to live cheaply, make art or do whatever it was they did unironically. Hip hop? Try punk rock or new wave at The Mudd Club in 1978. Back then making art was what they actually did (Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat). They didn’t spend their time shopping for the perfect t-shirt to make them look like artists.
“Hipster” today, by virtue of the term even existing, is a constructed pose: fashion choices, media accessories and an affected indifference. Ironically Hipster archetypes of the 70s were the reverse: passionate and focused. Today most “Hipsters” are just college educated middle-class kids working in law firms, ad agencies, non-profits or media companies. Angry at their parents and seething with contempt for those uncool enough to wear the correct t-shirts and sneakers. Trying to assuage their lack of intelligence or talent with the correct hip hop reference, laptop and mobile phone. Real estate choices for Hipsters today are less predestination than youthful affectation. Hence your “twilight for the aughts”.
So ultimately while I agree with your overall analysis of people (dorks coagulating) your analysis of Hipsterism seems untethered to any context or historical antecedent. Then again…isn’t that exactly the point of the Commodification of Identity? Life really is just a search for perfect jeans and sneakers anyway.
Pass the tampanade and turn up the iPod. Fade out.
See, this is what I don’t understand.
Ben64 says:
“Today most “Hipsters” are just college educated middle-class kids working in law firms, ad agencies, non-profits or media companies. Angry at their parents and seething with contempt for those uncool enough to wear the correct t-shirts and sneakers.”
James refers to what I think is a pretty sloppy piece on hipsters and summarizes hipsterism as:
“a counterculture on narcissism and apathy”
I don’t understand how people find it justifiable to generalize that anyone who wears certain clothes is “seething with contempt” or narcissistic and apathetic. I have been called a “hipster.” I have friends who look like “hipsters.” Whenever I read anything about so-called “hipsters” it usually ends up being a bunch of unsubstantiated speculation about the motives and thoughts of people based on nothing more than their style of dress. There is no united hipster politics, nor are hipsters all contemptuous, apathetic, narcissistic, shallow and pretentious.
How about this instead: I am individual. Other people are individuals. Some of them are narcissists. Some of them are angry at their parents for whatever reason. One cannot surmise on the basis of my $2 thrift store t-shirt that I am any of these things.
Again, if anything, the more interesting phenomenon here is what makes people get so worked up over the sins of the hipster. Why the fixation with hipsters? What is it that’s going on inside of you that makes the hipster so irritating and deserving of your contempt? The contempt here seems to be directed AT hipsters , not FROM hipsters to others. The supposed contempt of the hipster seems to me to be almost entirely imagined.
Wow, I have no issues with hipsters except that I’d love to just give so many that I see a kiss. I live in portland, land of hipsterdom. Anyway, it is true that it is easy to reduce them to a group of people who really don’t care about anything except the latest style, but I am choosing not to go down that path, because it is a lot of emotional energy to get all bent outta shape about hipsters. People might call me a hipster if they looked at me, but I don’t care, and when cute guys with fixed gears look at my gears on my bike I want to say- hey, like my bike? wanna go on a date?
I figure that really it all comes down to that people want to get paid and they want to get laid, and some are cool and care about the world and some people suck and only care about themselves. Hipsterdom is a fashion based off of a real history and I’m sure a lot of the meaning has been lost, but you can’t blame those people who are clueless. I mean, kids in small town kansas look like hipsters now.
anyway, I would enjoy helping a nice handsome hipster boy out of his tight pants or knee high socks sometime soon.
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