There's a thread about this from the convo here, but I wanted to delve into the subject a little bit more seriously.
I've been thinking a lot recently about hipsters.
Being an art student in Brooklyn, I see a lot of them. Every day. They're all around me.
And sometimes I feel as if I'm being drawn into their midsts. In many ways much of the music I listen to, many of the films I watch and the books I read, could be called "hipster." I take pleasure in "ironically" watching shitty television or movies. I play Super Nintendo. I find myself being drawn to marginal and fringe subjects and interests. I go to art school. I'm white. Upper-middle class. I live in Brooklyn. Originally from the suburbs. And I survive mostly off my parents' money.
But I can't be a hipster! I hate hipsters! But then of course there's the old joke of the hipster walking into a bar. "Let's get out of here," he says to his date, "this place is full of hipsters."
Denial is one of the stages before acceptance, right?
But just what is a hipster?
Let's look at what we know...
The cultural connotation of the word seems to be not so different from that of a "fashionista": someone who prizes the aesthetic above all else; Who prides themselves on their "cool" factor, to the detriment of actual emotion or sentiment.
More specifically, the term is closely tied to camp, kitsch, and the postmodern idea of irony. Hence, hipsters are seen sporting "Virginia is for Lovers" t-shirts, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, and listening to The Wu-Tang Clan.
I'm fairly sure this is primarily an American phenomenon, although I'm sure it's by now spread to all corners of the globe (Nathan Barley depicts somewhat of a mutant breed of the American variety).
The word first sprang up in the 40s to describe (typically white) jazz aficionados, members of the Beat generation. The definitive text on the 1940s hipster is Norman Mailer's The White Negro, which describes that group as being young Caucasian men "with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm."
The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary of Jive gives a more in-depth, sympathetic description:
"To the hipster, Bird was a living justification of their philosophy. The hipster is an underground man. He is to the Second World War what the dadaist was to the first. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and overcivilized to the point of decadence. He is always ten steps ahead of the game because of his awareness, and example of which might be meeting a girl and rejecting her, because he knows they will date, hold hands, kiss, neck, pet, fornicate, perhaps marry, divorce-so why start the whole thing? He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions-so what values are left for him?-except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that, "be cool," and look for kicks. He is looking for something that transcends all this bullshit and finds it in jazz."
But finding definitions of this newer breed becomes a bit tougher. The closest we can do is humorous definitions like The Hipster Handbook which gives the following: "One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term "cool": a Hipster would instead say "deck.") The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2% body fat."
How closely related is the 1940s hipster to the 1990s/2000s hipster?
Well one thing that ties the two together is their relationship to race and class.
The defining characteristic of Mailer's hipster was his appropriation of black culture. They adopted black clothing styles, slang, and listened to black music. Chicago jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow went so far as to call himself a "voluntary negro."
As I see it, today's hipster appropriates less specifically from black culture as he does from lower class culture in general. Not only is gangsta rap cool, so are aviator sunglasses, wolf shirts, atari, and caterpillar mustaches. Hipsters typically live in poor, urban, soon to be gentrified areas.
But we're still left without a clear cut definition.
Am I a hipster?
Are you?
How does one know?
What say you? |
