To me most hipsters seem to be rich, white, privileged kids who have nothing better to do than to dress like idiots and make pretentious poses all day. Since they have gallons upon gallons of privilege running in their blood system they also don't care about anything that goes on outside of their own little partying, fashionable world. I've seen these loathsome creatures in many cities and towns, and they're all the same.
Some damning excerpts from an adbusters article:
...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.
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.
Hena,
ReplyDeleteA blog post about hipsters... seriously? You have way too much time on your hands.
While I agree (in some cases) with your assumption that most hipsters are white and privileged, I would like to ask what you mean by "rich" and "gallons of privilege running in their blood system." Unless we're talking about those mythical hipsters without jobs who lounge around all day and expect their parents to pay for their Williamsburg lofts, most hipsters I know are simply (and I use that term loosely) middle class. And there are plenty of poor hipsters, too, which is great considering that you can look amazing by spending only a little money at the thrift store.
After thinking about this post, I've come to the conclusion that it might be more fitting to say that you cringe when you see scenesters. There is a difference, in case you didn't know, and all of that shit about consumerism and style and whatnot definitely describes scenesters. You should check out the description of a scenester on urbandictionary.com and then tell your friends over at Adbusters.
All that shit about hipsters lacking any cultural loyalty is just stupid. Cultural loyalty is key! Without cultural loyalty, how could hipsters have such great taste in music and literature (you have to have loyalty in order to gain the esoteric knowledge necessary to call yourself a fan)?! Your complaint should be that hipsters are obnoxious and pretentious because of their undying loyalty to relatively trivial aspects of culture. Hipsters don't look down on bands, sounds or styles simply because they're overexposed; rather, it's a result of the way those bands, sounds, and styles are treated by overexposure to commoners who have no choice but to follow their uniformly human rituals by destroying anything and everything worth something. It is important to note that overexposure changes things, just as overexposure to the sun changes your body into a series of potentially lethal tumors called cancer. Overexposure turns the original band, sound, and style into a cancerous experience. You see, commoners are the real consumers. They consume and appropriate anything they can get their dirty hands on and they destroy it. Can you blame hipsters for dedicating the time and effort to learning about a band and loving a band and truly understanding a band, only to have some fat girl in a short dress with highlighted hair and a tongue ring try to sing along? NO, YOU CAN'T BLAME THEM. Until common society stops being common, and it never will, there will always be elitists who have to fight for the right to be respected for their esoteric knowledge and understanding.
However, calling "hipsterdom" a counterculture gives hipsters too much credit. It's not about a culture. It's about understanding and celebrating the self and pushing the self to the utmost limits in order to reach a higher level of being. Elitist? Of course; necessarily so. There is no alternative to the cool, and the cool lives on in the soul of every hep cat out there surrounded by charlatans. It's not the fault of hipsters that they were born with the cool; it's the fault of those who weren't born with the cool getting jealous because they were born lame and now they're jealous and want to write about shit they know nothing about and put all these labels on people that they should put on themselves. And don't even try to say that hipsters label people too, because that's not true. Hipsters don't give a fuck about other people. Perhaps "hipsterdom" is the last great humanist movement, or the first under the age of consumerism. Who cares? Sooner or later, all you charlatans will have to realize that you are going to lose this war. You will never have the power, so just go eat some twizzlers and play guitar hero and listen to top-40 radio and wear wrangler jeans. GIVE UP. There are way more important things that you should be blogging about, like hot chocolate or Bob Dylan or Chelsea boots.
*I am not a hipster. I simply know a lot of hipsters and live in an area where a lot of hipsters congregate. And I have yet to meet one without great taste in music, which trumps every other attribute one could possible have. I am nothing; I don't even exist. I am a humanist.
Hmm I know exactly who wrote this :)
ReplyDeleteDon't worry I won't mention your name, haha.
I still don't agree with the whole commoner thing. The fact that everyone who's not a hipster is labelled as a commonor asserts the point the article makes about hipsters/scenesters thinking they're above everyone else, because for some reason they're sooo different, when really, in my opinion, they're all alike.
Don't worry I don't think of you as a hipster because you actually do care about the world and are trying to change things in it, unlike say, the dozens of hipsters I have encountered in various places who don't even know the real meaning behind wearing a keffiyah.