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political. On a global scale, hipsters seem to have emerged out of the Reagan-Thatcher years in those countries that earlier witnessed the cultural shift known in Western Europe as “’68” and in the US more broadly as “the sixties.” (To some extent, the origins of the new form of opposition can be found in the sixties themselves, from French situationism to Abbie Hoffman’s advocacy of ‘revolution for the hell of it’, but the prevailing ideals of that era remained serious ones.) The complete account of hipsterism’s emergence out of the ruins of 1960s utopianism is beyond our scope here, yet the genealogical link is clear: where sex, drugs, and rock and roll were not a principal cause of historical change, where instead the youth were contending with wars, dictatorships, and real --government- imposed-- cultural revolution, today there is little or no hipsterism. Today you will see stencils of Mr. T (or whomever; you get the idea) spray-painted on the walls of London and Amsterdam, but not Bucharest.
For hipsters, prevailing ideas and values are not necessarily oppressive, just stupid; not necessarily worthy of anger, just ridicule. (They generally focus on cultural output from the recent past, for reasons we have yet to consider.) Thus for example hipsterism encourages its adherents to propose, in writing, on their t-shirts, to sell moustache rides for five cents, not because they intend to give anyone a moustache ride, and not even because the apposition of ‘moustache’ and ‘ride’ is seen as a source of humor. What is humorous is that in some imagined Country Comfort Lounge in Amarillo or Cheyenne a generation ago some big slab of a man actually sported a moustache of which he was proud, which he believed could function directly and un-ironically as a sexual attractant.
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