On 1/23/2011 1:45 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> http://nymag.com/nymetro/urban/features/10488/index2.html
>
> See also Rob Horning's piece, Death of the Hipster, in which he writes:
>
> "As Greif mentioned in his talk, hipsters function as a "poison"
> conduit between the marketing machine and the street."
> http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/the-death-of-the-hipster-panel/
Thanks for these links. I lived among the hipster from the beginning, and I find all these essays confusing, like they're making something simple seem complicated. To me, the hipster never seemed like a new phenomenon or specific to any particular era -- until people seized on the word and reified the concept. When the term became a nationwide household word and NPR and Salon started churning out endless pieces on "the hipster," I found it confusing. I felt like an editor being pitched an article on how, like, have you noticed people wear baseball caps or how popular bumper stickers are? I want to ask: what exactly is the news peg here?
When I was a child, and I had an older sister, there was something called "college music," a.k.a "modern rock." "Indie rock" is just the same thing with a different name, no? And there were "scenes" where people would listen to "college rock," often in and around college towns. In these places, people would talk about a "slacker lifestyle" of young, marginally employed people who felt vague stirrings of rebellion and angst while listening to "college rock." They even made movies about these scenes, like Slacker (1991) and Reality Bites (1994). When I found myself among hipsters in New York in the late nineties and oughts, I just assumed that that scene was a continuation of the earlier scene -- that it simply consisted of the same social-type, but in new surroundings, with a few details of decoration and historical setting changed. I never thought that some brand new phenomenon had emerged until I was told so by the internet.
My assumption is this: That this social-type is specific to roughly the post-1980 period. It's defined by two contradictory conditions: (1) a feeling of alienation from the "mainstream," which is understandable, and exists among a certain educated segment of society in every generation; and (2) a frustration stemming (whether consciously or not) from the absence of real oppositional social movements around which the alienated can cluster. Without real oppositional movements, the rest of society has no need to take any serious notice of the alienated -- i.e., to take them seriously, either in a positive or negative way -- hence the feeling of frustration and pointlessness, causing anxiety and self-doubt about the sort of life they, the alienated, are living. Hence the infinite loop of self-hatred and cathartic analysis among "hipsters" and those who analyze them.
If you choose to look at this social type from a sympathetic historical point of view, there's no need to denounce hipsters or to assume that they're the symptom of some recent derangement in American society (though specific hipster fads might be). It's understandable to feel alienated from the mainstream of American culture. It's also understandable that this alienation will come at a psychic cost if it can find no purchase in a real concrete rebellion vis-a-vis the mainstream. Hipsterism may be a reason for sadness but not denunciation.
SA