We all know the routine: you smirk condescendingly at the
arty young adult with the glasses and the tattoos, or assume that everything he
or she does is “ironic”—scare quotes included. You roll your eyes. You scoff.
You make some sort of generalization on the way to your sweet new condo in
Williamsburg: “We’re not walking fast enough for the hipsters.”
I laugh to
think I might be the first to point out to you that if it wasn’t for hipsters,
your snazzy $2.2 million condo wouldn’t exist in the first place. Who are you,
dear reader, to talk shit on an entire subculture that you can’t even clearly
identify or define while you yourself have been swayed to wear tight,
high-waisted pants, oversized beanies, or large-framed glasses? Are you going
to just subsume the elements of their culture that mainstream America okayed
and then slander them to death for, say, growing their armpit hair, being
vegan, or gentrifying the very next neighborhood you’re going to move into?
I happen to
think the general hate of hipsters indicates something much, much bigger. I
don’t believe any subculture has been so antagonized since the first punk
rockers—who, as it turns out, were doing something truly important, destroying
and laying foundations for new subcultures to exist, that everyone might find a
place to belong. Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols were famously booed off talk
shows, spat on, and even exiled from England. Sure, they were “obnoxious” in
their outright rejection of societal norms. Punks were unhygienic to an extreme
that put hippies to shame, spitting in people’s faces and giving them pink eye
(as happened to Siouxsie Sioux and Adam Ant). They glorified the Id, punching
and pushing each other in mosh pits in clothing indicative of their subversive sexual
preferences. They had outlandish haircuts and wild, self-aware make up that
completely defied what the contemporary standards demanded: bad hygiene equals
bad manners. Try and fit in. Comb your hair. Sit like a lady. Punk rock
deliberately and loudly defied all that, giving room for those othered by society to other society in return—that is, a
community for freaks to belong to cemented by a common abstract enemy: the
status quo.
Hipsters are a breath of fresh air
after the stagnant remnants of seventies through nineties subcultures. We all
know punk is dead: it’s no longer rebellious, no longer menacing, and thus no
longer culturally relevant. Goth is dead too, as it always wanted to be—trapped
in a feedback loop of masochism, narcissism, elitism, and nostalgia. Rave
culture is said to be making a comeback, but I maintain that “rave” is just
another dirty four-letter word, a euphemism for a vapid and obnoxious trend
with no manifesto but PLUR. The acronym has become a symbol for sketchy pills
that dissolve identities and make everyone act identically trashy; stupid
bracelets with rave pseudonyms spelled on them called kandy; parties with music
so bad you’d have to be loaded to enjoy them. Rave culture never should have
existed in the first place. In fact, remember the nineties all together?
Remember Clueless and Britney Spears? The important musicians killed themselves
or sold out, or just lost steam entirely. After the militant social pressure to
straighten your hair, wear contacts, and have your ass crack show every time
you bent over, the stark contrast of the hipster aesthetic—an acquired taste
for me at first—stands for personal liberation.
Hipster
culture allows anyone to rock an unconventional aesthetic. For the first time,
boys make passes at girls who wear glasses in the mainstream. Hipsters never
sought mainstream attention to my knowledge—they gained it just by being so
outlandish in their “no rules” aesthetic. Hipsters pioneered the nerd
revolution. They made it okay to be who you are, or to be who you aren’t if
you’re riding that wave with any self-awareness. Anything can be cool if you
both mean it sincerely and don’t take yourself too seriously.
Hipsters really began back in the
forties, when white middle-class youths sought to emulate the black jazz
musicians they so adored, but lost cultural relevance until about a decade ago.
What’s so important about this subculture is that it has no agreed-upon
definition. What is a “hipster”? Technically, when the term was first coined in
the early nineteen hundreds, “hip” meant “in the know”, and the suffix “-ster”,
like in “spinster” or “youngster,” was added to it to describe a person who
fits in with the root adjective. So “hipster” means someone who is in the know.
But what about now? What does “hipster” mean to you, today? Is it an aesthetic
that you can compromise by disdain for people who transgress the boundaries of
what is socially acceptable more than you do? Is it a novel attitude? Is there
a manifesto? I live in Brooklyn, and even I don’t really know what a “hipster”
truly is. I know one when I see one, but I couldn’t possibly define one. That, my friends, is what I believe you
find so annoying. It is a culture so free, so ambiguous, you can’t even put
your finger on it. Anything goes. That is also why I know what the hipsters are
doing is important. It’s such a dynamic subculture that I don’t foresee its
stagnation so much as its transformation, just as it has been doing for the
past several years. It has even revitalized dead subcultures heretofore
mentioned and even spat upon, such as goth and *gulp* rave culture—though,
thank my pagan deities, with irony, nostalgia, and beats at 1/3 of the speed.
In fact, the sea punk idea of raves is refreshingly idealistic. It bears
mercifully little resemblance to the horrible “Happy Hardcore” of my youth.
In my opinion, hipsters seem not so
much to know what’s hip as to create what’s hip. Therein lies their
power, which you find so mysterious that you hate them for it. This puts them
literally at the avant-garde. Your repulsion means they’re doing it right.
So, to conclude, whatever hipsters
are, they’re revitalizing our culture merely by making us question ourselves.
They maintain dynamics in their ineffability. Perhaps this is because “hipster”
refers to more of an attitude than an aesthetic with a rigid manifesto, but
even then it vacillates wildly between ironic apathy and political dedication
(veganism, body hair, et cetera). They encourage paradox and a healthy degree
of hypocrisy. Hipsters are keeping American culture fresh—even you have adapted
some of their aesthetics, albeit at least half a decade later. Really this
reflects poorly on you, and not on those scapegoats bravely and haphazardly
carving the way for us at the forefront of the battlefield of cultural
development. Considering non-hipsters co-opt the hipster aesthetic, move to
neighborhoods gentrified and made safe and desirable by hipsters, and throw the
term “hipster” at arty people with the same calculated abandon that
scaremongers threw “Communist” at actors, activists, and transgressors not so
long ago, you look damn stupid when you hate on hipsters. Damn stupid, and damn
closed-minded.