Is being a hipster really so bad?

The hipster: having wafted around the edges of society for the past decade, feeding off the lack of interest in mainstream offerings as the youth have sought alternatives to, well, everything, the movement is increasingly growing stronger. 2010 might well be its peak year, if the sheer amount of anti-hipster sentiment building is anything to go by.

But you’re kidding yourself if you think it’s still an underground movement. Hipsterism has successfully infiltrated society and is here to stay. Hating hipsters is convenient, an easy way to sweepingly dismiss a cross-generational lifestyle. Hipster hatred is the key sign that hipsters are entrenched.

The last seven or eight decades have been quite clearly marked by their own counter-cultural movements challenging the norm and shaking up the scene. As Douglas Haddow wrote in his seminal Adbusters critique of hipsters two and a half years ago, “after punk was plasticised and hip-hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of ‘counter-culture’ have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes, and behaviour has come to identify the generally indefinable idea of the ‘hipster’.”

Robert Burton-Bradley of The Punch incensed hipsters anew a few weeks ago, a long time after Haddow’s masterful skewering, when he wrote that “the hipster sees nothing ridiculous in appropriating the style elements of other underground cultures, completely ignoring their actual meaning and then prancing around in the newly-adopted pastiche of identities.”

“Irony” is the hallmark of the hipster. Pastiche, too. Deeming something unoriginal as “ironic” gives hipsters free reign to recycle what was once authentic and deliver it to the modern day in a cheaper, shinier form. That key hipster demographic of 18 to 34-year-olds “have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the post-war era,” scoffed Christian Lorentzen back in 2007 – so retro! “Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.”

Hipster as vampire: fitting indeed. And speaking of soul-sucking, Burton-Bradley’s article might have descended into a cheap dismissal of the entire culture with little to no analysis of who, how, or why the movement has gained such momentum, but he did have a point. Hipsters in 2010 represent the societal ennui and confusion of the times we live in. After all, having experienced the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the excesses of the eighties, and the genocide decade of the nineties, the world finds itself growing swollen on greed, with the GFC imploding economies, demand for oil sparking bloody endless numbing wars, rising youth unemployment, environmental crisis, and the increasingly loud dissatisfied musing emanating from the youth: what’s it all for?

Hipsters. Huh. Image: www.bite.ca

We’ve accelerated to the point where people are looking to the past more than ever before, rejoicing in the retro, yearning for days gone by that look so very inviting from where we stand. While Haddow’s claim that the hipster represents the end of Western civilisation may be a tad exaggerated, he’s not wrong when he says that the subculture “mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.” Since the mid-1990s, we’ve been flailing around in the mirror of the past, endlessly recycling the fashions of times gone, uninspired and unable to create anything truly new.

Mark Greif’s sociological analysis of hipsterism looks at taste as an extension of social class, breaking down the movement into different socio-economic standards:

“The things you prefer — tastes that you like to think of as personal, unique, justified only by sensibility — correspond tightly to defining measures of social class: your profession, your highest degree and your father’s profession. … Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.”

And this, perhaps, is the crux of the hipster hatred that writers like Burton-Bradley have been espousing. The one-upmanship, the better than thou attitudes and the derision of anything that doesn’t fit within a vaguely-defined boundary of what constitutes cool is exactly what has been provoking the backlash.

There is nothing inherently wrong with reading books, seeking out little-known music or experimenting with fashion. In fact, we should be applauding the way that those that fall under the hipster umbrella seek out alternatives to what the mainstream is offering in their quest to find meaning. Reality TV and mindless consumption at the expense of the planet is no longer good enough. Why not look for organic alternatives, ride a bike instead of driving, support emerging artists and wear vintage rather than new clothes? These things, in and of themselves, are worthy. Dismissing those who act and believe differently isn’t. The elitism and unpleasantness of an entire subculture of the media-savvy, well-educated and techno-literate appropriating the symbols of the marginalised and laughing at them isn’t really kosher.

The hipster: is the whole movement just one big caricature? Image:

But neither is Burton-Bradley’s all-too-neat summing up of the hipster identity as revolving around three things: “fashion sense, music taste, and working in selected glamour industries like the arts, creative media or perhaps something involving activism.” It’s lazy, and diminishes those industries. As Pedestrian retorted, “The Punch’s definition of a hipster is so nebulous, it could be anyone who is creative, social and young.”

Here’s hoping that the backlash forces hipsters into some kind of coherence. Here’s hoping that the next dominant sub-culture finds a concrete point of rebellion. Where’s the passion of previous decades? Where’s the righteous anger? Has our youth really become so fatigued by hypocrisy and lies that we just consume the ‘cool’ of the past on an endless loop without adding anything to it?

Probably. The one point that all those critics of hipsterism unite upon is this: if humanity is to continue to flourish, the hipster must die. “The pursuit of conceited nothingness” won’t lead us anywhere good. But what will take its place?

This piece was republished in Issue 2 of LUNA Magazine.

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