What the heck is being a hipster about? I see the skinny jeans and the russian bear hats and the talk about the underground bands, but I don’t see what they’re ABOUT. Punk was about non-conformity, about ground-up creativity, about thinking outside the dominant paradigm, about, you know, stuff.
Hipsterism (as exemplified by my neighborhood, San Francisco’s Mission District) seems to be a somewhat aesthetically oriented group of would-be artists who like to talk about poetry and life, but don’t have any obvious creed or anything. They also seem to be obsessed with exclusivity and the Inherent Value of the Obscure. The more underground your tastes, the cooler.
I like video games and speed metal, SF books and parkour, Eddie Izzard and Bill Hicks. I don’t understand the need to wear certain clothes to proclaim my allegiance or my interesting tastes. I also like to be accepted, don’t need to stand out or be noticed for my taste or whatever. I’d make a terrible hipster. But I’m still not sure WHY. What the hell are hipsters about?
Much like any social motif, it is about conforming and belonging while giving the impression to those outside of your targeted community that you refuse to conform (see also: goths, slackers, punks).
Like every other subculture, they’re a social conformity based on the unwillingness to conform.
And they drink shitty beer like Pabst Blue Ribbon. If you ever get to a party and that’s what they’re serving, you’ve probably unknowingly stumbled into hipsters. There’s probably also 80s music playing and tons of cigarette smoke in the air, so you really need to get the fuck out of there.
This is a song about something there
there is something about this song
we did the clubs what ass
i was hoping to have her in the sack
i was looking handsome
she was looking like an erotic vulture
i was all dressed in black
she was all dressed up in black
every thing was fine down here
what you call it here
call it what you will here
way down down down in this subbacultcha
her warm white belly in the life i’d lived had seen nothing
finer she shakes and she moves me or something
she’s like jellyroll like sculpture
i was wearing eyeliner
she was wearing eyeliner
it was so good down here
saving for my scrapbook here
way down down down in this subbacultcha
now we live on the sea and relax and ride the tack
drug running on this panamanian schooner
she walks the deck in a black dress
and me i dress up in black
and we listen to the sea
and look at the sky in a poetic kind of way
what you call it
when you look at the sky in a poetic kind of way
you know when you grope for luna.
Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.
