What are hipsters about?

Young people, I just can’t keep up any more. I thought hipsters all had van dykes or soul patches.

The hipsters on Qt3 come out of the closet whenever someone starts a “Your fave album of the year??” thread. It’s a contest to see who can name the most obscure, Pitchfork-iest band. Those are probably some of the same people in this thread, but of course I’m far too lazy to check.

Wrong, wrong, and more wrong. While I’m not one to spend much time or money on fashion, a couple of my friends manage to spend a lot of both on it without being hipster-ish in the least. The reason people hate hipsters is that hipsters are fucking annoying. I live on the border of hipsterville and yuppiepocalypse, and while there are ample reasons to dislike both groups, at least the yuppies keep to themselves.

Your last comment is just stupid. I listen to quite a bit of Pitchfork-approved fare (to my everlasting dismay), as well as to quite a lot of “metal.” The things that the stereotypical hipsters listen to are, in my opinion, mostly mediocre bullshit that is praised in direct proportion to a given band’s proximity to Brooklyn. On the other hand, looking at people on this board who listen to metal, you’ll see a huge variety of music; to dismiss it all as “metal” would be like saying you won’t listen to Radiohead because you don’t like Muse.

It’s hard to argue that your basic Williamsburg/Mission District hipster music isn’t crap. It’s all basically white grad-student rock…what the kids do in between college and getting their yuppie knowledge worker job. Just because it’s mostly shit though doesn’t mean it doesn’t occasionally produce a classic or two now and then…and some of those future yuppies take too many drugs, drop out and start the Brian Jonestown Massacre which makes it all worthwhile.

If you watched Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist and thought “I can really relate to this movie” then you’re a hipster.

The funniest thing about this thread (and I may have just made this up to lead into my point) is that anyone is giving hipsters credit for being the valid sub-culture of now.

I’ll say now that I don’t think I have ever met a hipster, I’m not too sure if we have them in Ireland. We definitely have people who try and listen to the most obscure band (I had a tendency to do it with metal) but I don’t think there are any who form a collective over here.

What hipsters are to me, from my limited internet based interest, is a group who want to proclaim a passion or interest for something, or anything, without displaying any of that groups normalised traits or appearances. On further investigation, they appear to me to be a group that does not want to have a passion or interest that’s based on any actual passion or interest. They’re the manifestation of the imperative to have multiple faces and personalities, which has been pressed upon us for the past century. The idea that we have multiple roles and a different persona for each.

These personas have resulted in us creating a shorthand, or cues for society to react with. Something that places us within the strata (or large venn diagram of life if you prefer something less about class).

While these posts are somewhat cynical, I do think they are valid, in that they represent a strong desire of any sub-culture. They represent the rejection necessary to escape.

But what are they trying to escape.

I don’t think it’s so much deconstructing the notion that hipsters are about anything, but deconstructing the notion that, on the surface, the individual is about anything, but going deeper, that they know they’re about nothing. That there’s this huge transeance.

In the end I think it boils down to one of the oldest cliches known to man, Carpe Diem. The idea that we should take things as the come, and at the very utmost, “Enjoy life.” But to seize the day, people must be able to react to whatever happens. And to subscribe to any defining ideal or sense of self results in an inability to move to react to what comes your way.

I think this is why hipsters are so offended by being called hipsters. While they have grown to the point of immediate identification, that was never the intention of their ideals. Unlike the goths, punks, hippes, etc. there’s no unifying cause. There’s no positive reason to unite, beyond the normal needs for community and acceptance, reciprocity, etc… Their reaction, which has manifested in a fully fledged group identity, was based on the confusion that was caused by the nature of, the forced stereotypes running contrary to the possibilities presented by an empowered culture.

What I think is most interesting is that what they strive for, the ability to be free from categorisation and judgement on anything other than their rationality, is readily achievable. The internet lets us be who we want, when we want, and all we have to do to become that person is be that person. (Welcome to Buceph’s “Thought’s of the 1990’s Internet Studies”) And as a corrolary to that, the fact that most people are rejecting that anonymity and freedom with the need to solidfy the self, even on such a fleeting thing as the billions of websites that exist. It’s a need to identify within a community, something that I don’t think we have fully looked at, i.e. how communities in regards to the self are formed online.

tl:dr So hipster couldn’t solidify their identity in a world where multiple roles for a single person are so common (something to do with economic freedom), hipsters were lost, they manifested that lostness in a rejection of social cues (obscure/ridiculous fashion, music etc.) they found they weren’t alone. Now they’re at a loss/are becoming as boring as you or I.

still tl:dr Hipster found what they wanted.

P.S. et N.B. there are asshole/idiot hipsters who none of this applies to.

I did, too.

And since I have nothing nice to say about hipsters, I’m not going to say anything at all.

For fun, the Hipster Olympics -

What if you thought “I can’t stand these self-pitying, self-absorbed idiots for another second” and stopped watching about halfway through?

What about Into the Wild. I hated the dude in that movie, and I bet people who I hate would like that guy. In fact I know for a fact that I wouldn’t like anyone who liked that guy. Therefore they must be hipsters.

Hey, I like a lot of metal myself. The point is, it’s a style of music, and “hipster” is not - and if it were, it’d be a lot more diverse than metal. I’ve seen almost everything get described as hipster in a negative way, from boring indie like you mention to metal bands like Mastodon and The Sword to German minimal techno to UK grime. If anything, the term is more of a byword for people who spend a lot of time trying to keep up to date with whatever the latest thing is, which is why people using it sound all ‘get off my lawn’ even if there is a point to be made about transient fads.

I’m not really up to date on what all the pitchforkiness is about, is it this?

What people in this thread are defining as a hipster is a little diffuse. If the penetrating insight here is that young people are trend-obsessed and self-involved, then well done I guess, but the open disdain seems a little misplaced.

If not, I’m not sure I get what people think a “hipster” is.

You seem to know an awful lot about hipsters for never having met any.

I’ve met hipsters. The part of Portland where my girlfriend lives is hipster central. They’re just people. Perfectly ordinary young people wearing funny clothes that annoy outsiders and old fogeys, just like young people always do.

Oh, and they do drink an awful lot of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The evolution of the hipster and the Dead End of Western Civilization.

Thanks

I’ve met hipsters. The part of Portland where my girlfriend lives is hipster central. They’re just people. Perfectly ordinary young people wearing funny clothes that annoy outsiders and old fogeys, just like young people always do.

I think it’s a bit unfair to reduce a large amount of expression to the folly of youth. Youth culture has said an awful lot about our societies, and gone on to influence them hugely.

Most hipsters are probably doing it for a reaction, but there could very well be something deeper to that. And I’m certain that a lot of hipsters who have justified and intellectualised their behaviour would be extremely annoyed that you dismissed them so easily. (Or it would completely vindicate their opinion of you.)

“Hi Jason.”

“We’re a band called TV On The Radio. We couldn’t be more quintessentially hipster, we live in NYC, and hey, look at how white we aren’t.”

Hipsters are basically slackers that care about their appearance. They also don’t like anything popular.

What if I occasionally drink PBR non-ironically, and have for years?