Some corners of the internet have been going half insane in melt-down this week after Salon (cribbing pretty heavily from a New York Times story it seems) published some stupid and willfully inflammatory article about ‘hipsters of foodstamps’.
Street Carnage did the best response to that I’ve seen, and I am not gonna write about the original Salon piece, beyond that it is super stupid, missing the point on so many levels and is quite sickly condescending to poor and uneducated (and in many regards it is weirdly paternalistically racist).
There hasn’t been this much consternation about ‘hipsters’ since that AdBusters article came out a few years back - but even then, that was attacking the culture of ‘hipsterism’ (I’m gonna be making up quite a few words derived from hipster as I write this, just let me do this without feeling like an asshole please?), this new wave is simply attacking hipsters on the principle that they are all assholes. Hipster, as a word, has pretty much become an insult in itself.
I first got kinda annoyed earlier this week when a somewhat badly written blog attacked a moderately funny article in Platform. Tuvshin Bolor responded on behalf of Platform, and picked on one of the points that really bothered me in the blog, that the writer starts off with the supposed insult of calling Platform a ‘hipster magazine’. I’m not really sure what one is meant to take from that. Obviously is meant to be negative, in the sense that had she said ‘douchebag magazine’ the tone would be unchanged; this is the same as the ‘hipsters of foodstamps’, hipster there isn’t implying educated and potentially contributive to society, it is suggesting a rich, unentitled, image obsessed overgrown child.
Tuvshin Bolar replies to this ‘criticism’
To begin with, she calls Platform a ‘hipster magazine’, and to be honest I’m not too sure what that means but apparently it has something to do with wearing ’skinny jeans and being a trust fund “artist”’. (Note: sarcastic quotations! This bitch is straight up hilarious! She’s totally right! You’re not a real artist unless you’re poor because art is all about clichés! Rich people, you can’t be artists so fuck you!)
Why does hipster have to be such an insult here? Why is it thought by so many to be this simple encapsulation of a supreme asshole?
If I were to say ‘hipster journal n+1’ would it be denigrating it? I certainly mean it as a complement, in that it is led by fairly young, intelligent people who are willing to think and create in ways which can run slightly counter to conventional ideas. It isn’t apathetic, it is involved and hopeful - though, obviously, with a big dose of cynicism. These are what hipster should mean.
Gawker, the blog that for the past decade has almost defined the hipster obsessions with immediacy, speed, celebrity, cynicism, youth and money (and drugs), is now suggesting that the word ‘hipster’ be retired.
I can see why they are arguing for this; I’ve said a few times over the past year, it has been a full decade pretty much now since the ‘first wave’ of hipsterism, and with increasing speed everything that is considered ‘hipster’ is sucked into the mainstream, to the point that hipsters outwardly seem obsessed with authenticity and image. For many people hipster has come to embody all those traits that AdBusters ranted about three years ago.
And there has never been any kind of ‘fightback’, because for so long anyone who could argue in favor of hipsters as a hipster has vehemently denied being a hipster. Indeed, Foster Kamer (formally of Gawker) writes about the controversy stemming from the Salon article in the Village Voice, in which he says
But just like there are The Four Truths of Buddhism, there are The Two Truths of Hipsterism.
1. Hipsters don’t like being called Hipsters.
2. Hipsters don’t self-identify as Hipsters.
This is exactly the reverse of how it should be. Obviously no one wants to admit that they are trying to be cool, but it is time that hipsters start identifying as hipsters. Recognize that their exists a group of people out there, who came of age in the same decade as you, who shared the same formative experiences as you did and are all just as sick of the fucking New York Times running the same stories they have for the last thirty years, just with ‘punk’ cut out and ‘hipster’ slipped in. Hipsters are often accused of being apathetic and cynical, and of course they are, as anyone who came of age in the late ‘90s and ‘00s who didn’t work in investment banking or for Blackwater should be - but equally, underneath that, there is great disdain for the stale intellectual and ideological laziness of the last fifteen to twenty years. Probably two waves of ‘hipsterism’ have already burnt out in this new millennium already, but the excitement and creativity still exist.
Embrace hipster now, or watch it die, and then we really will be stuck in a dead end.
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