I received the image above with my morning inbox dose of press releases and a selection of Groupons for hair removal and vacations in countries I’m pretty sure are in the midst of civil upheaval. According to some reblogging over at Mashable, where this was put up by user Sam Laird, this image depicts “the one true hipster to rule them all”.
I laughed.
Along with some pretty sardonic commentary, Laird includes a checklist of what he considers the most obvious traits that have rendered this guy ‘King of All Hipsters’, including his outfit and goatee (which, admittedly, we can barely see here). It’s Friday and I’ve got fire in my veins again, so all this really did was get me thinking: What’s so bad about hipsters anyway?
When it comes to subcultures, I’m in the same weird position as everybody else born in the late 80s. I’m old enough to remember my elder brother wearing a flannel shirt and ripped jeans, but also young enough that I was fascinated by dead 80s subcultural artifacts like all the bad albums by The Clash. In fact, being part of “Generation Naval Gaze” meant that I spent a lot more time gravitating towards old shit than I did probing whatever was new on the shelves. Maybe that has something to do with growing up in a world where you can’t swing a wireless keyboard without hitting a commercial, or maybe it’s cos that’s just how growing up on Planet Earth works.
People spend their time preoccupied with the past as a source of useful culture and there’s really nothing wrong with that. It’s usually this fascination with the past that leads to some pretty progressive thinking in the present. That in turn gets the ball rolling on the development of new, dominant and influential counter-cultural thinking that drags humanity kicking and screaming into the next decade. The fact that so few people actually seem to recognize this is what really fascinates me.
I mean, do the folks criticizing Hipsters today know how much they must sound like the repressed conservatives calling out Punks in the late 70s, Hippies in the late 60s or even the “original” Teenagers of the 1950s?
But of course we don’t see ourselves that way. When we turn our heads back to those other prominent global subcultures, we only see them through a pair of glasses so rosy they’d give Ringo Starr acid flashbacks. We take for granted that what we see of them is what they were like. Yeah, the Punks were an angry, violent lot, but ultimately they hold a sort of bloody, dirty sex appeal by way of cultural icons like The Ramones and The Sex Pistols. The big ol’ media darlings of the latter day Rolling Stone articles – guys like Johnny Rotten – become more than the heroes of the movement; they start to represent every aspect of it. That’s even though, when you really stop to think about it, you know there were a ton more punks out there than the boys selling records. It’s the same way we know the punks we run into at The Bohemian in Melville aren’t anywhere near as volatile or aggressive a bunch as the guys and girls they’ve inherited their threads from. If anything, the modern punk is just some form of “hipster punk”; a diluted copy that’s as much like punk “proper” as an mp3 sounds like The Ramones on vinyl.
Jumping back to Hipsters and the image above, let’s take a look at Laird’s inventory of the above hipster’s crimes against humanity bad fashion decisions.
Micro-managed facial hair? Check. Vintage coat? Check. Stack of vinyls? Check. Legs crossed, European style? Check.
Portable vinyl player, with headphones? Bonus points. Hipster babe companion in retro dress? More bonus points. Sitting outside at a bar, during what may well be normal working hours? The deal-sealer.
Even if you think he looks absolutely ridiculous – and in a world where grown men and women wear cowboy hats unironically, he still does – you have to admit that at least some of the above criteria is a tad unfair. I mean, the vinyl player and headphones are absolutely retarded, but why wouldn’t a guy who looks this way be hanging out with a girl in an equally retro outfit? And how is crossing your legs “European style” the sole domain of Hipsters?
When I listened to friends recently heaping ire on Hipsters, it was largely in response to some perceived judgment that Hipsters were glaring back their way. The irony of judging the people you’re angry at for judging you seemed to escape them, at least at first. Before they cottoned on to how much they sounded like their parents, however, my buddies managed a short list of some of the problems they had with ‘They of the Skinny Jeans’. One criticism was the “uniform” of vintage clothing. Another was the fact that these awkward 20-somethings had the audacity to occupy the same bars as everyone else like they were… patrons or something!
The thing is, the trappings of subcultures are always the same for every generation. Each one must develop its own style of dress, way of talking and, usually, artistic preferences in terms of music, movies, whatever. The endlessly looping acid rock of The Doors probably had as little sway with leather-clad punks as the untrained clanging of their instruments had with kids in the early 80s. And lovers of mid-80s synth-pop probably didn’t fit in very well with the grunge or hip hop movements that followed them.
Your parents' parents hated this guy.
This didn’t make one culture inherently ‘wrong’. It just separated them from one another, with each new set of ideas evolving in direct reaction to whatever came before. The Hippies were a bunch of free lovin’, esoterically-inclined, self-exploring social activists precisely because the Teenagers that preceded them were an aggressive, rebellious, maybe even obnoxious bunch in too-tight jeans and leather jackets. The punks were over the Hippies’ seeming drugged-up passivity, so they switched to doing everything a lot harder and faster.
And so it goes.
Believe me when I say, I have no real interest in defending the hipster. Like every subculture before them, they’re ultimately just as annoying as they are consequential. The reason they seem to be so maligned, however, has so much less to do with the culture itself and so much more to do with how society reacts to whatever’s “new”. Well, as new as kids sporting all-vintage-everything can be. It’s like your mind trying hard to fight the onset of age that your body’s undergoing every day. We don’t think they’re annoying purely because they are, but also because we’re really afraid they think we’re annoying. Chances are they do. But they’re fucking hipsters. They hate everything.