![Wrath at Hipsters Misguided [part two]](http://cdn0.lostateminor.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/vice-photo.jpg)
Wrath at Hipsters Misguided [part two]
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From the various responses I got from my previous post about hipster hate being misguided, most people defined a hipster as people who are very young (let’s say below 25), live off of their parents, and don’t contribute to the scene they glom onto. The problem I have with this is that in my personal experience, this is not how most people define hipsters.
Vice Magazine is usually derided as being a magazine made for and by obnoxious, overly irreverent hipsters, yet one cannot deny that they embody a certain scene altogether, and indeed contribute to the contemporary cultural landscape via their record label, their promotion of certain artists, and their video blogs covering everything from the Beijing rock scene and heavy metal in Iraq to sex tourism in Japan and the gigantic island of discarded plastic floating in the Pacific.
Indeed, Vice darlings Terry Richardson and the recently deceased Dash Snow are seen as the epitome of hipsterdom, yet Richardson is well into his 40s and both he and Snow are/were prolific photographers that most certainly were capable of paying their own rents in addition to supporting their massive drug habits. Many of the prolific artists in Baltimore, where I am, would be described as hipsters, regardless of how well they support themselves or the earnestness of their art, merely because they have mullets and child-molester glasses.
Still others who responded to my post suggested that irony was integral to the definition of a hipster, yet hip-hop kids today wear non-prescription nerd glasses, punks in the 70s wore torn school uniforms and swastikas, and peace-loving hippies before them wore army jackets, all as a sort of ironic inversion of what those cultural signifiers originally meant. When Kurt Cobain began the song Territorial Pissings with a line from The Youngbloods’ Get Together, he did it sarcastically.
A tattoo of Elmo may be retarded and intended as ironic, but had Sid Vicious grown up with Sesame Street, he too may well have gotten a similar image etched into his skin. That today’s 20- and 30-somethings have grown up more saturated with self-referential pop culture than any generation before is not their fault, and the sentiment behind a silly mustache may not be too far off from David Bowie wearing women’s boots, even if it is less classy.
Finally, I should qualify what I meant when I said that hatred towards hipsters was dangerously close to hatred towards immigrants – I didn’t mean to equate the two in terms of racial bigotry, but in both cases, people draw a line between who they consider insiders and who they consider outsiders. This line depends on a lot of stereotypes, generalizations, and assumptions that while not as virulent as ethnic hatred, are still on the same spectrum of reactionary prejudice.
2 comments
Marked Thursday 23 July 2009
“people draw a line between who they consider insiders and who they consider outsiders”
This is just people being people. I’m not supporting the idea of prejudice or anything, but I find the idea of man being able to look beyond superficial traits and ‘getting along’ pretty unrealistic, and, frankly, more dangerous. People will always gravitate towards who we feel comfortable with, whether that’s based on race or culture or whatever, and the very nature of this means someone will always be an insider and outsider. Again, it’s far easier to recognize this and work with it than believe we can transcend it.
Mastadon Thursday 4 February 2010
The author is having trouble distinguishing between hipsters and their icons. The good people at Vice may indeed embody many things hipster, but few people despise Vice. They despise the people who read Vice, who themselves like to pontificate about issues from sex tourism to fashion, but who contribute nothing meaningful despite their positions of privilege, resources, and relative power. That last bit, by the way, is what truly separates ethnic bigotry from anti-hipster sentiment. Hipsters generally have money, connections, well-to-do families (read safety net), etc. Immigrants are at the mercy of the public majority and are easily harmed by wrathful employers, arrogant members of the police force, and others.
On a lighter note, I just want to be on record saying that people will regret skinny jeans. Today the young and hip people of the 80s regret their poor fashion choices, and hipsters will, too.