The hipsters are coming!
You cannot avoid it, they are seemingly everywhere. No not the hipsters themselves. But people bitching about hipsters.
Log into Facebook, fire up your Twitter account, peruse some
disingenuous Huffpo headline, or stand near a group of people at your favorite
watering hole and you will hear it. Yes,
America loves to hate “hipsters”. In
fact they have surpassed the Jersey Shore self proclaimed “guidos” as our
favorite demographic of people to hate.
Who are these hipsters? Living in Los Feliz on the border of
Silverlake, recently voted by Forbes Magazine as the hippest
hipster neighborhood in America, I would think to be awash with swaths of
these overdressed, pompus, Groucho-looking
hipsters. Yet I am not sure I
have ever met one.
Of course no hipster would ever actually admit to being one,
because that would be well, really unhip. But even alleged hipsters seem to
also hate hipsters. If so many people are complaining about them, where are
they? And more importantly, how do we
know they are a real hipster?
Therein lies the source of the problem. Ask anyone to
identify a hipster and you will receive a hundred different responses. A
hipster is a bearded man with skinny jeans, a skully cap, and way too thick
rimmed glasses who plays kickball on Saturdays. No wait, a hipster is an
unemployed pseudo-intellectual, living on their parent’s dole, using their film
theory degree from Portland State to create finger paintings to hang at the
local coffee shop. Better yet! A hipster is a self absorbed, holier than thou
craven delighted to mock all typical conventions of “normal folk”, while
pledging allegiance to no conventions whatsoever (except the denial of all
conventions of course).
It’s almost as if “hipster” has become a kind of blanket
insult for “things I don’t like”. A projection of people’s anxieties, often
centered on appearance, class, or attitude.
If there is one thing we love to do as a society, it is to collectively
hate a group of people and NOT feel guilty about it. And hipsters offer a perfect target.
Unlike say Mormons or Scientologists, a couple other groups
we love to mock, the so called hipster celebrates non conformity and therefore
has no central command to defend themselves.
There are no hipster meetups (Yo La Tengo concerts notwithstanding) or
dues paying members. They do not have a spokesperson nor a board of directors,
though if they did I am sure Fred Armisen and Wes Anderson would be invited.
If you ask me who the hipsters are, I have my own
definition. I say, people who make fun
of hipsters are the real hipsters. That’s right. I mean seriously, what is more
“hipsterish” than a group of people standing around making sarcastic remarks
and labeling others whom live a different lifestyle from their own? Are they not castigating the behavior of
hipsters by adopting that very same behavior?
But the truth of the matter is, there are no real hipsters.
Sure, there are unemployed art students, people who wear scarves in the Spring,
people who wear rimmed glasses with perfect vision and drink PBR, people who
ride retro bicycles and eat only artisanal foods, and people who smoke American
Spirits and use Kickstarter to fund their indie film project. And yes, if these
people move to your neighborhood the price of rent and kale will probably be
going up. But I am sure there is
something about your own lifestyle that just screams HIPSTER in the eyes of
someone else.
In that way, since there are no real hipsters, there is also
a little bit of hipster in all of us. So I say embrace it! It’s really not so bad. There are worse things in the world than
getting together to play Parcheezi and discuss how Twin Peaks is the best TV
series ever. Not that we own TV’s of course.
--Neil Stevens
