What is a hipster? Being a DJ in the contemporary North American urban nightlife scene, it’s a question that I get to ponder a lot.
Last month, on their cover, Adbusters ran a story called Hipster: The dead end of Western civilization characterizing them as:
one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior [coming] to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal.
While being more than slightly polemical toward the end, the author’s point holds water. Hipsters are very slippery when looking to conventional modes of definition.
In the 1940s, it referred mainly to white youths adopting black urban culture vis a vis jazz music - the precursors to the beatniks in the 60s who extended the culture into its more suburban/hippie incarnation. These days the word has come to mean something very different, but in many ways still related - mostly through space. Despite the fact that Hipsters have taken a lot of flack recently for their eclectic dress, dance, and style there is something about the hipster that seems to have remained true throughout the ages. Their participation is fundamentally urban.
In the original hipster era, participating in urban life was synonymous with participating in black life, and so jazz music, black modes of speech, and cultural leanings on a white person made them easy to mark as a hipster. As the city hurtles toward design-intensivity, the definition of a hipster seems as mercurial as the definition of cool - as the city becomes the main nodes for the absorption of trends, hipsters seem to be the most eager people within the city to express them. Far from being a race discourse as it was in the past, this is a style discourse that seems to be engaging youth culture in all facets. Coincidentally (?) XXL magazine ran a feature that discussed the Hipster-effect on Hip hop in the same month that Adbusters ran their Hipster cover.
How is style in the city becoming a commodity? Is the common culture that it’s bringing us toward as banal as the Adbusters article would have us believe?
And now, as always, some music.
Tags: Adbusters, commodification, Hipster, race, Style, XXL
August 27th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I think the Adbusters piece is too nostalgic for an era that never really existed. There have always been so many hangers-on with nothing to contribute when any trend got big, this is just the newest edition.
That said, I think we’re in the most frivolous part of the musical cycle right now, and people are due to move in a more adventurous direction soon.
August 27th, 2008 at 8:55 am
I don’t know if the culture is banal, but I do believe that this generation isn’t nearly as definable as previous decades — that’s always bugged me. We’re not going to be known for our flappers and jazz, or high heels and red lipstick, or bell-bottoms and peace signs. We’re going to be known as the fickle generation that couldn’t make a decision and stick by it, which isn’t necessarily something to be proud of. Maybe we have too many options. Maybe I’m ignorant to some bigger culture out there that does define this generation more solidly. But as far as I can see, the only theme of the current era is wishy-washy discontentment.
August 27th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
From the book Millennial Makeover:
The dominant musical genre for American generations are-
Ragtime – Missionary Generation (late 1890’s)
Big Band Jazz – Lost Generation (1920’s)
Swing – GI Generation (mid-1930’s)
Rock ‘n’ Roll – Silent Generation (early to mid-1950’s)
Psychedelic Rock – Baby Boomers (mid – to late 1960’s)
Hip Hop, Rap – Generation X (mid – 1980’s)
Mashup – Millenial Generation
http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Makeover-MySpace-American-Politics/dp/0813543010?&camp=212361&linkCode=wey&tag=maxiwealadvi-20&creative=380737
August 28th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Cool comments folks:
Ian - I agree with you here f’sho. I think what Adbusters might actually reminiscing on is the simple clarity of the spacial/cultural/style hegemony that existed before the city came back into vogue. I sometimes miss that too, because I might have been the last era of that hegemony before the solitudes really started breaking down. Identities seemed somehow less complex than they are now.
Elizabeth - Like I said above, I definitely agree about the complexity issue. Simple definitions elude them.
Jim H - In a VERY broad sense I can agree with this characterization of the decades for sure. The question I’m interested in is what does that mean?
If I could go back in time and be less tired when writing this, I would have called it “Theater of Style”. That’s what I’m arguing that the city has become and the hipsters seem to all be fighting for lead roles. To me the mashup/hipster culture is the first wave of a generation coming to terms with the role of capitalism and consumerism in cultural production, the access to pretty much all things, and themselves all at once. I think that a little bit of frivolity is par-for the course if you think about it as a global urban youth movement that just recently acquired the tools to develop its first bits of grammar. This is barely even stage 1.
Here’s a question: Are Hipsters bohemians? Do they impact the Bohemian Index of a city, and why or why not?
August 28th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Good post.
I’m coming to the conclusion that “Hipsters” (as I assume the word would be interpreted if I asked the next passer by that I met) are “fashionable” (i.e. buy the latest clothes, music, eat out at the places where people want to be seen etc etc). They are enslaved to marketing and the PR gurus who spin it. They are as conservative as they come. They define themselves by what they consume - they need the cash, they say yes to the man so they can get their fix of what’s hot and quickly ditch what’s not. They’re the new bourgeoisie.
Your use of the word “cool” is also a clue here - Zygmunt Bauman, Polish sociologist based in the UK - demystified “cool” by explaining it simply as what it means - non-committal, dispassionate, disinterested. To be cool you’ve got to not care. To be passionate about something, to be interesting in a cause or a hobby is to be a geek. Cool is therefore one of the reasons why a lot of people don’t care anymore about politics, relationships, about human rights abuses, about environmental disasters, it’s why no-one values loyalty anymore.
So, “hipsters” and “cool” are, to me at least, entirely opposed to bohemians, who would (in my understanding of the term) eschew consumerism and convention, be passionate about causes, throw social norms to the wind.
This might explain why modern British regeneration projects embrace “cool”, “creativity” and “counter-cultural” as branding tools - and the resulting “places” are empty, soulless, bland, boring and as uncool, uncreative and conventional as you can imagine.
Ditch hipsters, sophistos and cool. Embrace geeks, nerds and the earnest.
P.S. Zygmunt Bauman is a legend. If you haven’t read any of his many books, do. Liquid Life, Liquid Love or Liquid Modernity are good starts.