If there’s one thing complete strangers on the Internet have taught me, it’s that it’s cool to hate on hipsters. At least that’s what some hipster on Twitter told me.
The problem is, they’re becoming increasingly hard to pick out. Your mother, best friend, or favourite pet could be a hipster and you wouldn’t even know it.
Through clever use of poor fashion choices and general laziness, they’ve reached such an advanced level of irony that they are, in fact, indistinguishable from the rest of us. The best course of action, in these dark and uncertain times, is to simply treat everyone with suspicion.
The other day, for instance, an old man sat next to me on the train. Dressed in beige old-people clothes, carrying a walking-frame and working on a particularly challenging Sudoku, he couldn’t possibly have looked more un-hipster-like - but he wasn’t fooling anyone.
“I see what you did there,” I whispered. “Excuse me?” he wheezed. “Nice threads, man,” I said, pointing at his socks and sandals. It pays to be cautious these days.
Even I, at times, have been mistaken for such a person.
My brother recently called me over to his house to give me my birthday present - a disturbingly-sharp samurai sword he had bought from eBay for whatever reason. With no other way to take the thing home, I was forced to catch the bus with it (in its scabbard, of course).
Everyone started staring at me strangely. I knew what they were thinking, though. “Oh, so alternative! Hey everyone! Check out the uber quirky guy holding the daito katana ironically. He’s making some sort of comment on the influence of Japanese film-makers on Tarantino-era Hollywood directors. What a jerk.”
It’s a sad day when a man can’t carry an edged weapon on public transport without being judged by his fellow passengers.
My housemate later pointed out that they were probably just terrified that a random, hoodie-wearing stranger was holding a samurai sword while on a bus full of people. My calm and vacant expression, he added, probably made the whole thing even creepier. But he would say that, the dirty hipster.
Those masters of quirk have single-handedly managed to ruin books, the Internet, art, clothing from the nineties, sketchpads, skateboards, various hairstyles, jeans, vintage cheeses, cats, bicycles, fresh produce, generosity, culture, social issues, pastel-coloured kitchen appliances, and - it would seem - finely-crafted blades from the East.
The only thing they haven’t spoiled for the rest of us is hating on hipsters. If they do, we’ll just have to go back to watching parkour videos on YouTube.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about those quiet, effortlessly cool kids who are genuinely into late-20th century German art or whatever and don’t feel the need to tell everyone about it all the time.
I’m talking about those wannabes who claim to invoke the spirit of Kerouac every time they go on a two-hour road trip to buy new moleskin notebooks or whatever it is they buy with their EP money.
But those ones are easy to pick out and can be ignored. Its the others I’m worried about - the blenders. The problem may well be that the rest of us are ruining being a hipster for the hipsters, causing their numbers to significantly decline.
More and more of us are engaging in snark on Twitter, supporting local businesses, drinking red wine and enjoying arty things. Indeed, if you became a hipster tomorrow, would you even notice? And if we can no longer diss hipsters, who are we going to make fun of? Emos? We already did that back in 2006.
I, however, am in no danger. I’m way more alternative than you idiots.
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