Just when you think mainstream culture couldn’t get any shallower along comes the hipster.
No, I don’t mean the hipster sub-culture that beat writers like Jack Kerouac identified with in the 50s or low riding jeans most of us shouldn’t wear, I’m talking about the new breed of inner city trendy taking over small bars, laneways and cafe\bookstores everywhere.
Somehow draping yourself in ridiculous clothes and capering around while being deliberately ironic has become highly desirable for thousands of twenty and thirty somethings.
For those of you who are asking, ‘just what is a hipster?’ think fashionista culture meets indie street sensibilities, add a dash of metro-sexual leftovers then a sprinkling of first year arts degree intellectualism and you have the hipster.
Imagine you walk into an inner city café, there’s a tattered ottoman and some milk crates scattered loosely around a few rickety tables, a plastic palm tree glued upside down to the roof in one corner and indie music even triple J rejected bleating facetiously in the background.
The female barista is wearing sleeveless mechanic’s overalls with the name “Jerry” stitched on, and the several waiters with asymmetrical bangs down one side of their otherwise shaved heads cast derisive glances at you through thick rimmed glasses. Welcome to Hipsterville.
Somehow while no one was paying attention the previously separate sub-cultures of indie, emo, fashion victim and dilettante Lefty coalesced into a super scene where saying and doing nothing of substance is considered profound.
Hipsters seem to be everywhere now, think of that lanky guy in skinny jeans, a long sleeve T and mini vest with designer stubble reading Karl Marx while snacking on organic lima beans.
Maybe you saw him at a vinyl record store where he was listening to indie bands from the Canadian Prairie on oversized 80s headphones while draped across a bean bag, or perhaps it was at the aforementioned café where, in between existentialist lattes and French baguettes, you overheard a serious discussion on why backpacking through Indian ashrams was “totally spiritual” and which music festival he and his girlfriend Clementine are “doing” next.
The takeover over of mainstream culture by these faux bohemian harlequins has advanced to the point where hipsters seem to be having a monopoly on cool. As far as the hipster is concerned anyone not initiated into the banal but ridiculously intricate rules of hipsterism is now on the outside looking in. That’s pretty much anyone who does not read pitchfork music reviews, own a pair of Ray Bans or have a connection to indie arts, fashion or music.
Hipster identity revolves around three things: fashion sense, music taste and working in selected glamour industries like the arts, creative media or perhaps something involving activism.
Fashion is a hideous mish-mash of vintage, grunge, high art and retro styles; imagine skinny jeans or leggings, an ironically worn bogan flannelette, thick rimmed coloured glasses and “old skool” sneakers. The hipster see’s nothing ridiculous in appropriating the style elements of other underground cultures, completely ignoring their actual meaning and then prancing around in the newly adopted pastiche of identities. It’s not wanky – it’s avant-garde.
However it can be tough for even the most committed hipster to pull off this look, this is why they usually appear so listless and inert in public, it’s to cover up the fact they tend to have no idea what they are actually doing when they leave home.
Hipster music is almost impossible to label, if you or I know about then it’s no longer trendy, basically they like it’s any band known to less than twenty people.
This obsession with obscurity in music does not stop hipsters attending every music festival under the sun, bitching about how everyone has sold out and then posing in front of each other’s iphone and pouting in giant sunglasses for Facebook.
Inspiration and ideas for staying cool come from street magazines which can only be found in the right retro outfitter stores and carry headlines like “Sri Lanka’s most excellent metal band” “Fashion: there’s no one quite like grandma” and Russian cosmonaut style”.
Hipsters however are defined far more by what they don’t like and what they don’t do. The less you care about anything, the cooler you are and therefore the more authority you have when passing judgement on others.
The hilarious irony for those looking on is that this desperate attempt to be so artfully different compared to everyone else is nothing new.
Just look at Yoko Ono. No one will ever come close to making pretension as much of an art form as she did. Exhibit A: as you can see affected wankers have been around for a long time.
Hipsters like to pretend they are slumming it on the urban fringes of society as they study the world through their lensless glasses, believing themselves to be modern urban aesthetes, but in reality it’s just the pursuit of conceited nothingness.
Like Yoko Ono, hipsters take things that are mundane or ordinary and make them “cool” by emphasising their irony while they run down anything that is interesting or required actual talent to create because they did not come up with the idea themselves. It’s like installation art such as placing a TV in a fish tank; anyone can do it, but they didn’t and that’s the whole point.
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