does all hipster music sound like Tears For Fears lately?
Depends on what you count as hipster music.
Music that sounds like Tears For Fears, mostly.
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ACK! There's a horsefly in my office!!
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I think that Parerga and Paralipomena would be a good name for a b-sides/rarities collection.
4 was me, and can be read as responding to either 2 or 3, depending on your mood.
Is Lightning Bolt still hip? Has Mostly Other People Do the Killing ever been hip outside a relatively limited sphere?
This Selena Gomez song is to despair for America.
God, Lightning Bolt rips off Tears for Fears so bad.
At first I got mad at people who thought other people were using the word "hipster" wrong. Who cares, I thought. Now I often see it used to mean, basically, yuppies. And in this post I see it used to mean, I guess, the kind of music they play in interludes on NPR's Marketplace. Come on!
I no longer have the faintest idea what hipster is supposed to mean. If you asked me, "Quick, what's hipster music?", I would answer "I guess whatever Pitchfork is reviewing these days?"
It seems to now be one of those words, like patriot or feminist, that means whatever the speaker believes it to mean, no more and no less.
Beyond everyone's social circle stands the hipster.
Those feminist hipster patriot bands all sound like Budgie anymore.
If you asked me, "Quick, what's hipster music?", I would answer "I guess whatever Pitchfork is reviewing these days?"
I think that's the only plausible current definition. For a while, you could use the "people who get offended by use of the word hipster to apply to them" test to identify hipsters, but now even 100% puro yuppies get called hipsters and get offended by it, so that's dead. I imagine the term itself will be put on the shelf for another 30 years or so starting very soon.
people who get offended by use of the word hipster to apply to them
She sounds like a disco queen.
Ugh, all I hear is autotune. UGH.
Also I think they figured out a way to apply the autotune to her face.
9: All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
See them in the evening
See them in the dawn
See them in the daylight
Then in the beyond
And their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
He wants to party till the wheels fall off
Six feet under ground
What the world needs
Is another dead cowboy
Six feet deep, six feet wide
It's a mad world.
"but now even 100% puro yuppies get called hipsters and get offended by it"
i don't think i've ever seen "hipster" used as anything but a pejorative.
it's what you call trendy people who think they're too cool to follow trends.
But I think we all had something come to mind when the post suggested that vast quantities of music now sounds like Tears For Fears. "We Are Young" here.
18: everybody wants to rule the valley of the whirling knives.
Hysterical lyrical miracle! Spherical!
14: I imagine the term itself will be put on the shelf for another 30 years or so starting very soon.
You think so? It kind of seems to me like the West is set to spend the next several decades dumping on the imagined "hipster," the more amorphous the better.
23 is correct. The less meaning a term has, the more useful it is,as a one-size fits all pejorative.
"Hipster" has already been around for about 50 or 60 years anyway.
i don't think i've ever seen "hipster" used as anything but a pejorative.
Yes, but, I kind of sincerely want to be one. The Urban Outfitters catalog always looks glamorous to me.
Hipsters are lame. Hepcats are where it's at.
Suhrkamp has just published a translation of the N+1 "What was the Hipster?" volume, with three German authors adding "a German look at this transatlantic phenomenon": Hipster - Eine transatlantische Diskussion. We now know what to buy nosflow for his birthday.
All of which is to say that I think hipster is very much still with us as a contested conceptual category. Or maybe the Germans are just a bit behind the times. (The Suhrkamp book page even translates the original as "What are hipsters, really?", though this may have more to do with German fondness for the present tense than any substantive claims about continued existence.)
26: Sorry, heebie! A hipster is never sincere.
31: yeah, I think I'm in the same category as Heebie--my longing to be one thoroughly disqualifies me.
Playing John Coltrane's version of My Favorite Things while (slowly) typing a project. McCoy Tyner - unbelievable. Jazz artists - ur-hipsters?
When I was a lad hipsters were trousers that kept falling off your arse. Which makes it hard to take the term seriously when applied to people who take themselves seriously.
Hysterical lyrical miracle! Spherical!
Hypothetical political lyrical Miracle Whip.
Hipster - Eine transatlantische Diskussion.
This would be adorable if I didn't suspect that I would hate everyone involved.
Hipster looks kind of like Hitler if you squint.
Let us know when you've caught up with 2010, Halford.
You've got the dope on religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're all fucking hipsters as far as I can see
An Unfogged commenter is something to be
Off to swim see John Prine and Leo Kottke.
Ugh, all I hear is autotune. UGH.
Who decided that music sounds better when it sound metallic? Goddamn machinery.
To the lyrics of the song in the OP:
"I'm Diggin' You (Like An Old Soul Record)"
42: That's funny. I just was catching up on this thread after coming home from watching a bar band* cover, among other things, a Meshell Ndegeocello song. True story!
*They were totes hipsters, probably, once we've settled on a definition.
Old Soul records are the kind hippies enjoy, right?
I thought hipster music was Block Party, Deathcab for Cutie, and then became Canadian jam bands like Tokyo Police Club.
Bloc Party are totes not hipster! Bloc Part are maybs British indie, but defs not hipster.
I hope bloc party is hipster, because I love me some bloc party.
But addressing Keir more squarely, I would have thought Indie not a disqualification, but almost a requirement, of hipster-y ness--or rather, if something is even quasi mainstream, but still hipstery, it's probably "Indie" in some sense. Arcade fire, antlers, when only the cool kids knew them.
See, this is exactly the problem with "hipster": because of its negative connotations, people are constantly arguing over whether any given thing is "really" a hipster phenomenon (with the positions usually determined by people's opinions on the thing rather than any of its intrinsic attributes). This is rarely useful or productive.
Nah, I think British indie is conceptually distinct from hipsterism. British indie includes things like Oasis, who are definitely not hipster. Even Radiohead or Mogwai are hard to assimilate to hipsterism. Too much rock, too successful, and too solid a tradition.
(I have to say Teo, I have a much higher opinion of hipsters than I do of Bloc Party...)
I really liked the first couple of Bloc Party singles, but they were _really_ disappointing live, and went off-the-boil really quickly, imho.
re: 51
Yeah, neither Radiohead or Mogwai would strike me as remotely hipster-y. Especially not the latter. Who would mug hipsters for their lunch money.
No, Oasis is the conceptually distinct subgenre of Britpop, which is very much a time-delimited (mid 90s) subgenre, and can be largely captured by those things that share a family resemblance to the holy trinity of Blur, Pulp, and Oasis.
That said, my feeling is that it is unsurprising to encounter hipsters who express nostalgia for, and are fans of, said Britpop. And who also like contemporary British indie! -- but I think these are somewhat distinct; Bloc Party has more in common with the later LCD Soundsystem, I think, than either does with Blur/Pulp/Oasis.
Okay, my bottom line is: when I started going out and dancing, it was in NYC in 2004-5ish, and the party I went to seemed pretty hipsterish, though perhaps a little queerer than mainstream hipsterdom (the latter would probably have been Misshapes, which I never felt quite cool enough to go to). And they played a mix of then-contemporary indie, plus 90s Britpop, 80s, and New Wave, which I think captures the sensibility of at least a certain strand of hipsterdom--the strand whose touchstones (at least for the more hardcore, those who then define what's cool for the rest) are more or less namechecked in LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge."
Anyway--maybe I'm wrong, and the subdemographic I'm talking about isn't even a part of hipsterdom, but merely a near-neighbor. In which case, ok, I'm wrong. But I don't think so.
If I'm feisty about the Britpop thing, it's because I've been preparing to compete in a who-does-the-best-Jarvis karaoke contest tomorrow night, the winner of whom will get tickets to the Pulp reunion concert, which was sold out to scalpers in about 7 seconds.
Finally: the demographics may be a bit different across the Atlantic. Pulp was never quite so mainstream here (though they certainly had success), not to the degree that Oasis was--I remember watching a fratboy really emoting through a karaoke performance of "Don't Look Back in Anger" back at Chicago--and so I think Pulp, and to some extent Blur, have been able to retain a bit of indie/hipster cred.
Absolutely last bit before I go to bed: it's certainly possible I'm totally wrong about all this, but I feel validated by the fact that Wikipedia's article on The Misshapes has "See also: Hipster (contemporary subculture)" at the end. (And where did they get that name from? Pulp.) I may be wrong in my analysis, but I'm at least in the neighborhood of not-wrong.
I may not have seen this when it first aired in 1962, but surely no more than 5 years later. Discussion of hipsters reminds me of it.
re: 55
We saw the reformed Pulp last summer, and they were really excellent, fwiw.
I am well aware that we call Oasis Britpop (by rights Pulp aren't really Britpop anyway*) but Britpop's is not conceptually distinct from British indie. (Or alt rock. In the UK the distinction is way more fluid.)
See, Bloc Party are way more like Radiohead or Mogwai or the Libertines or Franz Ferdinand or half a dozen other blokey revivalist guitar bands than anything else, and that blokey-revivalist movement sits in the context of the British indie rock project, a giant revivalist guitar band producing machine. One place to look is the NME, which isn't hipster, at all. (After all, Oasis and Blur are blokey-revivalist-guitar bands. You can't play them in clubs, the dj says, because all the lads start singing along and it's like Maine Road in no time at all.)
There's a lineage in the UK that runs from post-punk to present-day indie that isn't at all hipster. (Joy Division/Smiths onward. Radiohead as almost-britpop hit machine. The Fall even.) Indie is different from hipster, and shouldn't be muddled, even though they do have similarities. Hipsters like British music, but they don't make it. (What hipsters consume and what they make has to be distinguished & it is very nice and subtle because hipsterism is about the fusion of consumption and production.)
But unlike in America, where there's no real continuity of critical discussion from punk through to hipsterism, there's a real continuity of taste/discussion/personnel from the Lesser Free Trades Hall Gig onward (to use notorious example.)
* Or else we end up in absurdities, with a Sheffield band from the 80s being britpop.
Britpop was always a slightly confused category anyway. In retrospect, while a lot of the bands lumped together in that category made explicit references to British pop music past, the influences were all over the place [viz. Elastica totally ripping off Wire, rather than the Beatles] and some of the bands musically more ambitious than just the lumpen Beatles/Stones/less-ambitious-bits-of-the-Kinks thing that's come to characterise it. Blur's blokey-revivalism was always, for example, mixed up with quite a bit of other stuff, even on their ur-Britpop albums of the early/mid 90s.
Suede! The touchstones they hit on --- Beatles, Bowie, the Pet Shop Boys, Smiths, are part of a British tradition that has nothing to do with hipsterism and everything to do with something else. And then there's a different but complementary harder-edged tradition.
I want to say that hipsterism is a kind of endgame strategy for pop culture, and so, like all endgame strategies, takes on the appearance of other things. But it isn't them!
I am surprised that no-one's yet tied hispterism and endgame together yet. Surely there's an article in there, just lurking around the odd Sherri Levine, a few Keith Halleys, a half-dozen Animal Collective records and the duller moments of October?
For me, it seems like hipsterism in the contemporary sense is substantially about social class. It's about a certain privileged middle-class take on popular culture. It's definitely not about the sort of working class outsider dandyism and neophilia that's constitutive of a lot of British pop music, for example.
Yeah --- that's a real nice axis to use. Hipsterism is an insider's pursuit.
(To take the LCD Soundsystem thing, it's really clear that it's a logic of cultural possession --- I had / I heard that you have / my records --- but fundamental problem of ownership comes up here. Noticeable that very few of the people listed have any continuity with LCD Soundsystem. Instead lots of discontinuities --- like there's this soft cell thing. But there's no way to get from soft cell to lcd soundsystem, only the other way around.)
Me: Hey Caroline, do you want to watch a Selena Gomez video?
Caroline: Of course! Why are you suddenly into Selena Gomez?
Molly: His friend linked to it, and now he thinks its cool.
Molly resents the "it's" error in her quote.
Keir: There's a lineage in the UK that runs from post-punk to present-day indie that isn't at all hipster. (Joy Division/Smiths onward. Radiohead as almost-britpop hit machine. The Fall even.)
Britpop / present-day indie / post-punk were and are all extremely important players in pop-culture fashion; if you're looking for some usefully descriptive analytical term that means something more specific than "someone who is currently up on fashion and pop culture," "hipster" probably shouldn't be it. Someone who wants to claim that Radiohead of all people -- who've played a large role in shaping and partaking of the current pop-culture zeitgeist, remix culture and all -- aren't at all "hipster" looks to me to have fallen victim to the relentless and inchoate urge to turn "hipster" into an epithet that applies only to The Other Guy, contradictions be damned. And I have to disagree with ttaM for once: ruling out the working class from being "hipster" means ruling out large swathes of obviously-hip people in the present day. It doesn't make sense.
(I know I said above that the more meaningless the epithet is, the more "useful" it technically becomes, but I meant for purposes of evil. You're the good guys.)
Mind you, I can understand if there needs to be a specific term for the kind of berk who hails from upper-middle-class privilege, listens to twee-cycled hip-hop songs but would not be caught dead in the company of more than three actual black people at a time, and (say) still reads the Vice magazine "Dos and Don'ts" feature with enjoyment. These people exist, nobody needs pretend they don't. But new terminology is needed.
Quick bleg:
I have an 18-year old younger brother who I've been trying to get into literature since he was a young teen. He read all the Narnia books, continued to read fantasy books, and more recently finished that Eragon trilogy.
Now I want to give him a book that helps him start transitioning to more serious literature (yeah, I know, who's to say fantasy is not serious; I just want him to try other kinds of good literature eventually and not get stuck on that). I suggested Tolkien but he dismissed the idea right off the bat saying he'd already seen the Lord of the Rings movies.
So, any other suggestion on what you could give a fantasy fan to read that he will still enjoy but might give him a sense of the goodness that is to be found in other genres?
Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow are my standard recommendations, and don't actually seem as far off the mark here as they usually are.
I suggested Tolkien but he dismissed the idea right off the bat saying he'd already seen the Lord of the Rings movies.
Ouch. I guess there are probably kids saying this about the Harry Potter books now, too.
I'm normally not into Tolkienolatry, but the kind of reader who won't stir themselves to crack open LOTR because they've seen the movies -- but will read Paolini!! -- needs help. Maybe start him out with The Hobbit or The Silmarillion since there aren't movies of those yet? Or give him some Guy Gavriel Kay (the Lord of Emperors duology, or Tigana, or The Lions of Al-Rassan)? Kay is a silly writer but he's a damned sight better than Paolini, and his books are a gateway to both general historical fiction and to Tolkien (who heavily inspires his fantasy work and with whose estate he's been directly involved; I believe he co-wrote or at least co-researched The Silmarillion with Chris Tolkien).
70. Childhood's End.
Seriously, the obvious route from Fantasy would be through mainstream SF, plying him with the more thoughtful and better written stuff, which the Mineshaft can list for you as they do regularly at the least provocation.
I was going to suggest the Mists of Avalon or The Once and Future King but on reflection, the LOTR movie remark and the response of others make me realize that those are bridges way too far. So, the Foundation trilogy.
70: Hmm, okay, let me think here:
The Eagle of the Ninth and The Mark of the Horselord by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle
The Hollow Earth (about to be republished, I think) by Rudy Rucker ==> This can serve as a gateway to Poe
The Grifters; Pop. 1280; The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
The Dain Curse; The Continental Op; The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett ==> Gateway to all of the good '20s and '30s writing.
The Sandman Slim books by Richard Kadrey
So, I dunno, maybe I'm not understanding the bleg right, but this is my idea of accessible genre fiction that might whet the appetite for more heavy-duty stuff.
69: Substantially in agreement here. I like to define "hipster" as anyone wearing more than 3 pieces of ironic clothing or accessories, but even there you're getting so imprecise. Real Potter Stewart territory.
Also, there's a very thin line between irritating jock/frat assholes who like to make the club scene and their slightly less conventionally determined brethren who are probably what most people think of as "hipsters".
Also, what about short story collections?
Historical fiction, maybe Hilary Mantel.
Mary Renault.
Slipstream; some of Michael Chabon, or The Time Traveller's Wife
Or for better-written fantasy, maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
Guy Gavriel Kay and the Foundation Trilogy are good suggestions. LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy would also be good, if he hasn't already read it. China Mieville might be a decent bridge into the sociological strain of realism.
Peter S. Beagle, both definitely fantasy and grownup. Maybe not A Fine And Private Place until he's read other Beagle and is in love -- that's not quite so much fantasy as it is the intersection of introspective mid-century New Yorkers and death.
Bujold's fantasy - the Chalion books, not the more recent Americana series.
After you've got him reading good fantasy, maybe Michael Chabon to transition to non-fantasy lit, as sort of a bridge step?
For a Narnia fan, The Magicians? I'm blanking on the author's name.
A thumbs down for Foundation - I think the last couple of decades of technology irretrievably dated it for anyone who doesn't have the skills to sympathize with what the future might have looked like from the forties. I think it'd just look puzzlingly stupid to an Internet kid.
(by rights Pulp aren't really Britpop anyway*)
But . . . but . . . Jarvis Cockery comes across quite well in Live Forever (about 1:30 into that clip, and I did just spend 15 minutes watching different parts of the documentary to find the Jarvis Cocker section).
82: Lev Grossman, and was about to recommend it as well, but 83 makes me realize it must be wrong*.
*Actually, a fair cop on Foundation, I can only give an old man's opinion. But I do have a house full of youngsters at the moment, and a quick survey gives it a lukewarm--median of 1 book read. Most interesting technology observation from one was there amusement at the Encyclopedia versus Wikipedia (may be part of what you were thinking of).
What about various Neil Gaiman fantasy books? I'm not really a fan, but they could be an easy gateway to a lot of different things.
I guess the question is, how ambitious should we be thinking? Is he somebody who already enjoys reading obsessively and just has a very limited palette or is it somebody who's going to want books that go down easily?
Right. What I've been thinking of as the problem is "If it's not fantasy, he won't read it" and thinking of stuff that he'll read, because it's fantasy, but which will build a broader sense of the possibilities of literature.
What about I, Claudius, the Lindsay Davies mysteries, and the Steven Saylor mysteries? Ancient Rome isn't a fantasy milieu, but it's going to have a similar "not here" vibe to it.
And I have to disagree with ttaM for once: ruling out the working class from being "hipster" means ruling out large swathes of obviously-hip people in the present day. It doesn't make sense.
I think that's part of the distinction I want to make. Between the intersection between cutting-edge or idiosyncratic fashion and music that's so central to pop-culture of all kinds [what I think you have in mind by 'obviously-hip'], and a particular wing of that that gets labelled 'hipster'. I think there's a distinction there that's got something to do with class, insider-dom and privilege. It's all fairly inchoate, though. As you say, hipster isn't a particularly useful epithet.
Why can't someone into fantasy imagine a world without the internet?
Imagining a world without the Internet is one thing. Imagining a world where there are planets that can maintain and operate spaceships but have lost science to the point where they couldn't build them is hard -- data storage is easy now, and Foundation doesn't make sense unless storing textbooks is harder than FTL travel. I think that's a hard leap to make these days: civilization would have to fall a lot further to fall that far.
74: There's a hell of a lot more sex in The Mists of Avalon than there is in LOTR, movies or books, though, so that could be a selling point. Though I guess Kids These Days don't require the written word for their jollies in that respect. (I read Mists at a significantly tenderer age.)
I recall liking The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, which has fantastical elements. Haven't looked at it in a long time, though.
Maybe he'd like Independent People!
92: What's the minimum number of people required to maintain a civilization? What if the Foundation civilization was the result of a diaspora?
What's the minimum number of people required to maintain a civilization?
64 unrelated individuals and their families.
96: There's a Stross post about this.
98: I dunno. Who reads that many comments?
"I'd put a lower bound of 100 million on the range, too."
Close!
I was envisioning a much simpler civilization than our current one.
70: Historical fiction is one way to go here, for sure--I like LB's suggestion about the Saylor/Davies books, which have the addition of bringing in the tropes of a lot of mystery novels. You might also think about ht Gunslinger series from King--that jumps across a number of genres while staying fairly close to fantasy. I remember enjoying the first few, but resolving not go back until the series was finished. Now it's finished, but I haven't been back. Can't say how it stands up to my 20-years-older self's standards, though.
Another route might go napoleonic fantasy-napoleonic naval yarn--space opera axis by going Naomi Novik to Dewey Lambdin (far more accessible than Patrick O'Brian) to David Weber's Honor Harrington. Or straight from Weber's Bazel series to Harrington if you want to make the direct fantasy-->SF jump.
All of this is fairly trashy, of course, but they're nice lead-ins to some sub- or different genres. My thought is that going straight to the litratchur side of things might be a stretch, but it's your brother so you would know better than I.
Admit it. You got lost in the calculation of how much sex you could have before legal incest was guaranteed.
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Rush Limbaugh says Democrats are trying to impugn his character.
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95: See, if you haven't read it, it's hard to talk about it. No real diaspora, no population crash -- it's a political breakup of a Galactic Empire modeled on the fall of Rome. With information storage like ours, much less sfnal future technology, it'd be really weird for a planet that maintained an industrial base and the ability to communicate with other planets to lose basic science. But they all do.
107: I thought about including a disclaimer that, while I had read it, I can only remember random details.
The breakup of an empire sounds like it could plausibly reduce the level of technology.
90: Between the intersection between cutting-edge or idiosyncratic fashion and music that's so central to pop-culture of all kinds [what I think you have in mind by 'obviously-hip'], and a particular wing of that that gets labelled 'hipster'.
Yeah, I don't think there's a "particular wing" of it that's getting labelled, is the reason it doesn't work for me.
I think there's basically just lots of assumption going on -- including, from people of our generation, assumptions about what still matters to supposed 'hipsters' that are really more suited to the mid-Nineties than to now -- and not much accuracy. (I'm reminded of this whenever I hear people, say, decrying supposedly "ironic" facial hair. How the hell would they know that someone intends their mustache ironically? Or, for that matter, know that some random example of "hipsterism" is or isn't working-class? The answer is they almost never know, not really.) I said new terminology is needed, but on reflection I think we probably have old terms that would cover the-kind-of-hipster-people-many-dislike fairly well, like "twit."
106: Oh, the poor thing. Bless his heart.
re: 109
I think we probably have old terms that would cover the-kind-of-hipster-people-many-dislike fairly well, like "twit."
Yeah, I take your point. 'Wanker' works for me, I suppose.
Or, for that matter, know that some random example of "hipsterism" is or isn't working-class?
This is where the Brit accent/class thing is relevant, I suppose. I can be sure -- when talking of musicians I've seen interviewed, people I overhear in clubs, or whatever -- with fairly high accuracy just based on how they speak. I suppose here though I'm not talking so much of 'hipsters' per se, but 'posh twats I don't like'.*
* where being posh isn't necessary or sufficient for being a 'twat', naturally. It's the intersection of posh _and_ twat I have in mind.
Another vote for Jackmormon's suggestion of China Mieville; he seems a good gateway to Serious writing. And Le Guin's "Dispossessed," definitely.
As for hipsters, hmm. Maybe I should actually read the N+1 book. Surely it was discussed here, when it came out--is it any good?
it is very nice and subtle because hipsterism is about the fusion of consumption and production.
This puzzles me a bit; I also thought hipsterdom--or at least core hipsterdom, beyond which the penumbra is defined largely by the non-core-hipster's social embeddedness in a network of core-hipsters--was about the hipster's relationship to media consumption, but I didn't think it really needed to be fused with production. Perhaps the Core Hipster needs to be involved somehow with creative production, if only as a critic, though even here I'm skeptical. A graphic designer, for example--that's a profession with plenty of hipsters, I imagine; but that doesn't mean their music consumption needs to be tied to their artistic production. I thought it was more about a particularly involved, almost moralized attention to music (& perhaps art and text, but mostly music), where that music is, yeah, somewhat artificially delimited as coming from certain subgenres.
Hrmm.
Someone who wants to claim that Radiohead of all people -- who've played a large role in shaping and partaking of the current pop-culture zeitgeist, remix culture and all -- aren't at all "hipster" looks to me to have fallen victim to the relentless and inchoate urge to turn "hipster" into an epithet that applies only to The Other Guy, contradictions be damned.
Radiohead aren't at all hipster. How could they be? They first play together in '85, they're famous by the early 90's, and they release their career defining album in 96. Hipsters might like Radiohead, but Radiohead aren't hipsters. Chronologically, it just doesn't work. (There's other, mostly stylistic, reasons around the sincerity and total lack of irony involved in Radiohead.)
Ah, ``production'' does not mean anything as crude as actually making music; it means the way in which the hipster makes his consumption of culture the same thing as his production of culture. The tendency to curate is an expression of that, for example. (That LCD Soundsystem song is very on point.)
I just . . . I . . .
http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=4921
103: Patrick O'Brian is perfectly accessible to the reader of good character who is not some sort of godless Communist appreciates tales of the age of wooden ships and iron men. He was very lovely to me when I came to have a book signed at the old shop on Lewis Wharf in Boston.
116: that's quite the location for it.
As dear to my heart as both Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick are, I can't see how they could be recommended as a transition into serious literature. I'd probably go with The Name of the Rose.
115: Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage (but a good cigar is a smoke.)
I hadn't thought we were restricting "hipster music" to hipster-made music; I had thought it encompassed, at least, formative influences on contemporary hipsters. But ok. Guess there was talking-past there.
In the harsh light of day, I'm also willing to concede that Oasis is very much Not Hipster Music even in the US, though I'm sticking with Pulp, and Blur seems to me more of a middle case, at least here. But I have no businesses opining in a music thread, so I'll stop now.
117: He said much the same thing.
Listening to some Beatles earlier today, and musing again about just how short their reign was. Here in the US you're talking about just 6-7 years. Kinda ties back to the scene in Almost Famous where Lester Bangs is telling Cameron Crowe that he's completely missed out on everything good that rock'n'roll had to offer. And, in some ways, that probably seemed pretty reasonable, if you looked at what that period of 1964-1970 was like, from the vantage point of 1974 or 1975. But compare that to our own decade. If you told some kid now "Oh, you're so screwed, you didn't get to experience the shining brilliance of the years 2002-2008" I mean, really, who could even start to say that with a straight face? Even in some of the genres, like hip-hop, where there was a lot of brilliance expressed, nobody would mistake it for a golden age.
? you have as much business as I do here!
Also, re:the charge of making the hipster be an other, I think that's over simple. I myself am closer, in many ways, to hipsterity than anything else. And I don't use hipster as a Bad Word; that's just bad practice.
I'm way more interested in hipsterism as, like I say, a strategy for dealing with the death of pop music, or whatevs, than as a broad catch-all-term for youth culture, which is what it becomes once you let Radiohead in. Because like, this is possibly the tyranny of closeness, but there really is a different thing going with Radiohead and then Neutral Milk Hotel, or Vampire Weekend. (Maybe also there's a thing about late hipsterity that is way more obvious, and when you try and push the term back it gets murky and messy, but that's no reason not to try.)
But it is really interesting that hipster music includes music made by not-hipsters (appropriation, appropriation, the alarm bells start going off) in a way that you can't imagine punk, say. (So post-punk gets assimilated to hipsterism, it gets appropriated. Joy Division oven gloves --- do half-man half-biscuit presage hipsterism? It is tempting esp things like ``we built this village on a trad. arr. tune'' which are veering pretty close to the twee/alt-country thing.)
So why was alt-country such a thing? Well OK, whiteness is maybe one thing. But there's also a like, showmanship to it. A display of ineffability: I can take this terribly, impossibly uncool thing, and make it work.
Speaking of hipsters....
Dumb headline, but in this video, endearingly blunt Polish storekeeper in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, describes the advent of artists in his neighborhood.
Pretend there was an article in that sentence. AN endearingly blunt Polish storekeeper.
Well OK, whiteness is maybe one thing
Non-alt country is pretty white too, you know.
Also, you really think that Uncle Tupelo ( formed in 1987) get in, but Radiohead, on chronological grounds, doesn't?
I have listened to a bit of alt-country and even back in the day read an issue or two of No Depression; I didn't even get a whiff of the kind of transfiguration of the uncool Keir suggests, but perhaps I was just insensible back then.
Yeah, because Uncle Tupelo are clearly originating that scene/taste community. (And even then I'd say calling them hipster is dodgy --- not all alt-country is hipster, even if a lot of it is.) Radiohead come out of a pre-existing scene & taste, and keep well within that game.
I've always thought of the Smiths, Joy Division, etc. fan contingent in the US as proto hipsters. Or at least that was clearly the demographic in my undergrad years.
Genre for going into litfic not yet mentioned: Mid career Silverberg, Jeff Vandermeer, Wolfe's short stories and novellas (but not New Sun - that's for the reverse process).
Non genre: Some of the turn of the century Austrians, Balzac, Powell, early Bellow.
So I wouldn't call that part of alt-country (No Depression etc) hipster, really. Bits of it are really influential on hipsterism though.
(I agree, it's too easy to say that transfiguration is The Reason Alt-Country was a thing. But it is deffo one reason hipsters went for it.)
OT: Eek!
Anybody else feel weird when an accident happens on a flight or train that one has taken many times? I know I would feel differently if it happened on the Warsaw-Gdansk route rather than the Warsaw-Krakow one.
130: Yeah --- something like Flying Nun is an interesting thing, in that in NZ, Flying Nun are just kinda alt-rock, but in the US, they are clearly ultra-hip or something. (So there's maybe a thing about distance/the other/wevs here?) The same with the Smiths/Joy Division etc.
I'm way more interested in hipsterism as, like I say, a strategy for dealing with the death of pop music, or whatevs, than as a broad catch-all-term for youth culture, which is what it becomes once you let Radiohead in. Because like, this is possibly the tyranny of closeness, but there really is a different thing going with Radiohead and then Neutral Milk Hotel, or Vampire Weekend. (Maybe also there's a thing about late hipsterity that is way more obvious, and when you try and push the term back it gets murky and messy, but that's no reason not to try.)
Picture me scratching my head.
Like, what death of pop music?
I've been to Gdansk.
You liar! You have been to Gdansk!
Like, The death of pop music, as a comparison to say, the death of painting. (The whole argument's a blatant attempt to reuse the work of Y. A Blois andOctober from the 1980s on simulation art in a pretty tendentious way.)
So, say, Lady Gaga as just rehashing previous forms, or like 122's general feeling that there's no Golden Age. The sense that we've kinda reached a stop in popular music, & there's nothing left to do. (Obviously pop music isn't dead everywhere. But even someone massively NEW like MIA is also just a Clash rehash. So that's a Thing.)
|| Quick bleg: a non-dairy condiment into which one might dip artichoke leaves. Ideas?|>
I don't really think Lady Gaga is just rehashing previous forms. Her songs are weirdly not-melodic and not-pretty in a way I'm not used to hearing in pop music.
140: Oil and balsamic vinegar dressing?
Really? Gaga's basically just a bundle of quotations from other people as far as I can tell. (Jessie J is a less important but striking example of the same thing.) (From the name on down.)
Isn't mayo dairy? (Oh, it's not. Duh.) I think of mayo as being the standard thing to eat on artichokes, because we used to do that growing up. So now I'm defensive that I didn't offer that up, first.
Garlic oil and Dijon mustard seems to be the winner.
Nope. Looks gross. Mayo w lemon.
How is mayo not dairy? It has egg yolks.
Except in the strange world of shortened grocery store section names ("Eggs and Dairy" --&rt; "Dairy") eggs are not dairy.
&rt; should be >. The hell happened there?
I think the "joke" in this caption may have appeared here in the past.
I don't know from hipsters and their music, but I still always get a kick out of Jeffrey Lewis's "Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror".
I thought aioli was canonical for artichoke leaves (and it is delicious). I wouldn't call it dairy.
123:
hipsterity
hipsterism
It's awful, but I really don't know what is this hipsterism, -dom, or -ity of which you all speak. I can't have a conversation in which I parse the fine points, or endeavor to put my finger on what it is, though (apparently) we all know it when we see it. It's like you're all making up a name for something that I've only ever heard referred to, but never encountered.
It's weird. Am I getting old?
Back on the farm, we had to wake up before dawn to go milk the chickens.
152.2 I fucking love Jeffrey Lewis --- I saw him play soeoe's livig room in Edgeware a few ears ago. I a aware this akes e uavoidably hipster.
(his keboard is fucked, sorr for he issig leers.)
Issig leers can be quite flattering in some contexts.
Oddly enough, we had the "are eggs dairy" discussion at my lab the other day. It was agreed that while they are not, they do serve a somewhat similar purpose to dairy, and that optimally you would have one master section containing milk products, egg products, and placenta.
115: Radiohead aren't at all hipster. How could they be?
Because "hipsterism" is musical / cultural fashionability, which predates whatever you're talking about as "hipsterism," which I'm having trouble making sense of. And a lot of this kind of discussion just sounds fishy to me, like this in 123:
But there's also a like, showmanship to it. A display of ineffability: I can take this terribly, impossibly uncool thing, and make it work.
It's just free-form speculation about motives that has little or nothing perceptibly (to me) to do with what many people are doing. Why all these contortions about how "alt-country" musicians are supposedly "displaying ineffability" when -- as is AFAICT the case with most of them that I've ever met, through gigs and music festivals -- the far more parsimonious explanation is that they actually just like the music, and are playing what they like? I don't see that it's describing anything very real, or if it is that there is reason to call it "hipsterism."
161: Yeah, my contact with people who've had some brushes with popularity in popular music suggest that none of them has even the slightest idea why the audience that catapults them to whatever level of stardom they achieve is into them.
I mean, the thing is, obviously there are hipsters. You can't throw a rock in Williamsburg without hitting one, right? And the composition of who those people are, their precise class background, their general and particular taste in music, film, fashion etc. and the language they use -- all of that stuff is always in flux. You've got some people (mostly men, but a few women too) who wind up kind of ossifying into their scene(s) in such a way that they become something like a permanent hipster (or at least for like 20 years or so, which is forever in hipster terms). People who run art galleries or motorcycle shops or coffeeshops, or coffeshops that double as art galleries of motorcycle-themed art. But the crest of the wave formation for hipsters is always that 22-29 tranche of upper-middle class kids and their imitators who like to give the impression that they don't care about what's popular, even while they slavishly follow the popularity of various cultural producers, only to drop them the second the wrong sort of people start to find them interesting. And of course, it's mostly a white thing, but with a little soupcon of tokenism just so everyone can applaud your cosmopolitanism and rejection of your parents' supposed values.
156: I like him, too, but that doesn't change the fact that he continues to refuse to buy me a car. Come on, Dad!
N.B.: My father does not make YouTube music videos.
Like, here's a thing: back in the, oh, 90s, I guess, you'd go to a cool coffee shop, and the barrista would have her hair pinned or trussed up kind of higgledy-piggledy, sticking out in geometrical directions here and there, which was kind of cute. She might be wearing an ill-fitting teeshirt and jeans, or khakis or whatever. She might have a tattoo or be wearing thick-framed glasses, or all of these things.
It was a cool coffee shop because it allowed dogs, and provided used newspapers and magazines to read, and checkerboards if one were so inclined.
The people who ran and frequented the place might know or be involved in an art show that might involve a piece like: a coiled garden hose. Or a used pizza box with cigarette butts crushed out in it. Sigh.
I saw a piece like that at a local show. A coiled green garden hose on the floor, next to it on the floor an old Casio keyboard with two of its keys taped down, to emit a droning alto "ehrrrrrr" chord. Strangedumb.
Was that proto-hipster? My sense is that hipsters are more stylish, not quite so awkward.
156: I fucking love Jeffrey Lewis + 163
Excuse enough to link a more recent semi-on topic song of his, "Cult Boyfriend".
Like, I could tell you exactly who I mean by "hipster" for right now, March, 2012 in Mpls., but that would only partially overlap with any other scene, or any other given time period here. There's going to be some elements that overlap broadly, but then again there will be things that are totally alien to hipsters in Chicago that are commonplace in Portland or DC. But it's not regional in the same sense that "OC punk" or "Seattle bike culture" would be.
22-29 tranche of upper-middle class kids
Sigh. I'm so old!
I had a thought today, and though it's probably super obvious, whatever: another thing about "the hipster," at least in its male variant, is simply that caring at all about one's aesthetic self-presentation (here we're talking about the visual signifiers of hipsterdom) already differentiates one from many, if not most, (straight) American men, who seem to dress as if they just don't know or don't care how to pick out clothes. Professional sorts mostly find their way into the Banana Republic-ish look, and that can obviously be done with plenty of flair, but the hipster visual aesthetic is clearly distinct from the BR one (except insofar as the BR one is taken so far overboard as to be a parody).
[M]any, if not most, (straight) American men, who seem to dress as if they just don't know or don't care how to pick out clothes.
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
We've moved on to hating you because you have a girlfriend, Flip.
And that song in 152.2 is pretty great. I really wish I had a pair of those sunglasses tonight for my Jarvis impression. We'll see what cheap imitations Walgreens stocks.
167: How is this new? Is the (male) hipster (just) a dandy?
I'm having trouble seeing what's new about the phenomenon of a culture/scene of people who attend to what's currently cool, attempt to generate that cool themselves, mostly wind up feeding off whatever the scene is marking as cool, lose interest if they can't tell what's cool any more, and so on.
That is, I'd had some impression that there was something distinctive about hipsterdom that differentiated it from past iterations. Perhaps it would have to do with our late capitalist times.
165: The Crass covers are funny, but kinda unlistenable too. I dunno, that whole style of cutesy-poo shoe-gazing lo-fi whatever the hell they call it just generally leaves me cold.
Is the (male) hipster (just) a dandy?
No! Christ, no. A thousand times no! Beau Brummell is spinning in his grave at the very suggestion.
It's just free-form speculation about motives that has little or nothing perceptibly (to me) to do with what many people are doing. Why all these contortions about how "alt-country" musicians are supposedly "displaying ineffability" when -- as is AFAICT the case with most of them that I've ever met, through gigs and music festivals -- the far more parsimonious explanation is that they actually just like the music, and are playing what they like? I don't see that it's describing anything very real, or if it is that there is reason to call it "hipsterism."
But that's just the intentional fallacy. There's no reason to assume that a musician has any insight into what they are doing on a broader level.
Like, Natilo's description just doesn't describe say, punk, or post-punk, or new romanticism, or disco, or rock & roll, or any of hundreds of other youth subcultures. So why is it treated as if hipsterism is this eternal thing? It isn't; it's historically bounded and located in quite a specific place and time.
And that's why I want to keep Radiohead and Mogwai out of hipsterism: because they just aren't doing the same thing, they don't partake of the same cultural strategies. (Radiohead, like I say, are British indie rock, which Just Isn't Hipster.) If you just use hipsterism to mean fashionable, it's a meaningless term that doesn't relate to how people actually use it. (We already use the word fashionable for that.)
173: Sorry. I am unclear on what a hipster is: the pictures people have posted over time have shown somewhat dandyish fellows. But that might be hipsterism on the runway, as it were.
Topically, I just made a mix with my new DJ doohickey. It's extremely weird, and honestly sort of amateurish, but what the hell, I will upload it for you people.
"If you noticed me, I wasn't well-dressed."
Well, there's elements of the flaneur or dandy present, but not in the really traditional sense. But hipster presentation is also emphatically not about emulating the spiv.
Also, most hipsters look awful. To wit, Look at This Fucking Hipster.
I mean, to say that musicians just like the music they make doesn't help. Why do they like it?
Hipster presentation involves too much irony to be a dandy, who does actually want to look good.
176 cont'd: ...aaah, never mind. Work in progress.
174: Well, like I said, I don't accept that a "hipsterism" that is "historically bounded and located in quite a specific place and time" and that's governed by the priorities you're assigning to it exists. (And I think Natilo's description is observable in a much wider variety of subcultures than you're granting.) That you're assuming in advance that it does seems to me like question-begging, or perhaps just like a poor choice of terminology for some much more specific and defensible cultural construct that you do have in mind.
180: I mean, to say that musicians just like the music they make doesn't help. Why do they like it?
I dunno, maybe they like it because it sounds nice? Maybe they have a whole range of different reasons for liking it? Why should I assume -- as you wish to -- that there's some invisible zeitgeist of "irony" or "end game" or what have you driving them to like it? Cultural constructs that have to be put together speculatively in this fashion are on dubious ground. (There are often macro- cultural forces acting on people in ways they're not necessarily conscious of, but things like "irony" are a claim of conscious intent. This "hipsterism" you're proposing seems a very confused thing.)
Now you guys have got me all confused again. I'm going to need to cipher this further.
Why should I assume -- as you wish to -- that there's some invisible zeitgeist of "irony" or "end game" or what have you driving them to like it?
Because it lets us say more interesting things than just: they like it. "end game" is hardly an invisible zeitgeist argument; it's a theory that a certain kind of style functions in a certain way. And that's a pretty useful thing, because we can think about stuff at a higher level than the desperately impoverished `it sounds nice'.
It's hardly my proposition! Cf n+1.
The hipsterism you propose is far more confused in its ahistoricity and desire to consume everything that's a vaguely yoof-oriented subculture. (For instance, no-one will have described Radiohead as hipster until hipster happened; instead the general critical discussion will have been back to other existing parts of British indie, american college rock, and grunge. But now, there are bands that we do talk about in terms of hipsterness. So clearly something changed.)
I'm having a problem with the Radiohead classification dispute, I must say: to the extent that I grasp what may be distinctive about hipsterishness (if we grant that it is distinctive), Radiohead doesn't seem that.
I find myself with Keir on that, and don't really understand 69's view that Someone who wants to claim that Radiohead of all people -- who've played a large role in shaping and partaking of the current pop-culture zeitgeist, remix culture and all -- aren't at all "hipster" looks to me to have fallen victim to the relentless and inchoate urge to turn "hipster" into an epithet that applies only to The Other Guy, contradictions be damned.
There's a lot going on in that sentence. Is it completely ridiculous of me to feel that Radiohead are sui generis (in their way)? I don't know if that's important, but it seems to be. If it's even true. I don't have enough data.
Yeah, I think LC is right about this alt-country stuff, there's a big difference between trying to render Shania Twain cool and coming to the realization that a lot of those outlaw country guys have actually been pretty cool all along.
An even more interesting case: people who are really into string bands. It's really quite implausible that they're trying to make the uncool cool, because "string band music" isn't even on the map of uncool stuff, and many of them seem waaaaay too earnest about it for that to be plausible (except perhaps as an explanation of how they got into it, but even there it's pretty uncharitable, IMO). This is even the case with people like Jack Rose, who got their start doing that (mostly) quite annoying "new weird america" stuff.
None of the subsequent discussion of hipsterity is making me reconsider 50 (or, for that matter, 12).
outlaw country guys have actually been pretty cool all along.
But have they? It's not entirely obvious they have been cool all along, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to realise it. And it still doesn't explain why people realised at this point that this stuff was cool.
OMG, I have to read n+1 in order to understand what this "endgame" business is??
I mean, to say that musicians just like the music they make doesn't help. Why do they like it?
Personally? Because it's fun and interesting and escapist to play music with other people, whose collected influences, talents, moods, and whateverness occasionally spit out an appreciable riff or a song or an album.
As for other musicians? No clue. Ask those weirdos.
I am unclear on what a hipster is
Comment #11. Everybody who uses the word has a different definition.
it still doesn't explain why people realised at this point that this stuff was cool.
I think Keir is fucking with us at this point. Stuff is not cool in and of itself, in its essence, once and for all: people make it cool. They render it cool (or not), perhaps cool again, or cool for the first time, but coolness is not something that is possessed by the thing in its own right.
OMG, I have to read n+1 in order to understand what this "endgame" business is??
O god no. You have to read October from the eighties to understand that bit of abtrusity. (Actually Y. A Blois curated a show about it that google will find for you, which gives you a rough-ish idea.)
When my sister and I had to explain "hipster" to my mom this summer, we said that it was basically summed up by the attitude towards PBR, where the hipster isn't drinking PBR because it's at the beer distributor and cheap, or because they think it's good, but it's fun to pretend to order it. Mom was a little bit confused.
(PBR is still parent beer to me. Rolling Rock is still crappy local beer to me. )
So, in short, we thought hipsterism is characterized by an attitude towards consumption that isn't ironic exactly, but... let's say aware the consumption choices are one way a person performs the kind of person they want to be, and that informs the rest of the choices.
Also baby sis thought that you had to be old, like 30, to be a real hipster, and so I stole her beer from her.
Rolling Rock is still crappy local beer to me.
The beer that made Latrobe obscure!
I've read 195.3-style definitions before, but I can't remember where.
It's not entirely obvious they have been cool all along, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to realise it
Yeah, to the extent that something's being cool implies its being generally known that it's cool, I'll buy that; I meant, rather, that all along the outlaw country guys had qualities that (at the time of the alt-country thing, or whatever) were known to be cool—hence one's occasionally hearing that e.g. they were punk rock. That is something that can be realized, and it implies that no one had to come along and make them cool (in the sense of offering some kind of revisionary interpretation) or that when Uncle Tupelo covered the Carter Family, they were somehow tweaking the CF, or expressing their genial powers in taking dross and making it kitsch.
And it still doesn't explain why people realised at this point that this stuff was cool.
Well, no, that's certainly true. And that's a really interesting question. But I don't think it has much to do with "the hipster", so much as why the hipster has taken on just this form, and that the answer to that question is going to be pretty broad and general and not operate at the level of the individual at all—which is where the critique of the hipster (as I understand it) does operate.
195.3 is good.
But it doesn't explain why just these consumption choices are the choices made, or why you would want to be (perform being) the sort of person who makes them!!!
201: Well, no, but it's compatible with thinking that sometimes the particular choices are made because they're ironic, or being reclaimed, or just the juxtaposition of one kind of self-presentation with another. E.g., I'm hip, young, thin, and stylish, so when I wear this ugly Christmas sweater, it is plastic to what it signifies, or whatever, whereas when mom wears it, she is just outdated. That man wears a trucker cap because he is a trucker, or gets lots of caps from companies at his job, but I wear it because it's so unexpected...
And I think it needs to be that high-level because it isn't always irony, or liking-things-that-are-bad, but more like adopting a costume while knowing that's exactly what you're doing. So whyever these consumption choices are made, they're not tracking any kind of intrinsic value, but what it might be made to signify, which varies with time and context.
I stand by my previous definition of "hipster":
To me, the consummate hipster doesn't do anything. Nothing. Specifically, nothing creative or useful. That's the defining characteristic. Period.
The complaint in 201 isn't mine; I think such an explanation is orthogonal to the question of hipsterdom as such.
At some point of course the trucker cap is no longer unexpected but also not beyond or even approaching the pale of what would be worn in … whatever the relevant manner is.
But I think that there was a revisionary impulse (all criticism is revisionary.) I certainly don't think that Uncle Tupelo were engaged in an hipster project. I think that later, parts of alt-country became hipsterised. (I guess one argument might be to distinguish a revival style and appropriation/ironic/etc. So alt-country has a revival style thing, and also an appropriative style.)
Because when hipsters use some pre-existing bit of culture, no-one thinks they are revivalists.
I'm not really interested in the critique of the hipster as a personal critique; that's somehow facile.
The question of why the hipster exists and why the hipster exists as they do is I think linked; I do not think you could have hipsterism without having this hipsterism. (Counterfactuals blargh.)
201: no, but it does push things towards that question, which is good.
I've read 195.3-style definitions before, but I can't remember where.
A real hipster would trace back the lineage of 195.3-style definitions, and insist that the original ones were better.
I guess I have not been quite clear about what Keir's thesis regarding alt-country is.
I do not think you could have hipsterism without having this hipsterism
But we've actually had several different hipsterisms, if "hipsterisms" are distinguished by the content of the choices.
So whyever these consumption choices are made, they're not tracking any kind of intrinsic value, but what it might be made to signify
This. Hipsters signify.
202: Honestly, I thought this kind of analysis of hipsterity -- participating in PBR and trucker caps, in what is now an obviously self-conscious irony -- was sort of outdated at this point. Do hipsters really do that any more? I thought the new hipster was earnest and sincere.
I didn't analyze it in terms of irony, but in terms of performance.
207: I'm not sure if we're disagreeing and I've had too much wine to care, but I think looking at content isn't going to do it at all.
211: Okay. 209 should be: Honestly, I thought this kind of analysis of hipsterity -- participating in PBR and trucker caps, in what is now an obviously self-conscious performance -- was sort of outdated at this point.
But we've actually had several different hipsterisms, if "hipsterisms" are distinguished by the content of the choices.
Yeah; & we have had several modernisms if modernism are distinguished by the content of the choices.
But modernism is still historically determined, I think!
So we do need a story of hipsterism that explains the changes as well as the continuities.
I think you can be self-conscious about being earnest and sincere. I mean, people earnestly get into jam-making and pickles and crocheting and furniture restoration or whatever, but it is hipster only if it is self-aware. Otherwise we have to count Mormon grandmothers as hipsters because they crochet and make jam.
but I think looking at content isn't going to do it at all.
I don't intend to be disagreeing with you and I don't disagree with you about this, which is why I think that Keir (with whom I do intend to be disagreeing) is barking up the wrong tree. (Though the content questions are interesting.) The point of 207 is that if you think the contents are essential then there's already been a multiplicity of types of hipster. (I actually am quite uncertain that there's any one thing lying behind the many things that people have labeled "hipster", even the "virtuouso/performer of consumption" thing, since many whom people often want to label hipsters just aren't like that at all: like this barista is someone many would, I'm sure, denigrate as a hipster, but he probably nonetheless is genuinely invested in making coffee. He might be a hipster on other grounds. This is one of the things I complained about (linked in the post that I wrote rather than making a comment here because, I don't know, I didn't want to take that long to write a mere comment?) about Greif; he wanted to say that the hipster has created nothing, but he got there by defining hipster in part as one who creates nothing, but merely consumes artfully.)
I mean, people earnestly get into jam-making and pickles and crocheting and furniture restoration or whatever, but it is hipster only if it is self-aware. Otherwise we have to count Mormon grandmothers as hipsters because they crochet and make jam.
I wish I had just written something relatively lengthy about just this.
Seriously, even (some/many) of those people needn't be thought of, I think, as being self-consciously sincere and earnest rather than being self-conscious about thinking things that are Hand-Made and Local and Real and Blood-and-Soily are thereby good. I think they can be/often are just straight-up earnest in thinking those things.
(I think it's at least infelicitous to say that Mormon grandmothers are earnest about jam-making. Or at least: there's a difference between the earnestness about jam-making that Granny exhibits, and that which (e.g.) I exhibit, and the difference isn't self-consciousness about the earnestness, but about the jam-making.)
In the post you argue that the dislike is because there is felt to be no there there. Personally, I like things that are empty.
214: We may be using "self-conscious" and "self-aware" differently here.
I'd have said that being earnest and sincere means casting aside self-consciousness. Your concern is not really with your self-presentation.
people earnestly get into jam-making and pickles and crocheting and furniture restoration or whatever, but it is hipster only if it is self-aware.
This is beginning to make no sense to me: if there's a hipster way to be into jam-making, then it's not earnest or sincere.
The ironic shit has to got to go.
But modernism is still historically determined, I think!
Well, sure, but there's a difference between the question "what kind of thing is modernism?", perhaps with the addendum, "that it could take on these forms?", and the question "how came it that modernism went from this form to that?". We might say that modernism is a form or complex of attitudes to (many different things) which contained implicitly within it the capacity to take on many different appearances, and that owing to conditions x, y, and z did take on these; similar explanations might account for its rise to prominence in the first place, as well, but I think the question of what thing it is that did take on these more concrete forms can be pursued in isolation from the question why it took on those forms. I gather you disagree about that kind of approach in general, though.
In the post you argue that the dislike is because there is felt to be no there there. Personally, I like things that are empty.
I don't understand the "no there there" complaint to differ substantially from what Cala was getting at (or what I took her to be getting at) in 195.3, though, except perhaps that Cala's formulation suggests more in the way of an aspiration eventually to have a there there. (The use of "performs" rather than "becomes" in "one way a person performs the kind of person they want to be" weakens that suggestion (to me) rather a lot, though.)
Terming it a complaint is the difference. That's why I think the Sherry Levine reference is useful: there's no there there, but that doesn't mean nothing's happening.
(Yeah, I tend to dislike that approach. Or perhaps I tend to think it is too easy?)
I think there is a there there. But I think it's performance to the extent that part of it is about being the sort of person who can make his own pickles, not just about having good pickles or making them. It's really a kind of renaissance man in the age of leisure. (another glass of wine and I'll go full metal continental!)
Keir, you could provide us with a link to the Sherry Levine and October and endgame references you've made a couple of times. It's common courtesy.
Oops. Pretend the italics close tag was in order there.
Sadly, not really -- most of it is trapped behind academic paywalls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherrie_Levine is pretty competent at explaining what Levine did.
But I think it's performance to the extent that part of it is about being the sort of person who can make his own pickles, not just about having good pickles or making them. It's really a kind of renaissance man in the age of leisure.
I can get on board with most of that. I mean, if I just wanted good jam, I could buy it. But: first, I'm not sure how much it's "being the sort of person who can make …" rather than the actual the actual making. Though presumably that can vary from case to case. And second, if it's about being that sort of person, what's the performance? I mean, it's quite easy to be the sort of person who can make his own pickles. It's not like a rich person being a common person, which is actually difficult (if you don't really make yourself poor), nor is it like a modern Portlander being a 19th-century bartender, which is actually impossible. In those cases all that's left is performance, along with actually being some of the associated things (a person who lives someplace shitty; a person who can actually make his own bitters), which might be the vehicles of the performance. But insofar as all that's going on is a desire to (be able to) make certain things which it is not necessary to make for oneself anymore, you can actually be someone like that.
The performance could come in if what was important to you was something like: generally being recognized as that kind of person. (Cf. Pippin, or Kant (the mannerist aper of genius "stands and moves as if he were on a stage, in order to be gaped at" (AK5:319), because the best he can do is act in a way that he thinks will be accounted genial, not being himself a genius.)) But I think that's just another way of saying that you're not sincere about self-consciously pickling, but you're self-conscious about being sincere about pickling, i.e., you're not really sincere about pickling at all, but you'd like sincerity to characterize you somehow. And it may be that many people actually are like that, and that the present historical moment encourages it, but I'm not sure it's nearly as widespread as enthusiasm for pickling is (which the present historical moment might also explain).
It's really a kind of renaissance man in the age of leisure.
This, sure.
I must be getting slap-happy. Now I'm thinking: Okay, you earnestly and sincerely want to be the kind of person who makes jam. Keep at it! Eventually you'll just be a person who makes jam.
That trajectory works fine. It would be a drag indeed never to get past the performative aspect of the endeavor.
230 before seeing 228, without a doubt.
And second, if it's about being that sort of person, what's the performance?
Hmm. Maybe being the kind of person who chose to be the sort of person who is an expert in homebrewing or pickles (as opposed to someone who learned it just because that's what was done in their day, or in their social class or whatever. ) I see it as mostly a good thing. But I like the way you nested the operators better, and I'm off to unironically watch some Downton Abbey soap opera and unself-consciously covet all the clothes and the shoes.
185: Because it lets us say more interesting things than just: they like it.
Well, that's all very nice, but I'd prefer some evidence that "we" are saying accurate things. It's possible to construct "interesting" castles out of air and dance "interesting" angels on pins -- even salutary if it proves to be enjoyable fiction -- but if we're trying to say interesting and accurate things I'd like a bit more to go on. And if "the hipster" is something more than just a kind of vague swipe, if it's supposed to be describing something that is actually happening, I want some sign that it is doing so beyond speculative declarations. If "hipsterism" is only really useful as a descriptor of fashionability, and attempts to press it beyond that are foolhardy (as I tend to think they are) attempts to make it more "precise" are obfuscations, not clarifications, and not "useful."
That's not to say that everything you're saying isn't interesting. The "end game" thing seems a gesture toward a serious point about pop culture, though I can't quite work out what the point is supposed to be. But it's simply inaccurate to say "the hipster" "didn't happen" before the last, say, dozen-to-twenty years. That time span is very far from having invented the term; it only (and particularly the past decade) invented the widespread obsession with building rhetorical edifices and mechanisms directed at it. That obsession is evidence that something is going on, but is far from being evidence that there's something coherent there, beyond the disparate patterns of fashion cycles, that is actually being described, any more than (say) Republican rhetorical obsession about "socialism" is evidence that they've been helpfully describing something that is actually socialism. I think the action is actually in the invention of the category "hipster" and the role it plays in sublimating -- or functioning as a kind of minor lightning-rod for -- resentment and confusion about the "end game" of American and Western cultural and economic preeminence.
the invention of the category "hipster"
More accurately, that should be "the invention of the 'hipster' as a charged category."
But I don't think I am the only one who thinks that there are people we can call hipsters, they are like the thing we are talking about, and that they didn't exist fifteen-twenty years ago.
And we can do this in large part by defining what isn't hipster. So we can say that British indie isn't hipster. There is British hipsterity, but it isn't Blur or Oasis. And that's already moved hipsterity away from just being a catchall term for fashionability, right? And we can repeat that process again, by saying that post-punk isn't hipster. Nor's New Romanticism, nor rave, etc. And so there's a shape emerging there, and we can talk coherently about what's happening in there.
And there's clearly a consensus that certain things are fashionable but not hipster, or were fashionable but weren't hipster. (You couldn't describe goth as hipster for instance.)
The Iditarod: definitely not hipster.
236: But I don't think I am the only one who thinks that there are people we can call hipsters
Yes, but so what? There are plenty of people who think there are people they can call "socialists" and that Obama is one of them. Does that make their views descriptively useful about either socialism or Obama? I think it just points to a resentment, or set of resentments, that's driving misappropriation of the term.
The evolution of obsession with the imagined "hipster" follows a recognizable pattern, too (in prior cases the obessesions with "hippies" and "hep cats" as the supposed source of social ills and Undesirable Phenomena, and categories that functioned mainly to distract from far larger and more identifiable Undesirable Phenomena that people preferred not to confront). But I don't know how to fit your remarks into that theory, which is also speculative (albeit on what I think is firmer ground than your speculations). So, if the "hipsterism" business is different, why? Why, for instance, do you think we can simply assume British indie "isn't hipster"? The answer can't be just because it predates rhetorical obsession with moralizing about the presumed irony or insincerity of "hipsters;" that's just assuming your conclusion in advance.
For my money, you don't have enough comon background established about what is to start defining "the hipster" negatively. It'd be a lot more useful to describe what its core characteristics should be. For example:
- Presumed obsession with "irony" and "kitsch." The "hipster" of our era didn't invent either one -- far from it, their prominent history goes back to Dada and reaction against Romanticism at the very least -- and if anything, AFAICT the tide of "irony" has pulled steadily back since the mid-Nineties. Moreovr, both of these are things that require self-consciousness and intent to be applicable. So, for instance, if alt-country is supposedly "ironic," it shouldn't be hard to find "alt-country" artists who think they are doing the whole thing as a kind of schtick or kitschy joke. Is it easy to find such people? What about the common touchstone of "ironic facial hair"?
- Obsession with authenticity, things "organic" and "vegan" and "vegetarian" and "slow" and so on. This is clearly the notion of "hipster" conceived by the author of "Hipster Hitler," and yet they're not the kind of thing that one-time hipster keystones like Vice or Pitchfork ever obsessed about, and the bulk of skinny-jeaned people to be found at a Death Cab for Cutie show couldn't give a shit about them. They are actually more characteristically yuppie obsessions (perhaps "swipple," if you will, to introduce another woefully imprecise category into the mix), and moreover it is not at all clear that the people nursing these particular tendencies actually care about being "hip" or fashionable or up to date. Indeed, many of them are habitual complaints about the imagined "hipster." They can be found in their legions at folk festivals across North America, believe me.
- Recycling and remix culture. This is supposed to be "hipster," but it's not clear to me how "hipster" it is except insofar as remixing has been sufficiently popularized to the point that even the very hippest of people profess to be right into it (including Radiohead, incidentally, who are in the process of promoting a remix album). Neo-Eighties music and style is recognizably "hipster" because it is currently fashionable, not necessarily because Gotye or Bat for Lashes have declared or appear to think that what they're doing is either uniquely "ironic" or uniquely "authentic."
- Posh, shallow bastards appropriating pop culture and claiming to represent it. (As venerable a phenomenon as the very existence of popular culture, going right back to the birth of jazz, and continuous ever since.) ttaM was forthright above that this is what he was really driving at, and it seems to me to be the real target of a lot of the actual resentment, and understandably so. But if that's really what's happening here, why are perfectly serviceable terms like "wanker" or "twit" not applicable and in fact more useful than "hipster," which has already been spread across several other categories of endeavour?
- Trendy cod-intellectualism. (Most certainly as old a phenomenon as "free jazz" and "progressive rock," let alone Devo, The The and any number of other Eighties bands.) The apparent distinction between prior iterations of this tendency and current complaints about "the hipster" seems to me to be, apart from minor variations in the specifics, that many people have simply forgotten about earlier iterations in pop culture.
I've seen all of the above cited in various times and places as definitive of "the hipster." And in application, all of them seem to invoke "hipster" as a substitute for much more complicated and confused currents of resentment, and none of them seem actually worthwhile as descriptors of some coherent phenomenon we could usefully call "the hipster," excepting as a vague catch-all epithet. But maybe your example is different. If so, how is it different?
I don't see what's so complicated. There are people who live in Williamsburg, and have a lot in common with the other people who live in Williamsburg. It's convenient to have a word for those people (and the people like them in other places) and that word is hipster.
Well, yes, there you have it. If people would just say "Williamsburg hipsters" it would save a hell of a lot of time (except I even doubt that the Williamsburg hipster scene itself breaks down nearly as simply as people seem to think it does).
(For instance, Chan Marshall a.k.a. "Cat Power" is undeniably hipster in the Williamsburg sense -- in fact is something of a poster child of that sensibility -- and yet AFAICT doesn't fit into any of commonly-complained-about "hipster" categories above.)
Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm gonna try the Guy Gavriel Kay- Le Guin - Bujold - Chabon route (in that order?) and see where that takes us.
Making fun of hipsters is itself a cultural identifier and not a rational intellectual point.
Right again! UPETGI is two for two.
Yes, but so what? There are plenty of people who think there are people they can call "socialists" and that Obama is one of them. Does that make their views descriptively useful about either socialism or Obama? I think it just points to a resentment, or set of resentments, that's driving misappropriation of the term.
But at that point we may as well give up language, because every word is misused. It doesn't mean we can't talk about things.
Why, for instance, do you think we can simply assume British indie "isn't hipster"? The answer can't be just because it predates rhetorical obsession with moralizing about the presumed irony or insincerity of "hipsters;" that's just assuming your conclusion in advance.
Yes, it is exactly because it comes before, because it precedes, the concept of hipster. (This is like saying: why can't the Baroque be modern? It can't simply be because it comes before all this rhetorical obsession with change and nowness.) You seem to be convinced that the word hipster is some kind of terrible slur and desperately want to be able to empty it of all content in order to be able to simply toss it out as merely a moral panic.
But that's not good enough --- we clearly are able to use the word hipster in a meaningful way. And I am not going to try and define hipster here with references to source materials, because that is too much work, in the same way as it would be too much work to define, say, post-punk.
Look at these fucking hipsters.
(Anyway, my operational definition is "anyone who complains about them" - see Hackney Hipster Hate, a blog by someone who hangs out around East London street markets of a Saturday morning with a big Nikon camera taking photos of people whose style interests them and putting them on the web with sardonic comments. This is, I think we will agree, about as hipsterish as you can fucking get. I know I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to go round the buoy and drive the bugger home.)
I was totally going to adduce Alex's observation about Hackney Hipster Hate as evidence for something way way up thread, but I am damned if I can remember what now.
participating in PBR ... was sort of outdated at this point.
I can testify to the fact that folks in the neighborhood of hipsterdom still drink PBR, though the precise guise of their enjoyment thereof is obfuscated by the fact that, at $1 per bottle, it was by far the cheapest booze at the "Berlin-style ping-pong" (Rundlauf?) party two nights back.
Also, I found LC's 239 interesting, if perhaps going too far in the direction of casting out the concept entirely, and now I will go to bed.
Posh, shallow bastards appropriating pop culture and claiming to represent it ... ttaM was forthright above that this is what he was really driving at, and it seems to me to be the real target of a lot of the actual resentment, and understandably so.
Yeah, that's probably right in terms of what annoys me. The superficial contemporary signifiers of that are secondary. Alex is also right re: Hackney Hipster Hate, and the like.
Although it's fun to play Keir's genre game:
Nu-rave - hipster
Romo - hipster
[although the instincts behind both, probably sincere]
Landfill indie - not hipster
Grime - not hipster, etc.
the "Berlin-style ping-pong" (Rundlauf?) party two nights back
And here I thought it would be impossible to scale greater heights of OMG-these-hipsters-WTF than the actual Dr. Pong bar. (And it's not "Berlin-style" ping-pong. You can see kids playing that way at every school across Germany.)
238: The Iditarod: definitely not hipster.
Yet.
246: But at that point we may as well give up language, because every word is misused.
Well, I was sort of aiming for trying to make sure we're using words meaningfully instead of just "talking about things." When you say "we clearly are able to use the word hipster in a meaningful way," you're assuming your conclusion again. That anyone preoccupied with pressing "hipster" beyond its workaday definition of fashionability is actually using the word "meaningfully" is precisely what is not clear. This is what I was getting at in 239.
You seem to be convinced that the word hipster is some kind of terrible slur and desperately want to be able to empty it of all content in order to be able to simply toss it out as merely a moral panic.
Well, it is mostly a slur, and I am indeed tempted to toss out its usage as such as merely a moral panic, but even more rarified attempts at it (like yours) are not convincing me that I'm the one "emptying it of all content." I think it's the actual usages that are doing that, and that you have the problem backwards again.
Of course, you guys would pick the time I go on holiday to talk about Pulp. Bastards. Anyway, congrats to Trapnel on the tickets. You'll have an awesome time - I went to two of the UK gigs last year and they were both amazing.
As for hipsterism and music, I'm almost 100% in agreement with ttaM here, and once again I think there may be some trans-Atlantic miscommunication here. There's a huge class element to hipsterism in the UK, and the comment about not knowing whether something is or isn't working class is almost comical in a UK context. Also, regardless of chronology, there's simply no way that Radiohead could ever be considered hipster in the UK - they're massively mainstream. Put it this way: if you've ever been on the cover of Q, or for that matter on the inside of Q, you're not hipster.
I'm really no expert on this subject, but doesn't the whole PBR thing really blow a hole in the notion that one can say that this, that, or the other music is or is not 'hipster'? It's an ordinary beer. Hundreds of thousands drink it, every day, mostly without irony. And yet, there's certainly a subculture going on here. The same can surely be said of brands of hats, styles of pants, etc.
I've never heard hipster used to mean "fashionable" except in the sense of "fashionable among hipsters."
That is, I don't think the Brits are adequately dealing with the (mis)appropriation of the mainstream strand which is, if not as important as inside knowledge of the obscure, certainly an element of any culture that can be called 'hipster' in the US.
What am I missing?
(And for our British friends, here's the wikipedia compilation of recent pop culture appearances of PBR:
Pabst Blue Ribbon was featured in South Park episode "The Poor Kid" [17]
The brand is mentioned in the 1986 film "Blue Velvet," by David Lynch.
Clint Eastwood drinks this brand of beer in the Motion Picture "Gran Torino".
Dale gives his buddy Tucker a can of "PBR" with a straw towards the end of the 2010 comedy horror "Tucker & Dale vs Evil."
"Pabst Blue Robot" is featured in the Futurama episode "The Route of All Evil."
In the Big D And The Kid's Table music video, "Shining On", The lead singer is seen pouring Pabst in his cup under the table while singing, "We bring a backpack full of Pabst, ooo, under the table we fill our glass"
Asher Roth's 2011 mixtape is titled "Pabst & Jazz"
The Zac Brown Band's song "Toes" in the last part of the song " a PBR on the way"
Singer Lana Del Rey mentions the brand in her song "This Is What Makes Us Girls" from the album Born to Die (Lana Del Rey album).
The band Freezepop mentions "PBR" in their song, "Less Talk More Rokk.")
So now we can play "which of those are hipster uses of PBR and which are not." E.g. Gran Torino, definitely not hipster.
I'm not even sure there is an equivalent of the PBR-as-hipster-drink thing in the UK. I suppose if you were to drink beer ironically in the UK, it would be Special Brew, but that's too strongly associated with tramps. What does Nathan Barley drink?
254: there's simply no way that Radiohead could ever be considered hipster in the UK - they're massively mainstream.
Although the presumed relationship of "the hipster" to "the mainstream" is another one of those things that I don't think is as clear as many think it is. (It is totally hipster to want to be ahead of the curve and outside the mainstream, for instance, but I actually don't see that "hipsters" IRL exude some kind of anti-mainstream force field, and many of them in fact do listen to and enjoy "mainstream" bands more than just occasionally.) So I'm not 100% clear how the Q criterion (or its American counterpart, the MTV criterion) would really work. Did Florence + The Machine stop being hipster when they won Q's Album of the Year, or Sleigh Bells stop being hipster when they appeared on MTV? I'm pretty sure hipsters still go to their shows.
the comment about not knowing whether something is or isn't working class is almost comical in a UK context.
Yes, far more applicable to Williamsburg or Yorkville I'm sure. I thought Keir was from New Zealand for some reason, though.
256: doesn't the whole PBR thing really blow a hole in the notion that one can say that this, that, or the other music is or is not 'hipster'? It's an ordinary beer. Hundreds of thousands drink it, every day, mostly without irony. And yet, there's certainly a subculture going on here.
Yeah, and far as I can tell, PBR is a "hipster" beer because it's relatively cheap and the kind of thing that broke-assed bohemians living in Williamsburg (or elsewhere) can afford to drink. Much like Pilsner or Lucky Extra, which are also "hipster" beers (albeit less well known, no doubt because they're more common outside of Brooklyn). The belief that people are "drinking it ironically" has always sounded to me like the belief in "ironic facial hair," something more frequently imagined than actually observed in the wild. (Maybe that's just because after tasting some of these beers, I find it flat-out impossible to believe that anyone would be dedicated enough to kitsch to be drinking them ironically.)
And yet by the same token, I'm sure some people would tell you that local micro-brews are Totally Hipster.
260 -- Yeah, but the presence of the product in the movie was definitely intended to signal, probably to people already used to thinking of PBR as the ironic drink of hipsters.
LC, I think you're wrong about PBR and irony. But I don't expect to be able to convince you, and have other things to do today. Have a fine day, internet peeps.
The thing is, hipsters in the UK are definitely not broke-ass, or at least if they are they can always fall back on their parents. Like ttaM says, it's predominantly an upper middle class thing.
171: I'm having trouble seeing what's new about ... a culture/scene of people who attend to what's currently cool, attempt to generate that cool themselves, mostly wind up feeding off whatever the scene is marking as cool, lose interest if they can't tell what's cool any more, and so on.
Exactly so. That's because we're old, Parsi. Steve McQueen was cool. Everyone since is a poor imitation.
256: Hipsters who drink PBR are hipster because, or insofar as, they're appropriating the drinking of PBR. Castock covers a lot of useful ground in 239: drinking PBR in a hipster fashion, or as a hipster, is treating it as kitsch.
I would have no idea what to say about the proposition that drinking PBR as a hipster involves, say, realizing that PBR is cool, it's just that we didn't notice that before. ! Come on, the stuff is gross.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/the-marketing-of-no-marketing.html
Really leaving now.
256: Hipsters who drink PBR are hipster because, or insofar as, they're appropriating the drinking of PBR. Castock covers a lot of useful ground in 239: drinking PBR in a hipster fashion, or as a hipster, is treating it as kitsch.
Yeah, there's a distancing involved - hence "ironic" drinking. See also Hipster Hate being quintessentially hipster.
Last time I played in NYC, I got the impression that Rolling Rock (in cans! only in cans!) was replacing PBR as the cool cheap beer to drink. Which, hey, whatever, gusty bus. But PBR is simultaneously cheap and actually tastes at least vaguely like a lager, which is why I'll order it.
265: I don't think the overall assumption that "they" could all just move back home if they're broke is necessarily very well-founded either. I think it's true that bohemians tend to issue forth from various parts of the middle and upper classes, but that doesn't mean the route back is necessarily open. Whether it is depends on a lot of specifics about life circumstances.
I thought the quintessential hipster has a small trust fund guaranteeing a modest income covering rent while allowing them to hold a "job" ironically.
"they" could all just move back home
NOT WITH ALL THOSE TATTOOS THEY CAN'T
Hipster breaks down to skinny jeans or not.
PBR + skinny jeans = hipster
PBR + normal jeans = my dad
knitting + slacks = my mom/grandmother
knitting + skinny jeans = hipster
biking + spandex = annoying biker guy
biking + skinny jeans = hipster
country + giant belt buckle + Levis = rodeo star
country + giant belt buckle + skinny jeans = alt-country hipster
There are some complications or modifications that can be made as well. Like women in flowy dresses - under 40 = hipster; over 60 = old hippie. I could make a giant dichotomous key if necessary.
The thing is, hipsters in the UK are definitely not broke-ass, or at least if they are they can always fall back on their parents.
Eternal agility.
biking + skinny jeans = hipster
According to this equation today I'm a hipster, but a couple weeks ago I was an annoying biker guy.
As is well known, however, if there's one thing which is certain in this universe, it's that I am not a hipster.
273: Maybe Hipster Hitler did.
I'm reminded that my absolute favourite epithet-for-posh-poseurs of all time is "trustafarian." Now there was an epithet you cold sink your teeth into.
Is there anything useful to be gained by making a distinction between doing things sometimes viewed as hipster (drinking PBR, or wearing trucker hats, or canning your own preserves, etc.), and doing them as a hipster?
An example to illustrate: when I first moved to my last house, I poked my head into a nearby downscale bar to see what was what, and ascertained that they served only Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite, and Heineken, and they had a pool table. A couple of friends and I went there half a dozen times over the next few months, to drink (inexpensive!) Budweiser and play pool -- the pool cues were all ridiculously warped, eh? You had to learn which ones were best. It was a nice low-key place, my local bar, and the regulars were comfortable and unassuming.
A couple of months later we stopped in, and saw some graduate students I knew back at the pool table! We left hastily. What the hell? How had they found out about this place? They were performing something, I felt certain. I pretty much stopped going.
I vaguely suggest that I was not drinking Bud and playing pool with a warped cue on a somewhat threadbare table as a hipster, but they were.
Hmm, Pabst is pretty clearly associated with a regional background, isn't it? Northern/Midwestern, working class (probably even a specific industry, autos). That could only translate as a real ale in Britain - one of the basically pretty crappy but big-production ones like John Smiths or Boddingtons.
Come to think of it, Boddies had a hipsterish vogue in the 1990s, probably because Tony Wilson got his hands on its advertising budget.
Although, actually I can think of an example of being very well-off and performing kitsch proleyness by drinking horrible beer very close to hand.
although, come to think of it, I've never actually seen him drink it.
CC's link in 269 is required reading.
280: Neither have I!
(281 to everything, not any specific comment.)
Hipster is a styletribe for people who are too weak to be part of a real style tribe.
But it's simply inaccurate to say "the hipster" "didn't happen" before the last, say, dozen-to-twenty years. That time span is very far from having invented the term;
Obligatory Lord Buckley link, just in case anybody isn't already familiar with it (and, even if you are, it's better than you remember).
276: Well exactly. People talking about 'those hipsters' are referring to people they see looking a certain way at a certain time (biking, at a show, at the farmers' market) without knowing how they spend the rest of their time. I used to go to SF dive bars 'as a hipster' and fit in fine, then I'd go birding 'as a nerd' and fit in fine. Anyway, this gets back to LC's point that we're discussing a very inexact term and Cala's point about performance.
Bud and Bud Light are IMO not hipster. Hipsters have reclaimed PBR but that doesn't necessarily extend to other mass market beers. Heineken in a dive bar? Weird. We get Yuengling here as our PBR equivalent. Anyway, dive bars are awesome, even if grad students go there.
Obligatory Lord Buckley link, just in case anybody isn't already familiar with it (and, even if you are, it's better than you remember).
Srsly. There are hipsters in The Dud Avocado.
Something extraordinarily strange is happening and I don't want to say too much detail because my identity is probably obvious. Suppose you have recently been a guest in a foreign country for work-related reasons and a local acquaintance took you and a few of your American colleagues out to an apparently innocuous bar. Certainly nothing inappropriate by usual bar-going standards happened, except some mildly awkward social interactions you all attributed to being unfamiliar with the local culture. Then the people who organized the trip heard about it, went ballistic, and claimed the bar is a cover for certain illicit activities. They seem to be threatening the career of the local acquaintance who took you out, although said acquaintance claims not to have known anything was untoward, and there are dark but cryptic implications that there will be legal consequences for everyone involved. Is it best to just sit back and hope things blow over? Or to try to retain the services of a lawyer who knows about the law in the relevant country?
women in flowy dresses - under 40 = hipster
I live in Brooklyn, too! I try to fix things myself, have been known to shop comparatively for cheap, fun things, and once baked a semi-ironic casserole. I own a pair of skinny jeans--that I bought at the Goodwill, for the hipster grunge cred. I also wear glasses.
And yet, when discussing this topic recently, I was straight-up told that I wasn't a hipster. Too old, too poor, or too homebodyish, probably.
287: Lawyer up if you can afford it.
It's because you just pull it off so well, JM.
That and those pictures of you with a rifle.
I have to say, I don't have a good definition for "hipster" and when I've tried to explain the term to people that are unfamiliar with it I've always struggled. So I've been reading this thread with interest to see if it would find some sort of consensus definition. It's been completely unhelpful from that perspective, but still interesting.
outlaw country guys have actually been pretty cool all along.
Out of curiosity, which outlaw county guys do young people listen to now? I mean Johhny Cash/Kris Kristofferson/ Willie Nelson were, clearly, cool all along, but they're also not exactly representative of outlaw country (or, if they are, it makes me think that "outlaw country" was a much smaller category than I thought).
I'd almost think of a group like Cowboy Junkies as starting to make elements of county sound cool for the indie pop set.
285: Bud and Bud Light are IMO not hipster. Hipsters have reclaimed PBR but that doesn't necessarily extend to other mass market beers.
This goes to my point about the regional/not regional distinction. Last I heard, hipsters here were still drinking PBR. But there's probably some scenes where its considered de rigeur to order a Bud. The local political kids have started bringing High Life to parties, and a couple of bars have experimented, probably at the behest of the distributors, with subbing in similar cheap beers (Lone Star in particular) for PBR with limited success. The bike punks all still drink Black Label, but you're going to have to pry that from their cold, dead hands, and anyway no one would confuse them with hipsters.
Right, with the rifle they'll call me whatever I please.
It's just...I'm so uncool that I'm not even a wannabe? Maybe I need some stupid t-shirts.
This happens every spring. The weather warms up a bit, and I go buy some silly pants or dye my hair.
Heineken in a dive bar? Weird.
Not weird over here, obviously.
288: I'm never sure if I'm supposed to want to be a hipster or not. I don't embrace the term but I'm vaguely offended if people say I'm not one. In my opinion, you sound like a hipster, if you want to be one. How are you situated with respect to tattoos? How ugly are your glasses?
I baked one of those casseroles with cooked chicken breasts, cream of chicken soup, broccoli and cheese. I just wanted a honest-to-goodness casserole like the ones my friend's parents made. But I didn't have any canned soup so I made my own Bechamel sauce with a little nutmeg. Ironic casserole + foodieness = too earnest for hipster?
This happens every spring. The weather warms up a bit, and I go buy some silly pants or dye my hair.
APPROVE
This happens every spring. The weather warms up a bit, and I go buy some silly pants or dye my hair.
APPROVE
Here are some bike punks, just down the street from my house, getting ready for the May Day Parade. Observe that some are wearing skinny jeans, but none are hipsters. Weirdly, this shot managed to capture no one I know on sight.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/surlygrrrl/146723935/in/photostream/
285: Heineken in a dive bar? Weird. We get Yuengling here as our PBR equivalent. Anyway, dive bars are awesome, even if grad students go there.
I confess that when I first investigated the place, I stupidly (oh so stupidly, so embarrassed) asked if they had any dark or amber beers -- because those are my preference! -- and they said they had Heineken. Yeah, my dad viewed Heineken as the more upscale option.
This was not a dive bar. I beg your pardon. There were no hookers or drunks, just locals.
Bud and Bud Light are IMO not hipster.
Oh. I thought hipsterity was an approach to (some) things, and wasn't tied to specific brands.
No tats, tasteful glasses.
It's as though if nobody unfairly hates me just because I'm different, then I really have just gotten old.
292: Totally agree! Example story of the perils of Regional Variation in Hipster Expression (unpub.): About 10 years ago, I was checking out this guy walking in front of me. Most of the guys in this town were too preppy for my tastes but this guy was wearing a Carhartt jacket, dark slim-cut jeans and an old beat up mesh-back cap*. I was intrigued. He turned around and, yep, turned out he was a 70 year old farmer.
*Mesh-back trucker caps were already out of fashion then but it was slim pickings in town. Besides it turned out to be a wheat coop hat.
I'll unfairly hate you, JM, always and forever.
Ah, young neb. You warm the charred ashy coals of my bitter heart.
Great, now I want casserole. My mother's recipe is too much of a pain in the ass to make ironically.
Whoever's a hipster, I'm not. Too old, don't listen to either the right sort of music or really music at all.
I do want to argue with Keir way back above about how certain things can't be 'hipster', because they were around before 'hipsters'. As far as I can remember, there were people who were essentially exactly the same as current 'hipsters' around before the word was being used to describe them -- the word postdates the thing.
When I was a kid, 'hipster' was an archaism used to refer to Manyard G. Krebs -- a guy with a goatee and bongo drums listening to jazz and calling people Daddy-O in 1962. You could call someone a hipster in 1990, but you'd mean that he was a middleaged guy who had been listening to jazz in 1962 and hadn't stopped and put down the bongo drums since. But there were arty young trendy people with a tendency to do things ironically and listen to ever so slightly less mainstream music, they just weren't 'hipsters' by name.
Sometime in the late 1990s, those people started being called hipsters. Now, I'm an outsider: while I knew and liked people like that, I never really had the fashion sense or musical interests to keep up. So it's possible that something interesting changed about the subculture at around the same time the word 'hipster' showed up. But as someone who wasn't part of it but was fairly close, it really didn't look to me like new subculture, just like a new word for an old subculture.
293: There was a genuinely brilliant bit of kitsch appropriation that I always wanted to get in on but never did: paraphernalia associated with Funk Granary on Funk Road in Merton, Wisconsin. There were shirts and mesh trucker caps with a logo that read "G Funk" and a stylized sheaf of wheat. My God, it was like they were made just for me, I think I actually heard a choir of angels the first time I saw one, but the moment has long since passed. I think Merton even had to rename Funk Road because TFH* kids kept stealing the signs.
(* Those Fucking Hipsters!)
299: Guy on the far right is totally wearing his beard ironically. I can just tell.
299: , but none are hipsters
Are you sure? Not to you, clearly. Bike messengers and the PBR link, the Natilo story would be?
JM and hydrobatidae want to be hipsters? Is it a slur, then, or what?
The analogy to hippiedom is sort of interesting. I don't think I'm a hippie, but a couple of real life friends have said, with certain firmness, that of course I am. Look at my house! Look at my car (when I was driving a VW bus). Look at my long gauzy skirts! Erm, but when I was in a real hippie place, I was so square as to look like an utter dork. The middle ground here is to understand that you have {hipster}{hippie} sensibilities, and leave it at that.
Mesh trucker caps are so unattractive, is the thing.
country + giant belt buckle + skinny jeans = alt-country hipster
This demonstrates a lack of familiarity with people who style themselves non-ironically as country. They wear their jeans tiiiiiight. ("With your high-heeled boots and your painted-on jeans / All dressed up like a cowgirl's dream.")
Anyway, you can't wear the prototypical hipster skinny jeans with an alt-country look, because they're too tapered for boots.
314: Yeah, I would've gotten down with the shirts over the mesh caps any day. But then I've never been a hat person, generally.
315: I know, you're right. I couldn't figure out how to describe the tight jeans cowboys/country-style people wear as different from skinny jeans. I think the taper and also the presence of stretch. Cowboy jeans are not stretchy.
Alt-country I think do wear hipster-style skinny jeans. They just tuck their jeans into their boots.
I don't think I'm a hippie, but a couple of real life friends have said, with certain firmness, that of course I am. . . . but when I was in a real hippie place, I was so square as to look like an utter dork.
At one point a friend of mine described my parents as people who were hippies and just never sold out, and kept the same basic values and beliefs. I think that's basically true, but only if you specify that they were at the very conservative edge of anything that could have been described as "hippie" (they had a kid when they were young and were responsible parents so that limited how much trouble they could get into -- but they are clearly folkies).
As that relates to hipsters I think there's some distinction between people who believe in (some or all of) the ideals (local, arty, etc . . . ) and people who are into a scene. The scenesters are always going to be generally disliked* but the scene wouldn't be "a thing" in the way it is if there wasn't a broader group of people who thought there was something admirable going on.
* As somebody said one, "there are people who put up with the scene for the sake of the music, and then there are people who put up with the music for the sake of the scene."
318: the ideals (local, arty, etc . . . )
Just to remember, though: those ideals are not distinctive of the hipster community. See Castock's second case in 239 of what might be considered hipster, obsession with things "organic" and "vegan" and "vegetarian" and "slow" and so on. Those are folkies.
What ever happened to the "earthy-crunchy" designation?
I haven't heard anyone called "crunchy" in a while, come to think of it.
320: Nope, me neither. I met an online bookseller friend for the first time a few years ago, and she later said that she'd expected me to be more crunchy -- in appearance, she meant. I was sort of confounded, yet proud. (Earthy-crunchies, represent! Something like that.)
I'm really meandering now, but do people think that long gauzy skirts are a problem in some way? Like, dispreferred or even deprecated? I've gotten that impression. If it's an accurate impression, I don't know why that is. Just a signaling thing -- such things signal hippiedom, which is bad or wrong in some way? I am unsure.
Also, why did Castock put "organic" and "vegan" and "vegetarian" in quotes in the section of his 239 that I cut and pasted upthread? I get why "slow" would be in quotation marks.
Lastly. From 259: Lana Del Rey has a song called "This Is What Makes Us Girls"? Apparently so.
Alt-country I think do wear hipster-style skinny jeans. They just tuck their jeans into their boots.
Boys too? Yikes!
304: No, JM, rest easy. If you were really old you wouldn't care if someone hated you based on your habitual costume.
312: Pretty sure. Look, these are folx who live in punk houses in working-class neighborhoods, work in collectively-owned cafes, or do a little contracting on the side. Some of them are Jesus freaks, and some are reformed addicts. They don't really give a shit if someone's early stuff was better, they would never even think to go to a consciously retro bar, or buy this month's controversial novel. To the extent that they're creative, they spend all their creativity on taller tall bikes or fanciful but unseaworthy boats to float down the Mississippi on. Maybe some of them draw or paint, but only as an adjunct to doing tattoos at their kitchen tables. The only overlap they would have with actual hipsters would be that they'd be working on the hipster's bike at the bike coop. And maybe would know a few of the same people through the bike scene.
Oh my, tall bikes.
Oh, tall bikes.
Oh me.
305: I've had a few similar experiences. There seems to be a pretty sharp age gradient here w/r/t Carhartts vs Skinny Jeans. Over 30=Carhartts, under-30=skinny jeans (in the anarcho-bohemian scene; there are still plenty of older punks who never stopped wearing skinny jeans).
Re: Alt-country
This used to be pretty huge around here, so much so that there was even a sizable rockabilly scene that recruited from the alt-country masses. Now, virtually everybody has aged out and there are literally like a dozen rockabilly folx in the whole scene, all my age or maybe a little bit younger. Time marches on, I guess.
I saw my first tall bikes in Boston. Several of them riding down the street. It was explained to me that they were an MIT club dedicated to tall bikes. I was super impressed, and now I see them all over the place, including here. Neat!
Here in the home of tall bikes, they've undergone a bit of a decline in popularity, but you still see quite a few of them. My next door neighbors have at least one. And the two main bike clubs are still around, so I'm guessing there'll be a resurgence one of these days. I believe Mpls. still has the record for the tallest tall bike.
Hmm looks like there are some jerks in Asheville and Thunder Bay who are trying to front. We still have the MOST tall bikes though.
328: The rockabilly folks in the Twin Cities all seem to show up to car cruise-ins (esp. In Hadtings & St Paul) with their lead sleds.
Here in the home of tall bikes
I would have thought that was Portland?
I first saw them at Burning Man like, oh god, sixteen years ago, but no idea where people brought them from.
333: Maybe Portland has a few, but this is where they were really developed into a thing.
334: I was unconvinced, and then I googled. Good to know! I suppose the people at the burn back in the late '90s were from the Reno chapter. Boston has had nerdy-ass bike gangs for a long time (in the early '90s it was Hells Bells, who rode choppers and invariably had bells and were awesome) but I didn't hear about a tall bike scene here until after I moved to California in '97.
I suppose the people at the burn back in the late '90s were from the Reno chapter.
I'm finding this impressively difficult to reconcile with my knowledge of what Reno was like in the '90s.
Coulda been from SF too, of course.
I remember some bike rodeo on Treasure Island; I rode past on my (not new or evidently fancy) road bike and some girls on choppers were like "get a real bike!" It was cute! I resisted being like "ItotallyhaveonewaitIhavethischopperI'llcomebackby".
Like a total saddo, I spent ages trying to work out what the camera was on the table in the sequence around 30 seconds in. Something German, probably a 6x6 folder, like a Super Ikonta B. Nice cameras (hipster or not), although probably too good/practical for your Lomo types.
Heh. I didn't even notice there was a camera there.
If it's what I think it is, I brought* the slightly smaller sibling camera to an Unfogged meet, and showed it around to general lack of interest. Maybe this makes me a hipster? Fat/middle-aged variety.
* not intentionally, I remembered it was in my bag when I was sitting in the pub.
Like a total saddo, I spent ages trying to work out what the camera was on the table in the sequence around 30 seconds in. where all the locations in that video were. Most weren't in the two mentioned neighborhoods, because there's no tram there.
