Page 1 of 68 123515 ... LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 679

Thread: Hipsters

  1. #1

    Hipsters

    I was going to make this a blog entry, because honestly, none of you care about this, but its too long, so whatever.

    Anyway, Sats said something about Hipsters on facebook. And I thought to myself, I don't really know much about them. So I got to googling.

    From Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster..._subculture%29

    Hipster is a slang term that first appeared in the 1940s, and was revived in the 1990s and 2000s often to describe types of young, recently-settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture, particularly alternative music, indie rock, independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media.[1] In some contexts, hipsters are also referred to as scenesters.[2]

    "Hipster" has been used in sometimes contradictory ways, making it difficult to precisely define "hipster culture" because it is a "mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior[s]."[1] One commentator argues that "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic" elements of all of the "fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge," and draws on the "cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity" and "gay style", and "regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity."[3]
    Christian Lorentzen of Time Out New York claims that metrosexuality is the hipster appropriation of gay culture, as a trait carried over from their "Emo" phase. He writes that "these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod."[3] He argues that "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic" elements of all of the "fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge," and draws on the "cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity" and "gay style," and then "regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity" and a sense of irony. He claims that this group of "18-to-34-year-olds," who are mostly white, "have defanged, skinned and consumed" all of these influences.[3] Lorentzen says hipsters, "in their present undead incarnation," are "essentially people who think of themselves as being cooler than America," also referring to them as "the assassins of cool." He also criticizes how the subculture's original menace has long been abandoned and has been replaced with "the form of not-quite-passive aggression called snark."[3]

    In a Huffington Post article entitled "Who's a Hipster?", Julia Plevin argues that the "definition of 'hipster' remains opaque to anyone outside this self-proclaiming, highly-selective circle". She claims that the "whole point of hipsters is that they avoid labels and being labeled. However, they all dress the same and act the same and conform in their non-conformity" to an "iconic carefully created sloppy vintage look".[18]

    Rob Horning developed a critique of hipsterism in his April 2009 article "The Death of the Hipster" in PopMatters, exploring several possible definitions for the hipster. He muses that the hipster might be the "embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics," or might be "...a kind of permanent cultural middleman in hypermediated late capitalism, selling out alternative sources of social power developed by outsider groups, just as the original 'white negros' evinced by Norman Mailer did to the original, pre-pejorative 'hipsters'—blacks...." Horning also proposed that the role of hipsters may be to "... appropriat[e] the new cultural capital forms, delivering them to mainstream media in a commercial form and stripping their inventors... of the power and the glory...".[19] Horning argues that the "...problem with hipsters" is the "way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how 'cool' it is perceived to be," as "...just another signifier of personal identity." Furthermore, he argues that the "hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity, by a sense of lateness to the scene" or the way that they transform the situation into a "self-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and exploit."
    Time writer Dan Fletcher states that "Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity".

    Dan Fletcher in Time seems to support this theory, positing that stores like Urban Outfitters have mass-produced hipster chic, merging hipsterdom with parts of mainstream culture, thus overshadowing its originators' still-strong alternative art and music scene.[4] According to Fletcher, "Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity. Critics have described the loosely defined group as smug, full of contradictions and, ultimately, the dead end of Western civilization."[4] Elise Thompson, an editor for the LA blog LAist argues that "people who came of age in the 70s and 80s punk rock movement seem to universally hate 'hipsters'", which she defines as people wearing "expensive 'alternative' fashion[s]", going to the "latest, coolest, hippest bar...[and] listen[ing] to the latest, coolest, hippest band." Thompson argues that hipsters "...don’t seem to subscribe to any particular philosophy... [or] ...particular genre of music." Instead, she argues that they are "soldiers of fortune of style" who take up whatever is popular and in style, "appropriat[ing] the style[s]" of past countercultural movements such as punk, while "discard[ing] everything that the style stood for."[20]
    and a rebuttle to the idea that they are the death of western culture:

    http://www.utne.com/2008-08-12/Media....aspx#comments

    That culturally ubiquitous slice of youth culture known as hipsters now finds itself under the microscope of the always provocative Adbusters. The magazine’s latest issue—and, to some extent, its overall editorial mission—is predicated on the alleged cultural malaise of the past 50 years, beginning with the rise of postwar consumer culture as an inevitable byproduct of Western ingenuity. “Practical cleverness beats the crap out of spiritual wisdom on the battlefield and in the marketplace, as the West has made clear over the last 500 years,” the preface declares. “But cleverness without wisdom sooner or later destroys life.”

    Douglas Haddow’s lead essay, "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization," takes it from there, positing hipsters as avatars of the narcissism and spiritual emptiness Adbusters laments, and as the probable harbingers of civilization’s decline. “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum," Haddow writes. "So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style.”hipster_stop

    As much as the cantankerous square in me wants to see hedonistic youngsters taken down a peg, I think this essay might be giving hipsters a bit too much credit, overestimating both their cultural impact and longevity while longing nostalgically for a chimeral sense of past “cool” whose own authenticity is itself suspect. “An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather than creating it,” Haddow claims. But is this sort of inversion really so unprecedented? Are hipsters the first generation to practice it? And isn’t it more accurate to say that all youth everywhere, not just hipsters, end up doing both the creating and the consuming of culture, with the advertising and entertainment industries serving as mediators?

    Yes, the commodification of cool is obnoxious, but it’s not novel and it’s not an agent of the apocalypse. Casting oneself and one’s peers as the “last generation, a culmination of all previous things”—as Haddow does, in his essay’s dour conclusion—displays the same narcissism and myopia as the culture he’s skewering. Hipsters are really nothing more than the latest manifestation of the disaffected, nihilistic youth population that mutates into a new form with each generation. They’re an obnoxious but essentially innocuous pocket of youth culture whose era is already waning, especially now that hipsterdom has been thoroughly assimilated into mainstream culture, branded, and codified into a household word. The hipster fad is now so ubiquitous as to be almost meaningless: everyone and no one is a hipster.

    Besides, I’m immediately suspicious of any author who posits the “end” of anything. Hipsters represent the end of Western civilization? Really? Alarmist generalizations are guaranteed to sell magazines and generate angry emails to the editor—in fact, the inevitable debate will probably be more interesting than the article that inspired it. But ultimately, I suspect hipsters are simply kids in a phase they’ll eventually grow out of, just like the Gen-Xers, punks, hippies, beatniks, and flappers before them.

    I don't really buy into the idea that any one group is the death of western culture. Or that all the evils of of current society rest on the shoulders of any one group.

    I think a lot of the negatives attributed to "hipsters" can be attributed to most Americans. Most people take on fashions and do not adhere to the culture that produced them. The only people that don't, take on "bland" adult styles that are safe for parenting and working environments.

    "hipsters" are accused of not standing for anything, but Americans by and large don't stand for anything. People don't get involved like they used to. They just bitch about shit at lunch time, to their co-workers.

    And wanting to appear as they don't give a shit is not just a hipster thing, it is a character trait valued by anyone under 35. No one wants to appear like they care about anything. Everyone wants to appear like they are above such things.

    I don't really know how "apathy" became value of the under 40 crowd, but it has. If people strongly care about anything that isn't death or kids, they are called "gay." Maybe this is the result of the homophobia of young men and they must distance themselves from the drama that they perceive that gay people care about. Or maybe it is the result of technology shrinking the world. People must build up a layer of appathy so that they can stayed focused and productive. or maybe people never really did care about much of anything other than themselves, and people are only being honest about this because of the decline of organized religion in the US. People are no longer scared of a big scary God that tells them they should care about others or just causes.


    Anyway, what are your thoughts? Are hipsters really the evil that will end america? Are they being blamed for something that all Americans are part of? Or have things always been this way.

    I await this thread being completely shit upon, derailed, or completely ignored.
    Last edited by Fe 26; 13 Aug 2010 at 01:53 AM.

  2. I could have given you a much shorter and simpler definition:

    Hipster is a slang term for all the kids who moved to Portland to be just as different as the thousands of other kids who did the same fucking thing.

  3. #3
    Looking for defintion really isn't what the thread about.

    I'm more interested in what the article claims they are. The idea that young people are no longer making new culture and just reusing the culture of others is interesting.

    On one hand, people say fashion cycles, so it should be obvious that kids would eventually recycle this stuff. On the other, if they really don't stand for anything, that is odd. I can't think of a time in the past 100 years that kids were not rebelling against anything. What are Hipsters rebelling against? Commercialism? And they do this by buying old shit that grandpa gave away and looking like rebels from other periods?

    Maybe it is really as simple as not wanting to do what mom and dad do.

  4. Hipster kids are rebelling against a lot of shit, they just have no great war.

    They ride bikes, drink cheap beer and are into tons of earthy shit like hiking and picnics. All tiny things, but they add up.

  5. #5
    I don't know. That sounds like it could still be filed under "don't wanna be like dad" and "lazy environmentalism"

  6. I thought Hipster just meant middle-aged urban white people.

    I was going to say middle aged white people, but then I remembered there were also rednecks and soccer moms republicans.
    Last edited by Doc Holliday; 13 Aug 2010 at 02:43 AM.
    "Question the world man... I know the meaning of everything right now... it's like I can touch god." - bbobb the ggreatt

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Tacos por Pepe View Post
    I thought Hipster just meant middle-aged urban white people.

    I was going to say middle aged white people, but then I remembered there were also rednecks and soccer moms republicans.
    You're confusing yuppies for hipsters.

  8. Who gives a fuck.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Fe 26 View Post

    And wanting to appear as they don't give a shit is not just a hipster thing, it is a character trait valued by anyone under 35. No one wants to appear like they care about anything. Everyone wants to appear like they are above such things.
    Quote Originally Posted by Mman View Post
    Who gives a fuck.
    Someone's being clever

  10. Quote Originally Posted by Fe 26 View Post
    TTSssssssssomeone'ssss being clever

Tags for this Thread

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •  
Games.com logo