I found this article to be right on. Hipsters have yet to stand for anything. They don't encompass a new idea, and there's nothing new about them. Physically, they are a collage of retro images, with a message that has yet to be delivered. Therefore, I can only assume that...
This is a generation that stands for nothing, lost in an urban recycle-bin loaded with two decades worth of media distortion, music industry mind-programming, and digital brain droppings. From Operation Desert Bullshit to Barbie and Ken, to Wal-Mart, these 20-30 somethings have been hypnotized by American fascism; their parents seated, broken-footed, and Godless, isolated by the television or by divorce.
So, yes, in the absence of their message, in the inference I can make due to that absence, which is that they stand for nothing, their style and their elusive principles make perfect to me.
A hipster will tell you, "Well, I just don't care." But surely you must care if you go to such great lengths to acquire Grand-Pap glasses, jelly shoes, and Wham T-shirts.
Perhaps hipsters stand for something. I just don't know what that is yet. I look forward to getting the memo.
And, I don't want to give these clowns too hard a time. It takes courage to go around looking like they do. At least they aren't out wearing those ridiculous-looking, self-mutilating, blood clots we call business suits.
Image found at http://www.latfh.com
This is a generation that stands for nothing, lost in an urban recycle-bin loaded with two decades worth of media distortion, music industry mind-programming, and digital brain droppings. From Operation Desert Bullshit to Barbie and Ken, to Wal-Mart, these 20-30 somethings have been hypnotized by American fascism; their parents seated, broken-footed, and Godless, isolated by the television or by divorce.
So, yes, in the absence of their message, in the inference I can make due to that absence, which is that they stand for nothing, their style and their elusive principles make perfect to me.
A hipster will tell you, "Well, I just don't care." But surely you must care if you go to such great lengths to acquire Grand-Pap glasses, jelly shoes, and Wham T-shirts.
Perhaps hipsters stand for something. I just don't know what that is yet. I look forward to getting the memo.
And, I don't want to give these clowns too hard a time. It takes courage to go around looking like they do. At least they aren't out wearing those ridiculous-looking, self-mutilating, blood clots we call business suits.
Image found at http://www.latfh.com
Interesting article to respond too...I sometimes feel like Hipster stories are saved for slow news days...but regardless:
I think there has been a slow decline from the intended definition of the term “Hipster” towards something full of resentment (even hatred in some extreme cases.) Hipsters for the most part are just tweens and twenty-somethings who keep up with a certain strand of Music/fashion culture. To me, being a hipster is just an ever-evolving, self-directed look. A fashion choice, not a cause.
The few times I have been called a Hipster has been based solely on appearance and not based on the causes I may or may not stand up for. So that leaves me to think, is being called a Hipster just a jealousy cry from Normal Nancy or is there any validity in it at all as a descriptor. After all one man's hipster is another man's art student is another man's hard-core kid.
Your point is still valid that MY generation is for the most part, an apathetic pile of indulgence. But it is for sure not just those wearing skinny dark denim propagating that message. To me the problem belongs to the generation, not the subculture.
Thrift store shopping and mustache waxing isn't a worthy cause???
Thank you for the memo, A. I would even say that a large portion of the 60s radicals were onboard the USS Ginsberg for the sake of fashion only...making them equally as jaded, politically, as the hollow hipsters. If you were called a hipster based on fashion alone, I'm not sure why you would take offense to that - why you would then infer that it was sparked by jealousy. Perhaps it was simply a statement regarding your fashion sense. And what makes Nancy so normal? Isn't it JUST her sense of fashion you are referring to?
I agree it is the generation, not the subculture - but the expression of hipster fashion gives me a specific visual to go on...a blatant image of, as you say, an apathetic pile of indulgence.
And at Former Citizen, the news is neither slow nor fast. Just here and now, during my life as I see it.
It could be, M. It could be. Getting out the old and ugly clothes that, for whatever reason, modern man has deemed unfit to wear - renewing the facial hair that at one point disgusted us - well, this is the enlightened telling their fellows that looks don't matter anymore.
Maybe that's the case; to evolve into a new standard of beauty or in fact, abolish any standard of beauty.
LATFH is better than lolcats and ROFLRazzi combined, for the sheer joy of knowing that those people are "real".
I think what your referring to is the new young crowd who scoff at image when they r in fact very much into image alone. Because I know u and ur very much a hipster in the sense of original hipsters like kerouac and in the sense that your an artist and dress to express yourself and your thoughts.
D, I am applauding the courage of those who wear short shorts made of polyester, of those who would normally appear handsome but instead appear mustachioed. But I feel disappointed that in their courage, they fight for nothing. Or DO they?
I know a woman who is in her 40s. She has an absolutely beautiful home in the city and seems to live a charming and endearing life. Sometimes, she WEARS plastic bags on her clothes. She wears them to the store and claims to embarrass her daughter when doing so.
I love this woman for doing that. I love that she can do something SO outrageous and with a "so-what" attitude. But she'll tell you that she's doing it just because it makes people wonder what the hell she's doing. It makes people think and reconsider...even if they also laugh.
If that's what these young 20 year olds (and I should've eliminated the rest of y'all because hipsters have been around since the jazz era, IMO) are doing, just going against the grain to go against the grain, then I can dig that so deep.
I'm just poking around here, seeing if they are thinking and acting, or just blindly following. And, if they aren't thinking before they act, then that's fine, too - but call it art. Is it their art? I guess that's for me to decide.
So THAT's what the PBR obsession is all about. I went to a dive, drank it 'cause it was two dollars and I was thinking "my god, it's more vile than miller lite, why is everybody drinking this"?
To be ironic apparently.
Speaking of hipsters, I'll be at the local Critical Mass, the mecca of hipsterdom.
I happen to drink PBR all the time, and I used to think I drank it cause it tasted alright and was cheap. But maybe that was just the hipster in me attempting to trick my mind into thinking I'm not hipster.
I can't seem to find what it is the age group stands for (and Im probably considered part of it). But did anyone think gen x had a cause to stand behind?
Gen X was a bunch of losers. Just kidding. Look, the more I think about this, the more I disagree with this having anything to do with generations (and, therefore disagree with myself who was typing just hours ago).
It has more to do with individuals. It's a personal decision to be hip. And, it's a personal decision what to be hip to.
We can look to the agreed upon "first group of hipsters" my heroes, the beatniks of the 1940s-60s, as a way to assess generational hipsterism.
These were young, free spirits who fled rural regions to define for themselves what it meant to be American. They sought intellectual conversation and human celebration and the recording of such events. Now, to me, that's fuckin' hip. But perhaps it was their parents and their time which was their springboard to this ultimate hipness.
Nonetheless...
HIP was here BEFORE the beatniks.
Hip was the lonely ol' hobo, carrying around with him a blue heart and a sack of tobacco, riding along the American countryside in a boxcar in the 1930s.
Hip was the uke player who set girls' hearts afire in the 1920s.
Hip was the man who placed pamphlets of Common Sense on the doorsteps of his fellow countrymen.
Hip doesn't belong to a generation. Generations are abstract. They CAN'T be hip. Only individuals are hip - and then the rest of us decide what to follow.
Methinks it's all a backlash against what can best be surmised by that great line penned by Huey Lewis - "It's hip to be square" but of course what the fuck do I know being the greatest underachiever unrealized potential bon vivant ne'er do well legendary slacker of all time!
To paraphrase Dylan, to live outside the hip you gots to care
Or Johnny at 2:52:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT_xrsjKN_Y
I mean whatya got daddy-o?
I just read an article about PBR before I went on vacation, so this is well-timed. From Wikipedia:
"In 1999, the Pabst Brewing Company began transferring its production to Miller Brewing Company on a contractual basis. In 2001, it closed its last brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The announced InBev purchase of Anheuser-Busch in July 2008 prompted Pabst to claim to be the largest American-owned brewer. In fact, it is a "virtual brewer," a marketing company whose 85 brands are brewed by either Miller Brewing Company or Lion."
That's definitely ironic, but I'm not sure if the hipster sense of irony goes that deep. I'm guessing they don't know. If they do, there's an actual chance that they have a sense of humor about themselves.