What the blinkers is wrong with being a hipster?

robotsintrouble

Continuously Cromulent
Hmm... so hipsters have no inner will and enjoy music not because it fulfills them, but because it's a status symbol, cultural signal, mating signal, etc. It clearly isn't the overall popularity of the music that defines what they like, but some inexplicable lust for novelty and newness.

I'm not sure I buy it. I mean, I'd buy that most people who are picked out as hipsters or scenesters are playing an image game with how they dress and behave, and that some people in the world use fresh music as the currency of cool. Still... to me, this sounds like the criticism of the popular kids in high school by those who weren't popular: that the popular students are such by virtue of their fakeness. This unfortunately ignores the fact that there's a level of fakeness involved in most smooth social interaction. Do you act like yourself in front of cops? Or your mom?

Some people are more comfortable changing the way they behave as a consequence of the context they find themselves in. People who aren't, in my humble observation, tend to find a single group of friends they feel comfortable with and stick closely to them. That works out fine until they start dating each other.
 

Rachel Verinder

Well-known member
are you fucking kidding me??? of course most people only buy what they are told by advertising. this fact is not really even contestable. most people work so much they don't have time to develop individual tastes and consume what the media tells them they should want. atleast in the US this is very apparent.

oh go back to your first year sociology class and grow up, sonny boy.

still i suppose it's asking too much for americans to display any evidence of intelligence.
 

robotsintrouble

Continuously Cromulent
There's an element of truth in saying "people only buy what they are told to buy", even if it sounds ridiculous when you consider a single person thinking this way.

Without publicity of some kind, nothing becomes popular. The word publicity just describes the process of information about a particular brand/meme/rapper/etc spreading through the population. The spread can be organic (word of mouth, especially in the age of the cellphone, IM, and blog) or it can result from purchasing adspace and publicity campaigns in the various largely one-way media available in increasing quantity to the American public since 1945. Dumping money into the publicity machine does, unfortunately, result in people buying albums.

Having power and money gives you an advantage in the eternal quest to acquire more power and money. This isn't news. Hell, if you resent people for liking commercial pop you ignore the fact that the purpose of commercial pop is to be liked by the maximum number of persons with disposable income.
 

Rachel Verinder

Well-known member
really? well, welcome to the world of capitalism.

the real power, as i have said a zillion times before in a zillion different places, is with the consumer - not to throw away throwaway pop, to be moved (to tears/laughter/sex/suicide) by it despite its inbuilt disposability factors.

and who's to argue that, say, cathy dennis doesn't put as much Honest Joy and Passion and Life into what she does as ariel pink does? it's a very jejeune argument.

but none of this changes the fact that nobody has ever been TOLD to go and buy a record. asked, persuaded...but never told.
 

soundslike1981

Well-known member
soundslike1981 said:
Exactly. That's what I wasn't getting in the "Definition of Rockism" thread--the pseudo populism I detect in the antirock-ist/anti-rockist "camp"---though maybe I'm seeing "pop-ists"--seems to relativise (not a word, is it?) political action or criticism out of possibility: conflating popular with of the people, refusing to believe that the mega-corporate structure as it's related to music may have a vested interest in telling people what they should want, not asking what people want and providing it. And yet all the bitching about the hegemony of mediocre rock--Coldplay and other bands I haven't heard--is the one exception.

Rachel Verinder said:
oh please let's try and do better than that never more tired old meme about People Only Buy What They're Told we're all held down by The Man maaaaannnnnn. i don't see security guards in hmv frogmarching (hah!) customers to c/frog and c/play cds at bayonet point.

Way to be intellectually condescending whilst oversimplifying an argument to sub-mental levels in order to avoid having to argue a counterpoint.

Unless you were trying to concisely exemplify the exact sort of reactionary-relativist, anti-anti-corporate intellectual disingenuousness I was pointing to. In which case, well done.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Rachel Verinder said:
oh go back to your first year sociology class and grow up, sonny boy.

still i suppose it's asking too much for americans to display any evidence of intelligence.

nice and mature personal attack you sophisticated European. if what i say does not contain any element of truth just try to explain the success of groups like the Crystal Method. it is purely hype.

if my description of artificial, manufactured desire is "first year sociology" Debord and Adorno are in my class.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
and I'm not an American thank you verymuch. I see how brainwashed Americans are through my perspective of having grown up on the other side of the world.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Rachel Verinder said:
debord and adorno are kind of like the ernie and bert of popsociophilosophy these days.

ok. so you are way too smart and educated for the Situationists and the Frankfurt school? then please tell me (the foolish child) why works like the Society of the Spectacle and the Culture Industry no longer applies and are irrelevent?

no seriously, I would like to learn something here.
 

Elan

Blackbird
Too funny for hipsters, perhaps.

Has there been a sociological study of hipsters? Is that possible?
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
confucius said:
and I'm not an American thank you verymuch. I see how brainwashed Americans are through my perspective of having grown up on the other side of the world.

yeah! fucking Whitey!
 

polystyle

Well-known member
ha ha ha

and double yeah , all those white stupid Americans buying black music
and writin' books on hipsters tryin to b hipsters , got damn
 

robotsintrouble

Continuously Cromulent
all those white stupid Americans buying black music

why are we stupid for buying black music if it's better than white music?

even if we are ethnically challenged, that doesn't mean we have to listen to kenny rogers.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
He haw

no worries Robo
t'was a joke ,
riffing off the 'Ms.' and the current Village Voice cover article "Yo whitewash the show"
 
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