What the blinkers is wrong with being a hipster?

Woebot

Well-known member
(absolutely no apologies whatsoever for posting this in the thought forum)

Lots obviously. If being a hipster actually means copying what other people do, making decisions based not on what is meritorious and splendid but what is a generational consensus. If it means not actually thinking for yourself and not thinking. If, I suppose, it means valuing something on the basis of its radiosity above anything else.

The thing is, almost everyone I know who would be pejoratively described as a "hipster" is almost by definition ahead of the curve. They're searchers (scarves fluttering in wind). They're actually the last people in the world to follow anyone's lead.

That last point though is maybe problematic. Radiosity. The thing about "hipsters" is that real quotient on the hipster-icity is their ability to sense what sounds "fresh". This could be genuinely problematic. (stepping back slightly) As someone who might be construed a "hipster" I often worry that always valuing something on the basis of its vital energy means that my listening (and this could equally apply to Art, Film whatevs) tends to be consumed in a heat of white light. Its quite often difficult to hear anything other than energy. Also seeking energy can obviously make one feel quite superficial, like a moth.

On the other hand, what is there but energy? This might seem like a vapid remark, but would you want to eat rotting vegetables? Who reads yesterdays papers? And although Bergson gets quite short shrift in these parts (you have to read the books themselves people, not trade in assumptions) isn't the vital force that which is most divine?
 

Rachel Verinder

Well-known member
i plough my particular furrow. sometimes people follow it. more often they make their excuses and depart. i plough in a slow, calm and patient manner because i don't feel i'm in a competition. the reserves of energy you haven't used up when you've finished your day's labouring mean you end up more "energetic" than those who use it all up in a flash of light which blinds for about the first two seconds, and then what have you left?
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
{I often worry that always valuing something on the basis of its vital energy means that my listening (and this could equally apply to Art, Film whatevs) tends to be consumed in a heat of white light. Its quite often difficult to hear anything other than energy. Also seeking energy can obviously make one feel quite superficial, like a moth.}

A neat summation of the issue. "Hipster" is often used as a pejorative term (frequently by me :)) because there's a negative aspect to it -- particularly its neophilia-as-neurosis and, worse, the "hipper-than-thou" self righteousness. It leads to a certain sniffiness about the popular or anything which isn't ground-breaking -- as is sometimes expressed about banging techno or big room house or classic seventies funk. Or, I dunno, Richard Curtice films maybe.

That aspect of hipsterism is unattractive and annoying. But critics of hipsterism (and hipsters) should afford it (and them) the courtesy of recognising that scenes don't happen without hipsters: they're an essential cog in the innovation machine.

Long live hipsters, and long may they be around for we of a puckish nature to take the piss out of!
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
it's long interested me, this sort of self-flagellating thing, where people who are patently hipsters use "hipster" as an insult c.f. rock critics who use "rock critic" as a pejorative adjective, e.g. "that's such a rock critic mentality"...

there's a new book on Hip by John Leland that's quite interesting, a history of the idea -- the intro is a bit cringy (too 'hep' in tone) but it gets interesting when he gets into the archaeology of the idea, and how it comes from this African word that means 'to know' or 'to see clearly', and how the core of it is white bohemians cultivating a relationship with black culture, hipness measured in your knowledge of blackness. obviously that's where it started, with jazz, with the Beats etc, but i think it's still got a lot of applicablity --indeed you could applicate to a lot of the discussions at Dissensus

you could mount a defence of the hipster project without too much difficulty, but would anyone step to a defence of snobbery? "Snob" is the one thing nobody wants to be, it's the strawman that much of the pro-pop argument is fighting...

To suggest that a whole swathe of people are benighted and bamboozled on account of their bad taste or from swallowing what the mass media offers---that's like the UNSAYABLE thing now

yet this cultural populism is utterly divorced from political populism (ie. commitment to eradicating the inequalities that create class-determined taste distinctions)

it's like an inside-out version of how the Left used to be (pro-social justice and wealth distribution, Reithian/Penguin Modern Classics pro-high culture benificence, anti-Americanisation and sniffy re. pop culture; or the Soviets with their subsidised, incredibly cheap tickets to opera and ballet so proles can be ennobled by Art etc)
 

ambrose

Well-known member
isnt that because cultural populism actually makes money, whereas political populism is costly - eg spreading birtney to the masses = revenue of $$$, ensuring good standard of education to the masses = bill of $$$ to gov.?
 

Woebot

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
you could mount a defence of the hipster project without too much difficulty, but would anyone step to a defence of snobbery? "Snob" is the one thing nobody wants to be, it's the strawman that much of the pro-pop argument is fighting...

ha! yes thats a tricky one. especially (speaking poisonally) cos essentially one is a bit of toff, and the very idea of being a snob, well its extremely problematic. i suppose being a critic defending (lets face it) marginal music, is some kind of weird detente screwed up ex-public school boys come to ;)

actually there is one other negative thing that could be levelled at hipsters, and this may be the commonsense/commongarden problem people who arent obsessed with various strands of culture to a monomaniacal degree have with hipsters, that they invest too much faith in the fripperies and vagaries of culture.

watched The Pianist with my wife this evening, the first serious film we've taken in in years (anyone with two children and no childcare will understand our predicament!) and confronting things like the holocaust (or more accurately representations of them) its incredibly levelling. one just wonders how important culture is. obv that film is making some points about the validity of culture, but "the pianist" himself, he who floats above the wreckage all around him by merit of his finesse, well he's an ambivalent figure i suppose.
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
Nothing.

I am a total fucking hipster, but I look like a drok.

Even 'real' hipsters call me 'cool' and they got the power and make a living out of it, where I hafta work a dull-job!

They can get fucked.

Having good ideas is a blessing not a fucking crime and people who don't have one original idea in their miserable heads hate that.

A big problem in today's po-mo ennui saturated gulcher.
 
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Noah Baby Food

Well-known member
It's about ideas for sure. The need to be constantly stimulated. The desire for progress and change. If people think you're doing it to be "clever" then they are missing the point and will NEVER understand. For some, the same-old same-old, same bands, same music, same scene - it's what they want, it makes 'em feel like they belong. I could never be so self-satisfied. (maybe the "hipster" thing has naff all to do with the "in crowd" and a hell of a lot more to do with feeling a bit like an outsider?). If you're fascinated by culture and it's possibilities, you owe it to yourself to try and get a handle on anything new and interesting. What depresses me constantly is people a lot younger than me a lot less in touch with new music and culture (listening to their dad's records etc.

It's also about knowing how the media works and not swallowing everything hook line and sinker.

And it's fine to get bored with stuff. If something stops interesting you, start checking something else...whatever's STIMULATING. Some people have a problem with this, like you're not being "true" or whatever - "I AM INTO HEAVY METAL/HIP HOP/WHATEVER AND WILL ALWAYS BE, TILL I DIE, EVEN IF IT STARTS GETTING BORING, BECAUSE THAT IS MY IDENTITY". That's not serious!
 

Rachel Verinder

Well-known member
i hold the somewhat unhip view that music should be listened to on the grounds of its quality rather than its recording date.

the history of music without tribes and "identities" would be a somewhat curtailed one.

if anything new and interesting (not a frequent combination) happens it usually finds its way to me, by whatever means.

this is of course a middle-aged perspective but being middle-aged i am perfectly content to maintain such a perspective.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
hipsters at their worst are conformist MTV-babies who wear the same trendy outfits and listen to the same trendy bands.

the (modernist) priveledging of the new is a much wider phenonmenon and has much deeper roots than hipsterism.
 

Dubquixote

Submariner
blissblogger said:
it's long interested me, this sort of self-flagellating thing, where people who are patently hipsters use "hipster" as an insult c.f. rock critics who use "rock critic" as a pejorative adjective, e.g. "that's such a rock critic mentality"

otm. only a hipster would use the word 'hipster.' and even though it may describe a very real social/cultural group, the word itself is always used negatively, which leads me to believe that there is a self-loathing inherent in hipsterness, or at least un-ease in one's own skin.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
Noah Baby Food said:
For some, the same-old same-old, same bands, same music, same scene - it's what they want, it makes 'em feel like they belong. I could never be so self-satisfied. (maybe the "hipster" thing has naff all to do with the "in crowd" and a hell of a lot more to do with feeling a bit like an outsider?). If you're fascinated by culture and it's possibilities, you owe it to yourself to try and get a handle on anything new and interesting . . . .

i tend to associate hipsters w/ scenesters

or maybe the term hipster encompasses both scenesters AND nomadic trend-spotters!

i mean, at least in nyc the most visible hipsters are the rock-n-roll crowd, and they're hardly at the cutting edge of music

Noah Baby Food said:
What depresses me constantly is people a lot younger than me a lot less in touch with new music and culture (listening to their dad's records, etc).

again, it's tricky

the original hipsters were into cutting edge black jazz, be bop and what not

but the early mods in the 60s listened to a lot of obscure blues from the 30s

as simon said, "hip" is more about whites getting clued into black music and culture than about the new as such

although obviously the meaning has changed, b/c again, the most visible hipsters in nyc today are into rock'n'roll and that's hardly black music anymore (if ever it was)

(of course you could always have an argument about who really knows the score, and who doesn't -- i.e., competing claims to hipness)
 

zhao

there are no accidents
it seems to me what would be useful at this juncture is a working definition of hipsterism that we can all more or less agree on.

hipster: a catch-all term for a social group which includes but is not limited to all the youth/fringe/(more or less) anti-establishment groups that have come before such as the Dandy, the Beatnik, the Hippie, the Mod, etc, etc. This lump term exists, is a product of, and is only possible, within the context of a post-modern period of culture known as Pluralism.

what do we think?
 

martin

----
confucius said:
it seems to me what would be useful at this juncture is a working definition of hipsterism that we can all more or less agree on.

hipster: a catch-all term for a social group which includes but is not limited to all the youth/fringe/(more or less) anti-establishment groups that have come before such as the Dandy, the Beatnik, the Hippie, the Mod, etc, etc. This lump term exists, is a product of, and is only possible, within the context of a post-modern period of culture known as Pluralism.

what do we think?

Can we just split it into two groups, HIP (ie Japanese dominatrix / ethno-electroclash* singer Amrita ; "Right to Work" by Chelsea ; DJ Rupture) and BORING (ie - Coldplay ; "Loveless" by MBV ; Wiley)?

* that's how she puts it, don't have a go at the messenger boy
 

zhao

there are no accidents
actually, as a possible revision of my earlier post, maybe the "hipster" has a unique relationship to consumer capitalism compared to the youth groups that have existed before. the brand whore phenonmenon, the consumer fetishism, the lifestyle accessories, the signifiers of rebellion as fashion statement.

so which do you agree with, this post or the earlier one? (definition of hipster as catch-all phrase or hipster as something unique to our times)
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
if hipness is possessing a kind of knowledge, then it implies membership in or passage through some kind of culture or scene (or at least special access to the scene) = o/w the knowledge of "what's going on" would be purely superficial and therefore not really knowledge

hipness means knowing the score

knowing the score about race relations, drugs, the power of music, the poverty of the workaday world

involvement in some kind of (particular) scene is the path to this kind of (universal) knowledge

(of course this is an idealized account of what it means to be "hip" -- and slightly at odds with what i said about hipness upthread)

today people often confuse being "trendy" for being hip
 
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Rachel Verinder

Well-known member
Loveless isn't boring, but writing about Loveless is rather boring. Can we have a ten-year moratorium on this record please, in order to give ourselves the chance to rediscover it?
 
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