Hipsters: Scourge or Irrelevence

Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
mos dan said:
yeah but come on, whether it's cos they like his writing or cos they like grime, they're still publishing it. they could just as easily ask him to write about something else.
Click to expand...

Looks like he IS writing about something else now...

It's quite odd, reading Vice, to reflect that its written by/read by the sort of apparently contemptible people you see swaggering around Shoreditch - its so full of sarcastic disdain for various subcultures that you'd have thought that they'd be an obvious target... perhaps they are? Maybe it's the armour of irony that protects them, from the criticism of others or of themselves...

I don't think most people are aware of what 'hipsters' are, outside of certain circles of people who could perhaps be described as pretty trendy themselves. That's one of the reasons 'Nathan Barley' sank like a stone in the ratings (alongside it not being particularly good) - the satirical point was lost on most people.

Besides, as a friend of mine who comes into contact with a lot more 'hipsters' than I do said to me, the idea of a homogeneously arrogant/obnoxious community of Nathan Barleys is a bit of a straw man... No doubt a lot of them are trust fund gobbling wankers but I'm sure plenty of them are just as passionate about certain things as WE NOBLE BEINGS are. They might just be into the fashion/parties etc. of that scene as well. And there are wankers in any scene.

Obviously as a satirical creation Nathan Barley was supposed to be a grotesque, an exaggeration, but I do wonder if he was too MUCH of an exaggeration? I don't live in one of those areas and I don't really come into much contact with 'hipsters' so I can't be sure but are there really that many people who are THAT stupid and unselfconscious and selfish in that scene?
 
mos dan

mos dan

fact music
Corpsey said:
Besides, as a friend of mine who comes into contact with a lot more 'hipsters' than I do said to me, the idea of a homogeneously arrogant/obnoxious community of Nathan Barleys is a bit of a straw man... No doubt a lot of them are trust fund gobbling wankers but I'm sure plenty of them are just as passionate about certain things as WE NOBLE BEINGS are. They might just be into the fashion/parties etc. of that scene as well. And there are wankers in any scene
Click to expand...

yeah this was precisely the crux of my article :)

re nathan barley, i actually think it was unfairly derided. 'it lacked any truly sympathetic characters, so it was never going to succeed' was the (fair) verdict of someone i know who's written sitcoms. but i still think the observations and the language were inspired at times. all of the sugarape magazine scenes, particularly:


i'd actually like a spin-off series about sugarape.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"It's quite odd, reading Vice, to reflect that its written by/read by the sort of apparently contemptible people you see swaggering around Shoreditch - its so full of sarcastic disdain for various subcultures that you'd have thought that they'd be an obvious target... perhaps they are? Maybe it's the armour of irony that protects them, from the criticism of others or of themselves..."
Click to expand...
I think that there are some very interesting articles in Vice but when you go in The Old Blue Last I somehow don't get the impression that the majority of people in there are reading them. Perhaps I'm wrong.

"I don't think most people are aware of what 'hipsters' are, outside of certain circles of people who could perhaps be described as pretty trendy themselves. That's one of the reasons 'Nathan Barley' sank like a stone in the ratings (alongside it not being particularly good) - the satirical point was lost on most people."
Click to expand...
Yes of course. And this goes back to a point that someone made earlier - really how important are "hipsters" in the grand scheme of things? Aren't there far better (though maybe not so easy) targets?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
mos dan said:
yeah this was precisely the crux of my article :)

re nathan barley, i actually think it was unfairly derided. 'it lacked any truly sympathetic characters, so it was never going to succeed' was the (fair) verdict of someone i know who's written sitcoms.
Click to expand...

I can never put my finger on exactly what it is that puts me off about it, perhaps that's it though. I know that the Morris fan-base seem to primarily loathe it for its casting of actors like Richard Ayodade, Noel Fielding etc... who are seen as belonging to a 'new school' of comedy that prioritizes irony, controversy and 'being well random' over more traditional setup-punchline jokes (oh, and who are also seen as being really really shit)... in fact, 'Nathan Barley' might be seen as belonging to that type of comedy itself... I don't think it's that simple, though.

Given that 'SugaRape' is clearly supposed to be a parody of Vice, do you think that the parody is now outdated, or that it was never supposed to be particularly accurate? Or is Vice, despite being a 'force for good', actually written by and for giggling twats?
 
straight

straight

wings cru
also love how vice still write about skating and hardcore like the people they perceive to be their readership was doing anything else pre electroclash/a-levels than riding horses and taping dave pearce off the radio. The last few issues have had some pretty good reporting in them which i assume gets skimmed past to look at people getting stick for their clothes outside bars smoking. in fact, the smoking bans have probably been a godsend to the dos and donts, you cant take anything like a decent full length photo in a club. All you have to do is read the comments beneath the articles on the vice website to see how bad the desperation to have some sort of sprayed on cool is amongst its readers, and depressing that so many think that it can be achieved by (ironically) brainless insults
 
mos dan

mos dan

fact music
glad there's some love for barley on here. corpsey you're right about the 'new school' being offensive to chris morris obsessives though - did anyone ever used to read cook'd and bomb'd message board? chris morris fans are *hardcore*.. very purist.

ultimately though richard ayaode is funny - see garth merenghi's dark place. fielding is a twat but whatever.

thanks to this thread i just wasted most of my lunchbreak reading dos and don'ts... on brits:

http://www.viceland.com/int/dd.php?id=508
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
Nathan Barley the TV show just couldn't live up to the sheer delicious spitefulness of the early tvgohome "Cunt" pieces. (I think there's an achive online somewhere, but my work firewall doesn't like sites with "cunt" in the title, lol) It was OK, although overstretched, might have worked better as five minute bits in a sketch show.
 
S

Shonx

Shallow House
Cunt was awesome. I think if that sort of anger had gone into the tv show it would have been far funnier (although technically unfilmable I think). Don't think it was about absence of sympathetic characters, really a lot more to do with the fact that the characters that were supposed to be derided weren't actually hateful enough. I got the feeling with the series that Nathan was just a bit of a dick desperately needing to be seen as cool by his peers in a laughably teenage fashion, whereas the Barley from Cunt was far more like Jonathan Yeah? in the series, far nastier borderline sociopath.

Oh the Cunt archives are here - http://www.tvgohome.com/
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
TVGoHome was fantastic. There was great stuff in it other than Cunt, too - Mick Hucknall's Pink Pancakes, anyone? :)
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Personally, I though Barley (the character) was pretty cool. The mental tv exec and the editor of Sugarape were best though.
 
CHAOTROPIC

CHAOTROPIC

on account
I always thought that the subtext of the humour in Cunt was the over-the-top nature of Charlie Brooker's hatred of Nathan Barley. The ludicrous obsession with Barley's relatively commonplace offensiveness was made clear in the series. In the original, we don't get to see the narrator, but in Nathan Barley we do, & if Dan Ashcroft wrote a blog, it'd be exactly like Cunt. What Ashcroft hates about Barley & the hipsters has nothing really to do with shallowness, tastelessness or amorality (calling people 'idiots' scarcely implies a moral censure) but their lack of alienation, which enables them to unselfconsiously embrace all the ridiculousness of their social context, plus the rewards of such insiderness: productivity, popularity & success. So I kindof saw the series as equally critical of Ashcroft's ineffectual sniping, his own weak wille zur macht, paralysis, parasitism & hopelessness, that leads to his Barley-obsession, as it was of the hipster trough from which, let's face it, both he & Charlie Brooker drink. Rather than being a television version of Cunt, I think it's Brooker asking, quite honestly, "why do I hate these people so much?"
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
mos dan said:
Runner: Max Gogarty. Good to see he's still getting work lol.
Click to expand...

Heh, Max Gogarty, a.k.a. Nathan Bali?

Is the poor lad ever going to live that down? I reckon he's going to top himself and then the Express will be all like "Innocent teenager hounded to death by Guardian blog bullies".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top