I didn’t use to have any particular gripe against the hipsters. I get no sense of self-satisfaction from ripping on them. But the hipsters have got to be stopped.
The Hipster Handbook defines a Hipster thusly:
Hipster – One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term “cool”; a Hipster would instead say “deck.”) The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2% body fat.
My hometown of Albuquerque does not have them. In Minneapolis you can find a lot of kids who look like they might be hipsters – and even some young ones who self–identify as such – but Chicago – Chicago is something else. I moved into a neighborhood just south of Wicker Park – the de facto hipster capitol of the city (rapidly giving way to the Bucktowners, a more conservative young set generally in possession of flat-screen televisions and khaki pants). The buggers are everywhere around here.
Hipsterism is essentially the meeting of a whimsical sense of irony with young middle-class culture. In this essay, I’ll take a look at how this irony evidences itself in hipster behavior, why this might have come to be, why it is dangerous, and what our options are. So let’s look at irony.
The hipster brand of irony gives us the trucker hat, the mustache, big belt buckles and women’s sunglasses. Taking in one culture and remixing it in (an this is key) a knowingly ingenuine way. Sort of a wink and a nod. Out of necessity, then, it must cannibalize all of its elements from other cultures. Hipsterism is indiscriminate in its taste: Las Vegas kitsch, cowboy saloon, seventies disco, modern celebrity pop, old-school ivy league, gay camp, even black panther… It’s a pastiche of satirical takes on stereotypes done up in bright colors (and sucked in to fit the form and look sexy [or ironically unsexy {or ironically sexy}]).
And in a way, I can respect this ironical bent. Hipsterism is in many ways the natural outgrowth of the times. A true child of the Zeitgeist.
Much of my generation is involved in remix culture, and by and large I find this entirely agreeable. It’s creative. The instinct to make something worthwhile out of the basically bankrupt material we are handed is at the heart of my own philosophy of resurrection and redemption. You see, the Millenial generation has grown up in such a backwards world, that of course we must turn inwards and upside down: the Clear Skies Act adds pollutants to the air; protect freedom by restricting free speech; the Family First blowholes are all gay; the newsmedia acts surprised when there are no weapons of mass destruction; mission accomplished.
You can see how a generation might get a keen eye for irony.
And this is not even to mention bullshit. Given the rise of the kind of television that rose in the late seventies and early eighties, we are the first generation exposed so heavily to so much advertising (the essential form of bullshit) literally since birth. As such, our bullshit meters are, predictably, pretty sensitive. Philosopher Harry G Frankfurt defines bullshit as a kind of lack of regard for truth which is different from lying. The truth or falsity of bullshit is incidental to its meaning and purpose.
Hipsterism proposes a kind of vomiting out of bullshit – a kind of “I see your game. You wanna feed me bullshit?, you’re gonna get some bullshit vomit in your lap.” It’s not an outright rejection, but a subversion. It is to style oneself knowingly after bullshit. It is to be cleverer than the world you live in. By reproducing a tough trucker outfit in women’s jeans and sunglasses, there is a way in which we can subvert the tough guy ideal.
Right?
The problem is that that’s not the aim. The ironic trucker mustache doesn’t mean anything. It’s a joke, and as such can be funny, but it leads nowhere. It is a bullshit response to a bullshit world. As such it can be credited with diagnosing the problem of our times, but not with helping to solve it. Because wearing a bullshit mustachio for long enough and without particular purpose, one loses sight of where the irony begins and the self ends. This intentional blurring of the line between irony and sincerity is the chief hallmark of hipsterism, and it bankrupts both irony and sincerity of meaning.
This is the chief danger of hipsterism.
One friend of mine used to find the mustaches funny, and now, against her conscious will, finds them sexually attractive.
And okay, a lot of social movements become so obsessed with form that they lose their original meaning, this is a danger to all cultures, particularly youth cultures where the default need is communal acceptance and sexual attention, and expanding youth cultures inevitably detach to some degree from their most meaningful roots. Okay. But here is a movement which never had a meaning to lose. There is no backbone, no thread of a continuing search for meaning.
The hipster Classic, Flight of the Concords tries on politics. Where does the kidding end and the genuine begin?
Where does kitsch end and question begin? At what point are they making fun of themselves for asking questions? At what point making fun of themselves for reducing these question to kitsch? At what point making fun of themselves for making fun of themselves? It’s a spiral of irony that takes considerable craft, and they’re masters of their craft, surely, but to what end?
Hipsterism envisions no goals, no truth; it is subjectivist in the extreme. It is in fact narcissistic nihilism.
Now. Do brightly colored converse and a predilection for vinyl records and effeminate hairdos make you a nihilist, incapable of belief in anything? No. Do I go too far, am I too cruel? Possibly. But there is a way in which hipsterism itself refuses – pointedly – to take any stand, say anything with a straight face. With everything hipster there is a sense that anything could be retracted at any time. The right is always reserved to refuse to take responsibility – for anything.
And I have to ask myself – is this the best that our generation can throw up against the cultural ghost of our times? I mean I understand that there are a lot of good things about his culture – in its predilection for the outward and downward spread of cool as opposed to mass-marketed force-fed nonsense, in its appreciation of diversiy, even in its wilingness to greet the world with a sense of humor – but honestly… this is it? If our generation is trying to rise above (and I think we are) then compare to, say, American Hardcore:
I think you can get what’s good out of our generational ghost, and you can live in the world as a remixologist, without falling into the trap of nihilism or sleepy solipsism. And there is much we must salvage out of the Hipster culture: the rejection of the bankrupt mainstream force-fed culture, self-determination of cultural identity, contempt for conformity, remixology – but remix culture does not have to imply any falsity or bullshit. Can we seriously do no better than reduction to kitsch?
The answer must be that we can.
So what are our other options?
As an example from my own youth, consider the psychobillies. Psychobillies are not kidding. This is a culture remixing the rockabilly greaser fifties, transforming a culture that does not belong to them into one that does. Its origins are from a Johnny Cash song written about putting together a Cadillac from many pieces (One Piece at a Time). Greased do’s, cigarettes rolled into the sleeve, leather jackets, the whole thing. But they’re not kidding, and they’ll sock you in the jaw. Similarly, punkrockers cover Johnny Cash songs an awful lot. Not because it’s funny or clever, but because the Man in Black is deeply revered in the community. We wept when he died.
Or, take Picasso. His good friend killed himself, and for three years following this tragic rupture, he painted in no color but blue. These paintings are beautiful, but singularly morose and straight-faced. Visiting one of his museums in Barcelona, seeing the radical transformation from the sad and lonely portraits of his blue period through color and cubism into the wildly painful and joyful work he did later in life, I felt compelled to think that it was cubism that rescued him from depression – it was the breaking up of people and things that allowed him to put his world back together. Only by breaking people up into parts that didn’t fit could he create a whole which fit better with his broken reality than a straight portrait ever could.
This of course, already happened. It is of great meaning to me, but of little use to my generation.
So. More locally, take Colbert. He offers proof that not even irony need lead us towards the empty insider neverland that hipsterism offers. I mean here’s a motherfucker says things he doesn’t mean for a living. The unrivaled Grand Duke of Irony. He starts his guest interviews by aggrandizing himself in front of his audience, high-fiving them and ignoring his guest (this presumably as an ironic stab at the talking heads he so knowingly and ironically lampoons and their inflated senses of self). But it doesn’t end there; it has also become a real hallmark of his own show, and therefore in some degree, of himself. But under all that irony, he is just not kidding. Not at all. He does what he does not to point out how superior he is to the silly world he lives in, but because he thinks that a certain kind of conservatism is an infantile and dangerous way to lead a country. Remember his press correspondent’s dinner speech? It was pure poetry.
What a profound victory of irony over bullshit.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart actually sending Rob Riggle to Iraq comes to mind. Or Billionaires for Bush.
My chief concern with hipster culture is not in its deleterious political effects, but with its profound weakening effect on the human soul. In a world so plagued with lies and with bullshit, we must value truth. (Brother Ali’s Undisputed Truth comes to mind). And in the name of truth we can reclaim the productive use of lies and of bullshit.
Let me be clear in pointing out that I am not advocating for a humorless, polemic culture. I am advocating for sincerity, yes, but also for a kind of absurdism that does not abdicate responsibility. We live in a broken world, and if we are to make meaningful art, it must be broken, too, because how a thing is constructed says as much about the world as what it says.
And anyway they’ve started to self-cannibalise. People in Wicker park are now wearing ironical hipster outfits. So the end has got to be near. I pray that it is, and that the hipsters find their backbones.
