Hipster (contemporary subculture)

Hipster is a slang term that first appeared in the 1940s, and was revived in the 1990s and 2000s to describe types of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture, particularly indie rock, independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media. In some contexts, hipsters are also referred to as scenesters.

"Hipster" has been used in sometimes contradictory ways, making it difficult to precisely define "hipster culture" because it is a "mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior[s]." One commentator argues that "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic" elements of all of the "fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge," and draws on the "cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity", and "regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity." Others, like Arsel and Thompson, argue that hipster is a cultural mythology, crystallization of a mass mediated stereotype generated to understand, categorize and marketize the indie consumer culture rather than an objectified group of people.

History

Origins in the 1940s–1950s

See also: Hipster (1940s subculture) and hip (slang)

Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation of the 1950s identified with the 1940s hipster subculture.

The name itself was coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene. Although the word's exact origins are disputed, some say it was a derivative of "hop," a slang term for opium, while others believe it comes from the West African word "hipi," meaning "to open one's eyes." Nevertheless, it gradually became a noun, and "hipster" entered the language.

The first dictionary to list the word is the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk," which was included with Harry Gibson's 1944 album, Boogie Woogie In Blue. The entry for "hipsters" defined it as "characters who like hot jazz." Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely black jazz musicians they followed. The 1959 book Jazz Scene by Eric Hobsbawm (using the pen name Francis Newton) describes hipsters using their own language, "jive-talk or hipster-talk," he writes "is an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders." However the subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene attached itself to the movement. Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality." However, it was Norman Mailer who gave the movement definition. In an essay titled "The White Negro" Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death — annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity — and electing instead to "divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self."

1990s and 2000s

"Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear t-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care."

— Time, July 2009

In the late 1990s, the term began to be used in new, sometimes mutually exclusive ways. In some circles it became a blanket description for middle class and upper class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, alternative hip-hop, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local beer (or even brewing their own), listening to public radio, and riding fixed-gear bicycles. Time described them as follows in a 2009 article: "take your grandmother's sweater and Bob Dylan's Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars and a can of Pabst and bam — hipster."

In 2003 Robert Lanham's satirical book The Hipster Handbook described hipsters as young people with "... mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes... strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags." Lanham further describes hipsters thus: "You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration" and "you have one Republican friend who you always describe as being your 'one Republican friend.'"

Slate writer Brandon Stosuy noted that "Heavy metal has recently conquered a new frontier, making an unexpected crossover into the realm of hipsterdom." He argues that the "current revival seems to be a natural mutation from the hipster fascination with post-punk, noise, and no wave," which allowed even the "nerdiest indie kids to dip their toes into jagged, autistic sounds." He argues that a "byproduct" of this development was an "... investigation of a musical culture that many had previously feared or fetishized from afar.”

In 2008, Utne Reader magazine writer Jake Mohan described "hipster rap," "as consisting of the most recent crop of MCs and DJs who flout conventional hip-hop fashions, eschewing baggy clothes and gold chains for tight jeans, big sunglasses, the occasional keffiyeh, and other trappings of the hipster lifestyle." He notes that the "old-school hip-hop website Unkut, and Jersey City rapper Mazzi" have criticized mainstream rappers who they deem to be poseurs or "... fags for copping the metrosexual appearances of hipster fashion." Prefix Mag writer Ethan Stanislawski argues that there are racial elements to the rise of hipster rap. He claims that there "...have been a slew of angry retorts to the rise of hipster rap," which he says can be summed up as "white kids want the funky otherness of hip-hop... without all the scary black people."

In the UK, Hoxton and Shoreditch are known as hipster areas where they are referred to pejoratively as "Shoreditch twats".

In the US, areas associated with hipsters include Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Wicker Park in Chicago, and the Mission District in San Francisco.

In Australia, areas associated with hipsters include Darlinghurst and Surry Hills in Sydney, Fitzroy and Northcote in Melbourne, and West End in Brisbane.

Critical analysis

Christian Lorentzen of Time Out New York claims that metrosexuality is the hipster appropriation of gay culture, as a trait carried over from their "Emo" phase. He writes that "these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod." He argues that "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic" elements of all of the "fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge," and draws on the "cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity" and "gay style," and then "regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity". He claims that this group of "18-to-34-year-olds," who are mostly white, "have defanged, skinned and consumed" all of these influences. Lorentzen says hipsters, "in their present undead incarnation," are "essentially people who think of themselves as being cooler than America," also referring to them as "the assassins of cool." He also criticizes how the subculture's original menace has long been abandoned and has been replaced with "the form of not-quite-passive aggression called snark."

Time writer Dan Fletcher states that "Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity".

In a Huffington Post article entitled "Who's a Hipster?", Julia Plevin argues that the "definition of 'hipster' remains opaque to anyone outside this self-proclaiming, highly-selective circle". She claims that the "whole point of hipsters is that they avoid labels and being labeled. However, they all dress the same and act the same and conform in their non-conformity" to an "iconic carefully created sloppy vintage look".

Rob Horning developed a critique of hipsterism in his April 2009 article "The Death of the Hipster" in PopMatters, exploring several possible definitions for the hipster. He muses that the hipster might be the "embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics," or might be "...a kind of permanent cultural middleman in hypermediated late capitalism, selling out alternative sources of social power developed by outsider groups, just as the original 'white negros' evinced by Norman Mailer did to the original, pre-pejorative 'hipsters'—blacks...." Horning also proposed that the role of hipsters may be to "... appropriat[e] the new cultural capital forms, delivering them to mainstream media in a commercial form and stripping their inventors... of the power and the glory...". Horning argues that the "...problem with hipsters" is the "way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how 'cool' it is perceived to be," as "...just another signifier of personal identity." Furthermore, he argues that the "hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity, by a sense of lateness to the scene" or the way that they transform the situation into a "self-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and exploit."

Dan Fletcher in Time seems to support this theory, positing that stores like Urban Outfitters have mass-produced hipster chic, merging hipsterdom with parts of mainstream culture, thus overshadowing its originators' still-strong alternative art and music scene. According to Fletcher, "Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity. Critics have described the loosely defined group as smug, full of contradictions and, ultimately, the dead end of Western civilization." Elise Thompson, an editor for the LA blog LAist argues that "people who came of age in the 70s and 80s punk rock movement seem to universally hate 'hipsters'", which she defines as people wearing "expensive 'alternative' fashion[s]", going to the "latest, coolest, hippest bar...[and] listen[ing] to the latest, coolest, hippest band." Thompson argues that hipsters "...don’t seem to subscribe to any particular philosophy... [or] ...particular genre of music." Instead, she argues that they are "soldiers of fortune of style" who take up whatever is popular and in style, "appropriat[ing] the style[s]" of past countercultural movements such as punk, while "discard[ing] everything that the style stood for."

Drawing from Bourdieu's work and Thomas Frank's theories of co-optation, Zeynep Arsel and Craig Thompson argue that in order to segment and co-opt the indie marketplace, mass media and marketers have engaged in commercial "mythmaking" and contributed to the formation of the contemporary discourse about hipsters. They substantiate this argument using a historical discourse analysis of the term and its use in the popular culture, based on Arsel's dissertation that was published in 2007. Their argument is that the contemporary depiction of hipster is generated through mass media narratives with different commercial and ideological interests. In other words, hipster is a less of an objective category, and more of a culturally and ideologically shaped and mass mediated modern mythology that appropriates the indie consumption field and eventually turns into a form of stigma. Arsel and Thompson also interview participants of the indie culture (DJs, designers, writers) to better understand how they feel about being labeled as one. Their findings demonstrate three strategies for dissociation from the hipster stereotype: aesthetic discrimination, symbolic demarcation, and proclaiming sovereignty. These strategies, empowered by ones status in the indie field (or their cultural capital) enable these individuals to defend their field dependent cultural investments and tastes from devaluating hipster mythology. Their work explains why people who are ostensibly fitting the hipster stereotype profusely deny being one: hipster mythology devaluates their tastes and interests and thus they have to socially distinguish themselves from this cultural category and defend their tastes from devaluation. To succeed in denying being a hipster, while looking, acting, and consuming like one, these individuals demythologize their existing consumption practices by engaging in rhetorics and practices that symbolically differentiate their actions from the hipster stigma.

Mark Grief, a founder of n+1 and an assistant professor at The New School, in a New York Times editorial, states that "hipster" is often used by youth from disparate economic backgrounds to jockey for social position. He questions the contradictory nature of the label, and the way that no one thinks of themselves as a hipster: "Paradoxically, those who used the insult were themselves often said to resemble hipsters — they wore the skinny jeans and big eyeglasses, gathered in tiny enclaves in big cities, and looked down on mainstream fashions and 'tourists.'" He believes the much-cited difficulty in analyzing the term stems from the fact that any attempt to do so provokes universal anxiety, since it "calls everyone’s bluff". Like Arsel and Thompson, he draws from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu to conclude:

"You can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as 'liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands'; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the 'creative professions.' These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy — but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural 'cool.'

They, in turn, may malign the 'trust fund hipsters.' This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into 'cultural capital.' (Bourdieu’s most famous coinage), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear. (Think of Paris Hilton in her trucker hat.)

Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-­surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be 'superior': hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility."

Grief's efforts puts the term "hipster" into a socioeconomic framework rooted in the petty bourgeois tendencies of a youth generation unsure of their future social status. The cultural trend is indicative of a social structure with heightened economic anxiety and lessened class mobility.

Dave Monaghan, a writer contributing to the progressive media Toward Freedom, listed four benefits of the hipster culture. The hipster demographic is likely to be progressive, and tends to eagerly question many of the most ingrained institutions in the modern world. Due to their tendency to live in popular cities, hipsters often support progressive housing-rights legislation as well. Hipsters often seek to reduce expenditures on everyday items such as food and clothing, leading to their popularizing of thrift stores and middle-class fashion and cuisine. Finally, as a result of their rejection of the cultural institutions of monogamy and settled living, hipsters are able to engage themselves in causes such as pacifism, environmentalism, and human rights. They can also devote themselves to creative, personal, spiritual, and political endeavors without having to concern themselves with the responsibility that a more settled life entails.

External links

• Robert Lanham deconstructs hipsters in The Morning News
• "The Sad Science of Hipsterism: The Psychology of Indie Bands, PBR and Weird Facial Hair" in Psychology Today
• "What Was the Hipster?" Mark Greif, New York, October 24, 2010
• "Will The Last Hipster Please Turn Out The Lights? New York cool dies its thousandth death. A satire." Zev Borow, New York, May 21, 2005