Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Essay: "You are a hiptser"


When I first became aware of the term "hipster" I was not aware that it was an insult. I had a friend who lived downtown, listened to Indie music, and only drank microbrewed beers. I told him casually that he was a hipster and he strenuously denied it.  That's how I learned that the word "hipster" is a term of contempt - because no one will admit to being one.


But why not?  I mean, there's nothing wrong with being hip, right? When we call someone else (never ourselves, of course) a hipster, what are we really saying?  I would define a "hipster" as someone who is "self-conscious" and "superior" and "contrarian."  So, for example, they listen to obscure music because it is obscure, and then act superior to people who only listen to regular music.

Basically, a hipster is a smug asshole.  No one likes smug assholes, or to be called a smug asshole, so we're clearly most of the way there to understanding why it's a insult.  But not all of the way, I don't think. It seems to go deeper than that.  I'm thinking of the raw denial , how we all call other people hipsters but will NEVER admit to being one ourselves, no matter how skinny our jeans or how v-necked and vintage our t-shirts. You get to the point where you just want someone to own it.  "Yeah, I'm a hipster.  Fuck you." But nobody does (they will eventually though; mark my words).

I think what bothers us so much about hipsters is not that they are smug assholes. It's that they're lame.  A hipster is trying to look cool and different (with the records and the trucker cap and the digital watch) but as soon as you put them in a category you are basically signalling that their efforts to look cool and different failed. And they failed because they were recognized as efforts, as inauthentic. Someone who listens to obscure music because it is obscure is trying to look like they don't care what people think about them.  But in fact they do care, they care desperately.  Hence the whole hipster act.

And here is where things get interesting. What this all means, in my opinion, is that since being a "hipster" is uncool, the more vehemently you deny being a hipster (because YOU aren't preoccupied with being cool!  YOU don't care what people think about you!), the more likely that you are, in fact, a hipster.

Say for example you were a big fan of the director of Drive before Drive came out.  You will feel an urge to tell people this, because this will make you look cultured and intelligent.  But then, not wanting to sound like a hipster ("I was into Nicolas Winding Refn before he was cool!") you stifle that urge. 

It is like the iPhone paradox.  Everyone bought an iPhone to look cool.  That's lame!  Trying to look cool is lame! So you (or me, really, in this example, but let's stick with you) go out and buy a different phone to distinguish yourself from them.  In order to, well, look cool.

You cannot escape the hipster trap. It's like trying to recapture how you thought before you learned a language. If you start affirming your love of mainstream music to show how you're not a hipster, you aren't getting off the coolness treadmill, you're just running faster and faster. Eventually you end up writing blog posts on the subject, in the vain attempt to implicitly distance yourself from the whole issue. Even admitting that you're "no different" is an act if it's done consciously; another way of trying to pretend like you don't care. Acting like you don't care is the biggest pose of all, which is the annoying thing about hipsters.  But how is consciously avoiding hipsterisms any different?

In the end what bothers us about hipsters, really, is not that they are different from us but that they less sophisticated about it. "Cool" is a big act, after all (I sometimes I think it could be best defined as 'making the difficult look easy, but making sure everyone knows that you are MAKING it look easy, and that it is not actually easy, but not letting on that you are making sure everyone knows that on purpose) and a hipster is like a magician letting the audience in on the trick.

The only people you can be sure are not hipsters are people like your (or my) mom; the people who if you called them a hipster would say: "Why thank you dear!" Unironically.

You, my friend, are a hipster (and so am I, but again, let's not dwell on that).  You will never stop being self-conscious by thinking about it.  You will only set up more and more elaborate mental superstructures of self-consciousness.  I come back to the advice at the end of "Candide" - Let us go work in your garden.  People with interesting jobs and small children aren't hipsters (certain Brooklynites excepted).  They are too busy and tired.  When they watch "Two and A Half Men" and fall asleep at 8:45, they aren't being ironic, they're just exhausted. How bizarre to think that our parents, despite our worries and the opinions of our friends, were always cooler than us; because despite all of our posturing, they were the ones who truly did not give a fuck.  When you were a small child your parents cared much, much less than what people thought of them than Mick Jagger and Miles Davis put together.  If that isn't cool, I don't know what the fuck is.

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