27.6.13

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9.6.13

Hipster




In a West Coast paper that appears to be some sort of independent rag, The LA Weekly, hipster flogging and discussion continued into 2013.  The lamenting about hipsters has extended long after the emergence of the satirical Robert Lanham publication in 2003 (above, centre). This means that at least one decade of writing on the subject of hipsters has elapsed. A video about "hipsters" vs. "chavs" has also emerged in the context of a giant "Battle of the Stereotypes." 

In all sincerity, before The Hipster Handbook, there was The Yuppie Handbook (1984), (below). This original emerged with the '80s market changes and the ramifications to the class system. For the older reader, the obvious parallel to the hipster movement is the hippie movement. The parallel being in terms of a section of the population, typically youth, that shuns or rejects the traditional culture in favor of a youth culture. 



The hipster is, loosely, defined in popular culture as a social prude with tendencies to make cameos in the media, launching obscure cannonballs of mawkish snobbery. See the clip from PBS (herm) for clips-within-clips of SNL broadcasts, etc. However, the writer appears to conflate hipsters with nerds, the nerd-proud, and can be attributed the creation of the Hipster Alarm. He discusses the hipster in relation to cultural capital, accrediting theorist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu with the creation of the word. As with all items that can be vaguely described as "the fashion," the association between the symbolism of material goods, knowledge of style, and the fetishization of such concepts into consumer products. 




Lanham defines a hipster in his little textbook on the topic as "one who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool." He continues to suggested a preferred slang term, the word "deck," but it is unclear as to whether this word survived or was immediately subsumed by another euphemism for cool shortly after publication. 

I thought this phenomenon, being away from the United States, imploded for various reasons. I will list the following reasons: gentrification wars, self-implosion, commercialization piquing in destruction of spontaneous followings, co-opting by the dominant culture, and the emergence of the hive mentality. 

Exhibit A (see below). Hipsters, or young people attending colleges in inner cities, tend to have it a bit difficult living circumstances. They are prone to being viewed as some sort of invasive species. They lack the social resources or knowledge of the local culture to be accepted within an order that has been arranged as such within small communities. The social structure of the small community is a hierarchy based upon birth; small communities exist within metropolises. These collectives have their own local culture different from the standard dialect. 

Hipsters are shuttered from small communities on the basis of, basically, not being born in a place and being viewed as an outsider depleting the resources of said location. If this is an area that experiences tourism, the hipster is maligned as a tourist or foreign presence. The hipster may or may not experience discrimination caused by rising house prices in conjunction with migrational waves. 



Exhibit B. The hipster is portrayed in independent media in an acerbic way. The hipster is typically classified so hatefully due to a self-depreciating style. The hipster is constantly attempting to preserve the culture by purifying it by means of banishing outsiders from copying. The hipster bemoans the writer for codifying hipster law as the hipster must work harder to evolve stylistically. On the contrary, the outsider praises the writer for identifying hipster coterie and making it easier to copy. The true haters of the hipster, the most conventional of social conservatives (social conservatives without appreciation for style [or lacking the recognition of style as style]) battle the hipster administratively and/ or politically. This type of social conservative has established a longstanding career of creating policies designed as governance to control the population in accordance with being financially responsible as a nation. Here, socially conservative refers to fiscally reserved, which is in contradiction to the particular type of promulgation of culture that the hipster partakes in. 



Exhibit C. It was long bet upon that the hipster's lifecycle would be short-lived due to its subsequent economic imprisonment as the hipster movement is a visual movement associated with trends and talking pieces more than ideology. The high cost of the goods equates it with slavery in the mind of the artist. 



However, since the cycle of hipsterdom continues, I will catalogue the new material and the commentary. The paper reported that the hipster remained unpopular with the majority of the population. It appears there was a poll that surveyed attitudes on hipsters. The best question on the poll was, "Nearly half (46 percent) of stateside voters agreed that hipsters "soullessly appropriate cultural tropes from the past for their own ironic amusement." The commentary is also worth reading as it is laden with definitions of the term. Several definitions of hipster emerge on the LA forum, but they have not been quoted at length.