Hipsters, Fixed Gear Bikes and Other Stories
From Mod Mania
Calling someone a hipster is complicated.
Apart from currently being heavily tied to the Indie music scene, the term 'hipster' can be quite confusing when you try to define it. We've all seen hipsters, we all know of hipster traits, but as soon as you try and add criteria as to what defines a hipster you realise it isn't a simple label to apply.
Wikipedia.com gives us three definitions of a hipster:
- a person who is interested in the latest trends or fashions
- a member of Bohemian counterculture
- an aficionado of jazz who considers himself to be hip
However, these three points could apply to many people who wouldn't be considered hipsters. The transient nature of being a hipster means that the definition of the word itself will keep changing as trends come and go. When someone identifies another person as being a hipster in modern western society, do they mean “an aficionado of jazz who considers himself to be hip” or do they mean “that kid in skinny leg jeans apathetically flicking through used Sonic Youth records”?
First and foremost, I'd like to propose that there is a distinction between hipsters and scenesters.
Scenesters aren't exclusive to the indie or hipster scene, they can be found in almost any cultural group you can think of. They are people who look like they belong to a certain group but usually do it for reasons of social status or fashion. Scenesters usually outnumber the group they emulate. Their clothing and taste in music and film is very much geared towards making them appear a certain way, they use the cultural value of an object and try to transfer that onto themselves. Liking a certain film or wearing a certain type of clothing or riding a certain type of bike - because of how it is perceived over any sort of practical or personal preference.
From personal experience, I've found that Melbourne hipsters are usually middle to lower class white kids between the ages of 17-34 and tend to be defined by most – if not all – of the following:
- a person who wears skin tight jeans
- a person who still buys vinyl records
- a person who shops at thrift stores for ironic vintage clothing
- a person who reads Vice magazine
Hipsters gain resentment because of the way they take something meaningful or iconic, such as the fixed-gear bike, and drain away any cultural significance it once had. The hipster consumes counterculture and then “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.”[1] The hipster is a mutating representation of hippie, punk, beat (writer's such as Bukowski, Kerouac and Burroughs) and hip-hop (specifically east-coast rappers in the early 90's such as Wu-Tang, Nas or Notorious B.I.G.), they are the first counterculture movement to draw solely upon the past without creating anything new. They are a collage of previous rebellions. “[A] youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.”[2]
Although widely condemned, the sheer lack of definition and loose association that the word hipster carries leaves me undecided as to whether or not the movement has any merit. I've met some pretentious pseudo-intellectual people who would be considered hipsters and I've met some really down to earth and interesting people who would also be considered hipsters. It may be a stretch, but the hipster lifestyle could be seen as a reaction to the commercialisation of authentic arts, culture and music, an apathetic movement that refrains from creating culture for fear of fuelling a consumerist society. If advertising copies art, then why create art? It happened to Kurt Cobain, his music ended up becoming part of the same consumerist culture he sang songs of rebellion against, and he ended up committing suicide. These days punk clothing is no longer modified at home with reckless abandon but can instead be purchased pre-made at Dangerfield. Or flannelette shirts – originally symbols of 90's grunge – being sold in Jay-Jay's, Just Jeans and practically every other main-stream chain clothing retailer. Marketers have realised that countercultural and anti-consumer movements are viable investments, they probably realised it long ago, and from what remnants of the original indie/hipster scene remain, I get the vague sense that this is what they were rebelling against, or at least no longer playing into. The true hipster is shopping in thrift stores for pre-loved clothes, buying used records, furnishing their homes on hard-rubbish collection day with sofas and washing machines discarded on the curb, and just generally doing one of the things that consumerism has slowly programmed us not to do: Recycle. The true hipster isn't spending a lot of money. Marketers can exploit the hipster aesthetic, replicate it, sell it to scenesters, but it is arguable that they cannot fully exploit the hipsters themselves.
Or maybe I'm being a little bit forgiving...
On a less flattering note, the hipster movement seems scarily enough like the last countercultural death-rattle. The hippy, punk, grunge and hip-hop movements all carried less momentum than the movement before them. The Indie movement, (which is to hipsters what punk music was to punks, or ska was to rudeboys), was consumed and repackaged so quickly into the main-stream that it was hard to define the authentic from the replications practically from the get-go. The indie scene and hipster movement was under marketing scrutiny from such an early age that advertisers could begin selling the new 'cool' while it was still considered so by the underground, which meant that scenesters were quick to assimilate into the culture. Is it possible in modern society to start a countercultural movement as untainted by commercial culture and capitalism as the hippies of the 60's? Or the hardcore punks of the late 70's? Or would it be dismantled and reverse-engineered by marketing companies and robbed of meaning?
Obviously the term is no longer even useful, because of how broad and poorly defined it is, in a similar fashion to how the term 'emo' originally referred to a post-punk movement and bands like Sunny Day Real Estate or Rites Of Spring but now refers to most music found on myspace.com, and this kid
References:
- Lorentzen, Christian (May 30–Jun 5, 2007), "Kill the hipster: Why the hipster must die: A modest proposal to save New York cool", Time Out New York, http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/features/4840/why-the-hipster-must-die
- Adbusters #79, Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_%28contemporary_subculture%29
