What Was the Hipster?
Trucker Hat by Jon Rafman (Found on Art Fag City)
Last week n+1 posted a bewildering and intriguing event listing “What was the Hipster?” A “Panel, Symposium, and Historical Investigation.” As it coincided with my last trip to New York, I stopped by and ermm, live-tweeted some of it. (Read The Observer’s take on it here.)From the invitation:
Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster? Who is free enough of the hipster taint to write the hipster’s history without contempt or nostalgia? Why do we declare the hipster moment over—that, in fact, it had ended by 2003—when the hipster’s “global brand” has just reached its apotheosis?
A panel of n+1 writers invites n+1 subscribers and the public to join a collective investigation. Short presentations will be followed by audience debate, comment, and recollection, to be transcribed and published in book form this year.
Mark Greif started by pointing out the term hipster is almost always pejorative. (viz. This website) He defined the two major hipster tribes: the aggressive and non-aggressive. The former is epitomized by Kari Ferrell. The later, most of her victims. The first kind of hipster gained prominence in early-aughts, about the time Gavin McInnes moved to New York, Vincent Gallo released Brown Bunny and aligned himself with the neoconservative movement, Williamsburg still had some semblance of edge, and mustaches started appearing at shows. This kind of hipster clings to the angriest forms of Americana: trailer parks, guns, alcoholism, (overtly or discretely) racist humor. It also is self-contained in New York City. The point of this kind of hipster charade is obviously lost outside the US (sure, there were trucker hats in Europe and Asia in 2003, but the wearers never quite got what a trucker hat means.) Inside the US, pretending to be white trash only works in a city where white trash doesn’t exist. Otherwise you’re bearing the stigma of America’s deep-seated classism.
The second kind of hipster, emerged at roughly the same time. They volunteer at 826, eat vegan, wear sweaters in bright colors. If female they have Etsy stores. Male twees tend to be “beardos.” Think Wes Anderson, Dave Eggers. Grief called their breed of preciousness “knowingness and naivete… irony without sarcasm.” Both the aggressive and nonaggressive hipsters are defined by their taste. They do not create their own art, so they define themselves by what they consume. This is a way to build “status as possessors of knowledge.”
Self-aware graffiti in the East Village
Christian Lorentzen, an expert on the subject per his New York magazine article, Why the Hipster Must Die, talked about hipster mating rituals and hipster diaspora. The “hipster is disgusted by anything erotic and confused by what is known as love.” Every hipster must decide in early 30s, to stat a family and return to the suburbs (his likely origin) or continue as a sad aging hipster. A fascinating point was made about older, somewhat twee, literary hipsters — they are equal parts “Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik.” Grief wondered whether Cobain himself may have “applied his considerable literary talents” as a New Yorker staff writer, had he lived and gone on to enjoy fatherhood.
Jace Clayton (dj/Rupture) talked about hipsters abroad. Peruvians translating Pitchfork reviews into Spanish. And the false positives you might see in Spain, a country where the mullet is not an ironic revival but a haircut favored by civilians. Or those white guys with dreads that show up at hipster parties because there aren’t enough people sporting skinny jeans and real hipster threads to merit their exclusion.
The author of The Hipster Handbook, Robert Lanham, was in the audience and I wish they had talked more about the book. One of the weirdest trends in the high hipster days of ’03 was in reference to it. “Deck” was a made-up synonym for cool. As soon as the book went mainstream, hipsters called things “deck” — as a laugh at the book? At themselves? Whatever, they did it.
There was some discussion of class. The “trustie” hipster is really a NYC novelty. In Portland or Austin or Chicago, most hipsters come from humble beginnings. Moving to the city and entering a culturally literate scene is generally an upwardly mobile step. Lanham called them the “wash class” as they are the waitresses and bartenders at the establishments frequented by trust fund hipsters who don’t have to work. This is a pretty curious internal class divide and probably worth a “historical investigation” of its own.
The hipster, as he was known up until 2003, is now dead. He is a victim of the Internet, the ease and low cost of finding This Heat b-sides or obscure cult comics. Moe Tkacik called the Internet a “deregulator,” of all the kind of cultural artifacts time, dedication, and money once kept hidden. Losing My Edge really was an elegy.
What remains is just the shadow of homo hipsteromicus. The kind who “sing[s] theme songs from syndicated television programs from the late 70′s, early 80′s” although she was born in 1988, and is nostalgic for something she never knew.
Paddy Johnson questioned the panel’s use of the word “nostalgia” as it suggests this is something people actually like. But no one actually liked Charles in Charge, did they? Her comment inspired the most n+1-y reaction from audience, “Can’t [hipsters] protect things culturally worthwhile?”
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