With Arms Outstretched

Hipsters and cultural progress

While I agree with many of the comments that this piece in Adbusters about Hipsters being the end of civilization is written in hyperbole and at least four years too late, I did find the timing of myself reading the article to be, well, crazy coincidental as the very least. Just yesterday, as I rode the train to my next to last evening boot camp (of the workout variety, not the armed forces) I battled myself in my mind over whether I’ve become an old fuddy-duddy or if my generation of artists and intellectuals is as shitty as I think they are. For instance, I know I have friends who are very into what young filmmakers are creating these days, but I can’t help but mourn a generation of people who are more educated and have incredible resources (I’m talking media, technology, etc) yet are doing nothing with them but document their lame, apathetic lives.

I’m most definitely talking about films like Mutual Appreciation, which I will give credit for being beautifully crafted unlike most every other film by Bujalski and his friends, but otherwise the story is just the Brooklyn hipster version of The Hills. Nothing happens, no one is interesting, but most important to note, the film and the characters don’t care about anything apart from themselves. And that is what is so infuriating about hipsters.

So here are the bits of the article that stood out to me:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.

The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks. While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states – be it the head-spinning b-boy or violent thrashings of a live punk show – the hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-committal fear of expression typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist. The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves into oblivion.

In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.

Again, I realize this article is dramatic and generalizes things, but I think that he’s on to something with saying that hipsters aren’t creating culture but rather appropriating other (often minority and/or lower class) cultures in an attempt to be authentic, or not a part of the mainstream which is automatically considered inauthentic and manufactured. But in appropriating these cultures, they actually condescend to whichever culture they are taking from simply because they appropriate ironically. Rather than, say, wearing ghetto clothing because they like it or, even better, drinking PBR because they prefer it to other beers, they wear their clothes and drink their approved drinks because it’s not what is expected of them, namely privileged white people doing stuff that “white people like”.

Don’t you get it?! “I’m a skinny white dude from an upper middle class family, I’m not supposed to drink a poor man’s beer”. But actually, it’s not even the supposed aspect of it that is so condescending, it’s the fact that he doesn’t have to drink such a cheap beer and in doing so he is choosing to come down to the level of “real” people. This gives him authenticity, along with riding his bike rather than driving the beemer his parents offered him, and DJ-ing/writing for blogs rather than work for a real paper like he could with his journalism degree (but why would he do that, journalism is dead, no?). In taking on the symbols of less culturally powerful and privileged group of people, the ethos of a hipster is patronizing and inherently snobby. And the worst part is that those people groups they take from are not represented within hipster circles, because if a real black person or a real working class person were to hang with hipsters, then the irony is lost, and with it the “authenticity” of not being what The Man wants you to be.

And don’t even get me started on the music/dancing aspect of it. Needless to say I’ve already touched upon that, albeit from a different angle. But to add to my irritation, the fact that hipsters can’t bring themselves to actually dance, or to actually produce music or art that isn’t completely absorbed in being ironic or anti-[insert something mainstream here] is what makes me lament my generation’s goals and output, or lack thereof. There is such concern to like the right things, the right authors or filmmakers or artists, that the concept of art and beauty and progress is perceived through the most narrow of lenses. It truly angers me to think of how my friend Nate prefers the bad dancing of Feist because she “doesn’t take herself seriously.” This statement wholly sums up the Hipster’s ethos to me, and the contradictions therein. They no longer accept art that takes itself seriously, or politics that takes itself seriously, or people in general who take themselves seriously. To be serious is to be a fool, to be naive, to be what your parents and society and whatever or whoever else hipsters are against wanted you to be. Instead of being serious one must be self-aware, ironic, and hostile toward those who are actually making something of themselves and doing so for the benefit of society, art, and progress.

Hipsters may not represent the end of Western Civilization, but I do think they represent a stagnant and possibly even retrograde movement, and one that I am so over already.

posted by Alison @ 4:33 PM