Hipsters are a bogeyDRAFT |
| by Sam |
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Several months ago, I closely followed the discussion that unfolded around Vice Magazine and its co-founder Gavin MacInnes.
I've followed Vice for a while -- it's one of the younger "urban" magazines, and free, which adds up to it being somewhat influential. So Gavin made some loose comments, published in Pat Buchanan's mag American Prospect, and to top it off, gotten a negative article in the New York Times Style Section. Just another smug, ambition-twisted freak...what's to be done about it, I say. But to a whole crowd, it was much more than that. It unleashed a torrent of confused feelings about our culture, politics, generations, cities, all directed towards "hipsters." I'd always been somewhat distrustful of the term, and now I was determined to get to the bottom of it. Who were these people who seemed as fascinating as they were loathsome, as influential as they were disposable. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see The Hipster Handbook. It quickly became clear to me hipsters don't exist, at least not as such. There is a nice barb in the tail of anti-hipsterism: "it is so hipster to claim there are no hipsters." But social research doesn't proceed like a schoolyard game of jinx, so let me say it again: The Hipster is an amalgamation, a phantasm, a bogey. He does not exist, and is a distraction from the real relations within our cities. What is real is the culture of American immigrants. Not immigrants to America, but immigrants within America. Over the last hundred years, populations have risen for both urban and rural areas, but they have risen much faster in urban areas. The birth rates are equal -- in fact, they were higher in rural areas until the early 90s. As well as international immigration, there is a sub-national migration, a very definite one -- young adults come to the cities. And, I would add, move from city to city. There is an important experience there, one which is profoundly jammed and obscured by the hipster bogey. It is easy to blame hapless young people for the ugly social developments they are learning to adapt to. Rents rising -- don't blame the landlords, blame the young people who are finding ways to pay them. Of course, you can also smugly wash your hands of the whole deal. And The Hipster has the potential to step right in the middle of it, smear itself all over these complexities until they reek with the banality of an shopping catalog. He is simultaneously mocked as a dolt and envied for his privilege. She wears thrift store plus Prada. They are the originator of trends and the butt of jokes. "A hipster," in its extension, is anyone who has been in the city for either longer or shorter than you, who you either envy or look down on. Not a useful word. It is the most useless to American urban in-migrants. We, after all, have to find our way in a culture that is, at least initially, quite alien to us. Our connections are fragile, our perceptions are evolving very rapidly. This is both a productive and a percarious position. On the one hand, culture, geograpy, and economics are mapped against each other. On the other, social exclusion is a real possibility, and poses a real struggle. What is this struggle? It is a struggle for social inclusion, a struggle for public space, a struggle to establish collaborations and mutual reliance. The culture of this struggle is weak and fractured, antagonized and virtually anonymous. It is grounded in the common condition, the reality of being an outsider, and the desire for contact with other people. We can do without The Hipster. He could never play a useful part in our cultural struggle. Our struggle is for a culture which is easily identifiable and locatable, and players who are differentiated by message and frequency rather than exclusiveness and credentials. This culture is there, this script is being written. Let's build the stage big and start acting it out! DRAFT 0 Hipsters are a bogey There is a spectre haunting New York...the spectre of hipsters... Gavin McInnes' difficulties of late make it an appropriate time to clarify a thing or two about the "hipster" phenomenon. First and foremost, it is essential to understand that "hipsters" do not exist as a social group, as they are commonly supposed to. Hipsters are a sales fiction; a product, same as Mickey Mouse. Like the yuppies in the eighties, they are not a spontaneous, coherent, or self-identified group. They will never defend themselves, you can say anything you like about them, and the best part is, the media that produce and sell "the hipster" can always do so at a safe distance. Hipsters function as a convenient way to market a certain range of cultural phenomena without risking the exposure of a direct endorsement or condemnation. Love them or love to hate them, those wacky hipsters always make good copy -- sell trucker hats to the kiddies at the same time as you give the Lord & Taylor moms something to cluck over. In this light, the current of hatred for hipsters is a profoundly misdirected one. It's like getting deeply personally exercised over a professional wrestling villian, or someone who dresses like one. They do not exist without the exploitative media that creates them, which I like to call them the "hip replacement" press. Chief offenders: They are the puppet masters who use the spectre of hipsters to shame their readers -- "don't you know, all the hipsters are..." -- and avoid ever having to take responsibility. When they have sucked one trend dry, they dump it, replacing one "hipster" with another. Why hipsters? Molly points out that they play much the same role as yuppies did back in the eighties. It is easy to blame hapless young people for the ugly social developments they are learning to adapt to. Rents rising -- don't blame the landlords, blame the young people who are finding ways to pay them. They are, in fact, a conveniant fiction that give a semblance of coherence to what are, in actuality, disparate social phenomena. |