An open letter to hipsters

When I was but a young lad, I used to look at photos of my parents wedding, their friends and my extended family and think, "did they really think these outfits look good?" I got concerned that maybe we all looked at equally terrible and when the blinding bulb of hindsight was turned on, 20 years on, we'd all be throughly embarrassed. This entry would go for days should I write theories on fashion so lets skip it, but let it suffice that I have a good idea those people did know who unbelievably foolish they looked.

Fast forward to last weekend when I was in the western most portion of Brooklyn, Williamsburg, a supposed hotbed of Hipster activity. I was talking with a guy I'd just met about the situation and he said it was unbearable. "They all run around here with their cut-off jean shorts, their handlebar mustaches, and stupid bandannas.Their everywhere."

You can imagine how I recoiled given that in the Peoples Republic of Cambridge, we have such a heavy Ivy influence that nothing that vulgar would really be seen in populous. And then it hit me. Hipsterdom, the very zenith of counterculturalsim was in danger, as all fads are, of trying to outdo itself, tripping itself up in its own quest and unraveling ultimately because of it.

Up in Boston they are a stronger force in the population, less easily discernible, but the soul of the movement has a healthy froth here and what I heard of in New York stands to undermine everything.

If we're being honest, its about enforcing a rigorous standard of taste that is impossible to attain, and a hipster int he running to be such is always falling out of the ethos because he's attained a level and created a new one. Thats the positive spin. Non-hipsters will tell you that we're tasteless assholes who seek to get high enough on our horse to look down on everyone else we can. While fashion has become part of the deal, its not what matters.

Whoever is right there, the level of taste and who actually adheres to it is no doubt rough and at a higher level than most academics or elitists. While hipsters generally relegate themselves to music, it would be foolish to presume that preferring a late era Pollack to a pre-populous Dali wouldn't assign you and Pollack to a commercialized tool of the man. These New York insurrects are chasing Ansel Adams as a god.

And theres the problem. Snarky is the deal, yes. Theres no way around that. But Irony, while functional, cannot be used to undo eons of work, refining a rebellious, shit-starting, antagonistic attitude that we've moved to a level which almost seems refined. We're but lonely inches from subverting the children of the WASP class, and these reformed frat boys are in danger of ruining it for everyone who was sick of the three classic rock stations you got in your hometown in the sticks.

Its hard not to imagine the mustache coming up within the culture in how we might imagine "Stagger Lee" (Nick Cave) or when guys like Jack White grow one for the hell of it, but the cut off jean shorts and mullets have never been a part of the culture, just a parallel running social current thanks to the internet took off. By why this, and why here? Why don't hipsters start dressing like Chuck Norris, or Mr. T. Or Transformers. With all the horrible 80's references, where are the Night Riders driven by David Hasselhoff? No one looks like Robert Goulet. Basically anyone else Will Ferrel might have played on SNL in the late 90's.

The reason i'd wager is because none of these hard very much to the principles on which the first hipster was born. When we look at the primordial ooze of pop culture and counterculture that the first born crawled from, there aren't traces of the 80's kitsch, or the idiot middle school girls who always dress like Olivia Newton John from "let's get Physical" when they want to do a "crazy, fun" Halloween costume.

Their idiots. <~~~~Hipster statement.

Don't Taze me bro. <~~~~~ Frat boy.

If its on a Snorg Tee, its likely not within the realm of the hipster.

My point in all of this there is a reprehensible, but valuable and needed personality out there in the American ether that acts as a catalyst for cultural stimulation. The shove of the hipster can lead art forms to come full circle, but not for years and never can you say that in their presence there is stagnation. The overarching idea is that with constant movement, the intermix does a few things:

1. makes it less easy to adapt to some fad. Hair Metal rules the 80's after having started in the mid 70's and went strong until 1993. Rap/Rock died in 3 to 4 short years.

2. Because no sound can dominate, a mix and experimentation has to come to a forefront, and it almost demanded by a nation with a shrinking attention span and a growing access via the internet to new, different, better.

3. The sticking point to the creation of new art now is personality, and personal preference. In the big cultural swirl, all that remains is you. if you don't know who you are you're in the swirl, too indecisive to commit, and not confident enough to create. If you do know who you are you don't care where the swirl is going, you know it will come back.

Think what you want about it, but as John Stewart Mill would suggest, the more philosophies we have out there, the better off we are as a society. If its the case that you're outwardly against the inclusion of a hipster mentality, let me remind you that something will take its place, and as we speak it looks to be 1970's urban-dwelling redneck-idolizing revisionists of 1970's good-ol-boy culture. And by the very nature of their approach, a humor on par with a 1970's humor; Andy Kaufman. An inside joke between one man, only now its a bunch of unsightly pasty clowns who have spawned and over run a group of elitists who by name alone exclude.

Everyone has exclusionary groups until they become imperialist. Think hard america, its time for the great ecumenical movement within art to cast these heathens out, for the sake of everyone else.

Snarkily,
Brow