Story by Jacob O’Gara
Illustration by Bailey Meyers
Consider the hipster. Well, what is it, anyway? Nobody seems to be absolutely sure, at least not sure enough to be able to describe what and who a hipster is in a sentence. Part of the problem is that nobody self-identifies as a hipster; if someone who is apparently a hipster just came forward and said, “I’m a hipster,” then we might be able to reverse-engineer some sort of definition. As it stands, we must rely on what everyone says about hipsters, which is that everyone else is one. For the purposes of this article, a “hipster” is exactly what you think it is.
September 7 was, according to one Katie Runnells on Facebook, “Kick a hipster day.” Over 19,000 folk “attended” the event, along with around 1,500 who maybe did. Most of the Facebook page’s hundreds of comments repeated the same lame joke over and over: that so-and-so was into kicking hipsters before it was popular, referring to hipsters’ contempt for anything regarded as “too mainstream.” Numerous others, though, were shockingly and vividly gruesome:
“Got the Steel toes ready to be laced up! Don’t forget if [sic] to loosen the screws a bit and place some razor blades in your boots” (this is a representative sample, as a number of comments mentioned wearing steel-toed boots for the hipster-kicking festivities); “[Kick a hipster] in the teeth”; and, my personal favorite, “i kickt them in a face n broke there nose dose it count.”
The notice in the event’s “More Info” section—“**DISCLAIMER: Same as Kick a Juggalo/Juggalette day, IF YOU TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY… CONSIDER YOURSELF SUCCESSFULLY TROLLED LOL**”—is cold comfort and doesn’t do much to assure one that this is all in good, clean fun. I can’t imagine that anyone would tolerate this kind of violent language, no matter how jokingly written, if it was directed at blacks, Jews, gays, or women, or anyone. At best, the comments found on the “Kick a hipster day” page are a series of moronic attempts at humor. At worst, they indicate a startling undercurrent of rage in today’s youth culture, a desire to lash out at someone, to smash “them in a face n broke there nose” and hope that it counts for something.
Hipster-hate, though, isn’t a new thing. In 1957, Dissent magazine published arguably the first entry in the anti-hipster canon: a rather unreadable 9,000-word-long essay called “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” written by Norman Mailer. Mailer—an author and literary celebrity who later became more famous for punching other literary celebrities and stabbing his second wife (not to death) than for his writing—wrote that the hipster was a kind of “philosophical psychopath,” a social creature born in the aftermath of World War II, and, traumatized and disenchanted by the industrialized bloodshed of that conflict, one that rejected the American mainstream and shamelessly appropriated other, more subversive identities and cultures, mainly African-American jazz culture.
The matter of cultural co-optation by hipsters is at the center of Christian Lorentzen’s “modest proposal to save New York cool,” published a half-century after “The White Negro” by Time Out New York, provocatively titled “Why the hipster must die.” According to Lorentzen, “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. … [H]ipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.”
What Lorentzen doesn’t see—or refuses to see—is that the “hipster zombies,” as he dubs them, are doing culture a tremendous favor, and all they get in return is people like Lorentzen arguing that they need to die for the sake of preserving “New York cool,” whatever that is. Hipsters act as conduits, middlemen, between the mainstream culture and the numerous underground, sub-, counter-, and fringe cultures; by doing so, they make the mainstream a less boring place. Sure, this diffusion can take the cool out of a culture, but consider the alternative: an artistically and intellectually ghettoized society, a vast, yawning wasteland full of authenticity.
No discussion of modern anti-hipsterism would be complete without at least mentioning the lodestar of that movement, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization” by Douglas Haddow, the cover story of the September/October 2008 issue of Adbusters. In the article, Haddow declares that the “suicidal” hipster scene is “a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning.” There are a number of smart ways to criticize this piece (he apparently decided that Western civilization was dead after following one group of party-hopping hipsters over the course of one night; being lost in and stealing from its past is one of the things that culture excels at) but the most cogent, damning point to raise is this: Douglas Haddow is a hipster. I have the Tumblr URL to prove it.
Just as anti-gay pastors and legislators are at some point in their wretched careers bound to be caught on their knees practicing exactly the opposite of what they preach, so too is it inevitable that the most virulent of hipster-bashers will be seen riding a fixed-gear bike or submitting photos to Hipster Runoff or listening to Surfer Blood. This isn’t to say that it’s bad to be a hipster. Rather, what’s bad is the hypocrisy, the self-denial, the self-loathing—those are the real crimes, the real tragedies. To consider the hipster, then, one must consider the anti-hipster, for most of the time, they are one and the same.
Anti-hipsters are a conflicted, insecure lot, uncomfortable with their selves, so they construct some sort—any sort—of identity by placing themselves in opposition to an other, by mocking and denigrating one of the last cultural groups in America that society deems acceptable to mock and denigrate: hipsters. To be sure, this scorn and prejudice isn’t dangerous. Yet. As long as hipster-bashing remains the pastime of half-wits on Facebook and of self-loathing hipsters, we should be fine. However, history books are filled with the blood-soaked consequences of otherizing groups of people. Like the hipster, perhaps we should feel a little more uneasy at the thought of such sentiments becoming too mainstream.