Adbusters loses cool over them polaroid-toting, soft porn-aping, keffiyah-wearing gits. Comes off like extract from highschooler’s journal:
We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum.
and, moreover:
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
Far more on the money is this: the Onion‘s Hipster Archive.
Hmmm. Someone needs to write an article that defines between ‘liking good stuff’ and ‘being a hipster’. Am I right in thinking that the dichotomy is also that of ‘late modernism/ postmodernism lite’, or Keston Sutherland V. Luke Wright? Think about something like The Fall: there’s a huge problem about authenticity as regards their fans. We’d like to consider ourselves ‘authentic’ Fall fans because we have the credentials: northern, bookish, interested in history and politics, see how they fit into terrace culture and modern gothic and surrealism et al. We therefore define ‘inauthentic’ Falls fans, AKA ‘hipsters’: yatter on about MES as some lovable loon, praise the lyrics for being ‘weird’ and ‘unintelligible’ (which they aren’t, if you’re type a), don’t have the frame of reference. >>Could say the same things about new wave cinema or Gang of Four (Leeds-based left-wing modernists appropriated as the template for Bloc Party) or seaside towns or Derrida and so on ad infinitum. Is ‘hope’ and ‘belief’ authentic and cynicism or fashionable nihilism inauthentic? >>So do we go with the narrow definition of hipsters as amoral, pseudo-transgressive, apolitical cultural magpies? Actually, that sounds fair enough to me…and seeing Gavin McInnes defending his tribe in that article seems to further legitimate that stance…