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…