What Was the Hipster? By Mark Greif, http://nymag.com/news/features/69129/ published 24/10/10 accessed on 5/4/2011
“Dov Charney, CEO of American Apparel, announced in August that “hipster is over” and “hipsters are from a certain time period.” Gawker proposed to substitute a new name for the hipster by fiat—approving, after some consideration, the term fauxhemian.”
“A key myth repeated about the hipster, by both the innocent and the underhanded, is that it has no definition.”
“The matrix from which the hipster emerged included the dimension of nineties youth culture, often called alternative or indie, that defined itself by its rejection of consumerism.”
“Un the nineties, the sociologist Richard Lloyd documented how what he called “neo-bohemia” unwittingly turned into something else: the seedbed for post-1999 hipsterism.”
“The neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”
“Hipster, in its revival, referred to an air of knowing about exclusive things before anyone else. The new young strangers acted, as people said then, “hipper than thou.””
“the White Hipster fetishized the violence, instinctiveness, and rebelliousness of lower-middle-class “white trash.” “I love being white, and I think it’s something to be proud of,” Vice founder Gavin McInnes told the Times in 2003.”
“In culture, the Hipster Primitive moment recovered the sound and symbols of pastoral innocence with an irony so fused into the artworks it was no longer visible.”
“Where the White Hipster was relentlessly male, crowding out women from public view (except as Polaroid muses or SuicideGirls), the Hipster Primitive feminized hipster markers; one spoke now of headdresses and Sally Jessy Raphael glasses, not just male facial hair.”
“Purchasing the products of authority is thus reimagined as a defiance of authority. Usually this requires a fantasized censor who doesn’t want you to have cologne, or booze, or cars. But the censor doesn’t exist, of course, and hipster culture is not a counterculture.”
“Hipsterdom at its darkest, however, is something like bohemia without the revolutionary core.”
“The most confounding element of the hipster is that, because of the geography of the gentrified city and the demography of youth, this “rebel consumer” hipster culture shares space and frequently steals motifs from truly anti-authoritarian youth countercultures.”
“Isn’t this hipsterism just youth culture? To which folks age 19 to 29 protest, No, these people are worse. But there is something in this confusion that suggests a window into the hipster’s possible mortality.”
“Over the past decade, hipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anti-capitalist communities.”
“In the U.K., American-patterned hipsters in Hackney and Shoreditch are said to be turning more toward an ethos of androgyny, drag, the queer.”
This is another article by Mark Greif who seems to be an authority on hipster culture writing about how he feel that hipster is now dead and has been since early 2010. In it he talks about the evolution of hipsters, where they came from and what they might of stood for, talking about where they stood as a subculture and coming to the conclusion that it is for one thing not a counter culture. He refers to their influences and why they came into existence and then talking about their evolution from what he called white hipsters to the hipster primitive. Towards the end he asks if hipster can be revived like after its near death in 2003. Overall this article makes for a very interesting read and goes deep into the ethos of the hipster however the explanations where longwinded making it hard to find short and snappy quotations.
By Toby
