Review what was the hipster

And over the course of these pages, plenty of dubious spleen is vented in their direction. At one point, Slavoj Zizek is treated to a kicking, largely, it seems, for being the only intellectual American Apparel's till staff have heard of. Other contributors, however, confess to minor midlife crises and a certain nostalgia for the days of the Face, when coolness was a more elusive phenomenon than it is today.

Maureen Tkacik is not alone in seeing parallels between the deregulation of this subculture via the internet and the financial crisis. Elsewhere, there are some quite interminably hoary discussions about authenticity, while the question of race and gentrification is an open sore that is prodded repeatedly, if rarely to edifying effect. Case in point, as Lichfield detailed on Twitter last week: Almost as soon as the "hipster effect" article was published, a man furiously emailed the magazine claiming a photo of him was slanderously used alongside it without his permission.

He was, it turned out, mistaken. Calling someone "hipster" isn't exactly slander, Lichfield noted on Twitter, but it prompted him to dig into the photo itself, a Getty Images stock photo described as a "shot of a handsome young man in trendy winter attire against a wooden background. Still, we would never use a picture without the proper license or model release.

But I think that's why a lot of people are successful from a place like Portland; you can be a really big fish in a small pond and start succeeding and get traction. Are outsider groups the only ones that make possible new forms of cultural capital? And thus are hipsters always necessary to the powers that be?

Perhaps, in an endlessly repeating pattern of co-optation, hipsters serve as agents for the stakeholders in the established cultural hegemony, appropriating the new cultural capital forms, delivering them to mainstream media in a commercial form and stripping their inventors' groups if not the inventors themselves, in the best-case scenario of the power and the glory, the unification and the mode of resistance.

Can you perform a significant act of rebellion on Facebook? How do we stop running that race, stop worrying about the degree to which we are "hip", the degree to which our treasured self-conceptions can be made into cliches against our will? One must start with the premise that the hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity. The faint air of self-satisfaction inherent in the premise of a post-hipster conference grew thicker and thicker.

Some even seemed to confuse hipsterism with an artistic avant-garde when they are in fact opposites by definition. The hipster as the embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics. I was a gentrifier in Williamsburg. Like the maligned hipsters, I used my parents' savings to secure a place to live.

I hoped for property values to rise, so that I could sell my apartment for a profit. Is there homophobia in the hipster-hating, a revulsion in seeing men who care "too much" about how they look?

Hipsterism has some sort of repressed white-American sensibility in its essence. Something that arises form the luxury of sleeping through life. A true hipster rapper would've been the epitome of an Uncle Tom, exploiting a robust, nourishing culture to create an empty white-friendly shell.

In my view, the Blipster is a contemporary update on the cool black nerd, picking stuff up from white subculture to develop an accepted type. These skinny, nappy-facial-haired black dudes might even be avatars of our ethnocultural future. Hipsterism strikes me as what happens when white folks become aware of power and inequity—but then say, "Well, what are we supposed to do?

The girls always looked good, if a little dead in the eyes. Not everyone was a famous person, but everybody looked like one. Instead of doing art, people everywhere were "doing" products. A subculture of pro-consumer, pro-consumption, amoral, pro-lifestyle. Something in the "white hipster" imagination moved inexorably toward justifying rich whites in not having to be anything but white. Hipsters rationalized white colonization and separation by unconsciously forming an ethnicity for themselves.

It's all about superiority: you may be tending bar, but if you are tending bar in hip clothes and you're in a band at night, you'll always possess higher status in culture if not in income than the bond-trader losers ordering vodka tonics in button-downs. Nov 28, Gladia rated it liked it. In late August I crossed the ocean and the presence of the hipsters became a reality.

The first time I dared to wear converse, skinny jeans and a flannel shirt I got looks that left no doubts. If people associated me so easily to hipsters, I might as well find what a hipster actually is. The first thing that surprised me was the gravity of the tone. The fact that the complete title is What Was The Hipster? A Sociological Investigation might have given me a clue that of sociological investigation they are actually talking about.

Anyway, I though some humor was going to be employed. I was wrong. The preface by Mark Greif was probably the part that mostly made me nostalgic of some healthy self-irony. And this in literally the first eleven pages. The preface is followed by the transcript of a Symposium that took place at the New School where three people expressed their theories on the hipsters and then there was a discussion. Here I should say: thank you Christian Lorentzen. The one that actually seemed to take the whole issue more lightly.

Not strictly related to the sociological issue at stake but funny nonetheless: 'I am now of the opinion that procreation should be prohibited before the age of 30, except among the rich and in Alaska.

He wrote plenty about the hipsters before in his defense, he does mention the fact in his statement. The rest of the book is composed by a Dossier with articles about the discussion, followed by a selection of Essays. Are they really so relevant from a cultural or sociological point of view? May 05, Eric rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction. Who knew that the much-maligned hipster could generate so much provocative discussion around issues of culture, gender, race and consumerism?

A surprisingly interesting and educational read. Aug 20, Alexis rated it liked it. Funny, despite itself. Oct 01, Stephen rated it really liked it.

The essays that actually attempt to define hipsters do pretty well. The coverage of the panel they held was pretty much a farce, though. The emphasis was on the NY hipster. Apr 30, Logan rated it really liked it. Sometimes funny, with varying degrees of academic and anecdotal insights, painfully self-conscious, and, of course, ironic, What Was the Hipster? Jace Clayton's "Vampires of Lima" avoided some of these opacities with a look at how U. I cringed furiously at how much the first section of What Was the Hipster?

Then again, cosmopolitan navel gazing is so characteristic to the hipster, the self-absorbed merchant of Cool. Fitting, to that end. Some of the measured, haughty responses to the symposium in the second half are essential reading, especially as to how non-white males configure into hispterism.

Self-identifying as such would be embarrassing, because they reduce vocation to the limited digital real estate of a social media channel s. As if their performances and postures are not "real" by virtue of being online vs. IRL modes. These influencers see things like photography, fashion, music and film less as inherited culture we synthesize into personality ornaments i. The reality being we are assemblages of Xerox'd culture with slim chances at ideals like 'freedom' or 'the authentic self.

They perform conspicuous gentrification of cultural and economic whitespace, the newest mediums where you may be very visibly "fashionable," where what is cool can now be transparently performed on behalf a personal-brand aesthetic and as sponcon for companies commodifying the new stems growing out of the hipster's corpse.

Cool is no longer a monolith embodied in the hipster, it is a series of business verticals. Jul 10, Sophie Bucci rated it really liked it. Nov 21, Harris rated it liked it Shelves: usa , non-fiction , library-book , millennial-life. Minnesota was declared the most hipster state in the country a few years back and just a week ago, St. Paul was named the most hipster zip code in the nation. What is all this? What are we to make of it? It was for some answers that I went to this collection of essays.

The participants only barely scratched the surface focusing on reasons behind various styles, discussions of classicism and racism, and identity but these ideas are hardly given any space to really get to the guts of the debate. One of the goals of the "investigation" was its hope to express the reality of the hipster to future readers, which is itself a bit ironic, as the book, now three years old, is already showing its age.

In particular, the descriptions of the Peruvian hipsters from Lima who only embraced their Peruvian chicha musical identity when it was embraced as ironically cool by a French recording studio based in New York. This globalizing presence appears to be part and parcel of the hipster idea, as things become "cool" divorced from their origins only to lose their "authenticity" in the process. Themes of irony, authenticity, sincerity, and nostalgia all seem to be at the heart of the idea and lead to some of the most incisive essays in the collection.

With the proliferation of the internet, ideas and styles merge and mutate, leading to conflict among groups about meaning and identity.

Jan 07, Errol Orhan rated it really liked it. It is the structure of the book that makes it such an enjoyable, thought provoking and light work of social analysis. The ironical symposium is following by a group discussion in which little is discussed and even fewer answers to questions from the audience are provided. However, these two events form the foundation for several more in depth analyses of what the cultural and social meaning of 'hipster' is. The birth of hipster has always been indistinguishable from the advent of contemporary gentrification.

As Greif notes, hipsterism marked the turning of a tide when, after a period of white flight to the suburbs, the children of those who had left returned to low-rent but attractively situated city neighborhoods that hung on as minority and working-class enclaves. But one might probe more deeply whether nostalgia in fact lay behind the aesthetic and whether the new logic of cool truly mystified its exponents. You can certainly argue that hipsters resurrected the iconography of their childhoods out of a disaffected nostalgia, ironic rather than romantic, but the ultimate catholic reach of their stylistic foraging places a certain weight on opportunism.

If the style drew force from retro and referential gestures, what hipsters chose to curate their lives may simply have reflected what broader society had cast off: literally, what showed up in secondhand shops and family storage.

In such cultural artifacts one sees the first stirrings of the new hipster. The ground for hipster was effectively laid. But artifacts of this era also remind us of a time before hipster. Ryan Schreiber, a figure who seemed to leap straight from the imaginations of Smith and Hornby, founded Pitchfork Media in while clerking at a record store and living with his parents in the suburbs of Minneapolis. According to a history of Pitchfork written by Michael Gillis for Newcity Music , Schreiber, just out of high school at the time, registered Pitchfork using money from his record store job.

Just as rap sampled and collaged the music that had come before it, the music video relished referencing and reworking the tropes of visual culture especially TV and movies from the preceding decades. The easiest way to establish an immediate context, given these limitations, was to refer back to shared cultural touchstones and styles. Sometimes this meant specific works of art and entertainment, but just as often it meant the texture and character of the media themselves, as these came to evoke eras and decades.

The very quality of image and sound, even more than the content, engaged a pleasant, knowing recognition, familiar and ironic, and, most profoundly, wordless.

MTV launched in , shortly after the music video emerged as a recognizable form. The developments in eidetic technologies film, video, photography, audio recording in the twenty years before and after meant not only that small variances in the sensory particulars of an image or sound could synecdochically invoke micro-eras as never before, but more powerfully still that such technological nuance infiltrated the very character of subjective memory.

The laconicism characteristic of the hipster—which briefly flowered in that most hipster of genres, mumblecore—had everything to do with the unstated irony in these wordless evocations of the past: the past not as words, writing, or speech, but as the successive obsolescence of material technologies and the mediating textures of these technologies.

This also meant that hipster was always a style about style, a fashion about fashion: Its ethos gloried in the tacit recognition, the logic of silent appraisal. This superficiality complicated the terms of its critique. What distinguished early hipsters from other subcultures, perhaps more than political apathy, was that on some level they always wanted to impress, to look good.

Many were attractive. Punk, by contrast, always seemed to make un attractiveness a central plank in its aesthetic. Or perhaps it was their being good-looking, their never being true weirdoes, that made the normal processes of subcultural snobbery so unforgivable in their case. Secretly—or maybe not so secretly—no critic of the hipster mystique remained entirely unbeguiled by it.

Embarrassment dictated the scathing appraisal of the hipster. This was, in one sense, the embarrassment all principled people feel before their own unsupportable aesthetic judgments. As superficial as fashion trends may be, when it comes to trying to look good and judging others accordingly , not even critics can resist their sovereignty.

The subsequent handwringing over what implicated the community of handwringers mirrored the anguish over gentrification expressed by a community of gentrifiers. Gentrification proceeded by disowning the principle while continuing the practice. So hipsters endured by denigrating the attitude while cultivating the fashion.

When with hipster or gentrifier does the pejorative first make sense? A gentrifier does not become a gentrifier until migration to a neighborhood reaches a critical mass. Since it is the latecomers who effectively turn the early migrants into gentrifiers, one can understand why the first wave resents subsequent arrivals, no matter what they mean for property values.

Priority becomes the basis of a new pecking order. Those who had felt the sting of being uninitiated now turned the tables in college, where—fashion apostles—they brought the good stylistic news.

Waves of subsequent adoption continued in this manner for several years, with ever finer distinctions, an increasing narcissism of petty differences, and more anxious and uncertain airs of superiority, until at last everyone was partly hipster and everyone partly hated hipsters now seen as the earlier adopters who looked down their noses at you.

By the time any respectable hipster felt obliged to decry hipsterism just as any respectable gentrifier felt obliged to decry gentrification , taking stylistic steps away from hipster fashion made as strong a stylistic statement as taking steps toward it had made a decade before. Thus, by the mid-aughties, the core hipster conundrum was in place.

Not only could we never say precisely what a hipster was; more confusing still, everyone involved in the discussion possessed some percentage of hipster DNA, and everyone, according to his purity or impurity, felt entitled to judge everyone else as either overly or insufficiently hipster.

In this way hipster started to look like a metadiscourse on the very etiquette of hip: How much was too much?