This overarching identity dilemma is one born of aggressive social-media expressions, singing songs of ourselves each day and launching them unto the world to either coalesce in harmony with our peers, or to serve as a jarring counterpoint. Nowhere is this type of perpetually refreshing navel-gazing better illustrated than in our repeated investigation into the idea of hipsterhood. Barely a week goes by where we're not confronted by it—28 Signs You're A Hipster, What Was the Hipster?, and so on. More often than not, these come, for some reason, in the paper of record. This past weekend Steven Kurutz contemplated his own unexpected metamorphosis into this most picked-clean carcass of identity. “My initial surprise was replaced by a stark realization: as a 30-something skinnyish urban male there’s almost nothing I can wear that won’t make me look like a hipster,” he wrote, surprised to find himself enlisted into a community he never volunteered for. “Such is the pervasiveness of hipster culture that virtually every aspect of male fashion and grooming has been colonized.”
The versatility of the hipster signifier is what makes it such an empty avenue of exploration in goofy listicles and trend pieces while also engendering skeptics' frustration with its dogged refusal to go away. Public approval of hipsters is at 16 percent, according to a recent poll—Congress looks good in comparison. As Kurutz notes, almost everything can be woven into the hipster fabric now; it's a choose-your-own-ending story where every option leads to the same page, you standing there in some silly hat or other. White guy with a beard? Hipster. Black dude on a skateboard? Hipster. Just a sort-of-skinny cop? Hipster. Woman riding a bike? Hipster. You can play either a mandolin or a turntable and somehow still be a hipster. No rules! As a result, hipsters have become both an object of incessant scorn, but also endless fascination. When a hipster can be defined as anything, it also essentially means nothing—that's an undeniably appealing paradox to poke at.
One thing that seems universally agreed upon, however, as most of these types of pieces about what constitutes hipsterhood point out, and the thing that makes Kurutz such an obvious candidate for hipsterhood himself, is that no one—even the most self-evidently hipster among us—wants to admit to fitting the description. The only rule of hipster club is don't admit you're a member of hipster club. Nothing could be seen as less hip than actually wanting to align oneself with a superficial demo. That's exactly the wrong attitude, it seems to me, if we're to pin down this mercurial concept. The original hipster was someone who bucked the status quo and jumped out ahead of the curve. So, unlike Kurutz and the thousands who have come before him bending themselves into logical pretzels trying to shrug off the designation, I'd like affirm my hipsterhood—with pride.
by Luke O'Neil, Slate | Read more:
Image: Luke O'Neil