The death and life of the great American hipster offers an alternative history of culture over the last quarter century.
On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen years ago and subtly different, it is both hipster and not. American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy, but in cities and towns across the US the styles forged a decade ago at the epicenters of bohemia still filter out. Urban Outfitters is going strong. In Zürich, on the banks of the Limmat, elaborate tattoos cover the bodies of the children of Swiss bounty. The French use Brooklyn as a metonym for hip. In this context, in such saturation, hipster can no longer stand for anything, except perhaps the attempt or ambition to look cool. But since coolness venerates its own repudiation most of all, every considered choice bears hipster’s trace. Hipster is everything and nothing—and so it is nothing.
Yet even before hipster petered out, confusion dogged its meaning. Starting in 2009, Mark Greif and his colleagues at n+1 undertook the most serious attempt to date to understand and situate the hipster in context. This realized itself in essays and panel discussions and ultimately a book, What Was the Hipster? Admirable as these efforts were—and Greif’s essay of the same name remains the high-water mark in hipster criticism—something elusive always troubled the boundaries of the concept. As Rob Horning wrote for PopMatters after one such panel, “The participants never really made much of an effort to establish a stable definition of what a hipster is,” a failure that may reflect the impossibility of the task.
Still, if hipster eludes strict definition, one can nonetheless diagnose the confusion that vexed its discussion and, in so doing, back one’s way into an understanding of the phenomenon. The problem always arose in the incongruity of the use of the term and the reality of the type. The word meant to describe the figure, of course, but since the word always carried a pejorative connotation—since those recognized as hipsters would never so self-designate—no one could ever achieve clarity on what, if anything, made up hipster’s authentic core. The term registered inauthenticity. But did it describe latecomers and poseurs, second-wave adopters who appropriated an authentic style (in which case first-wave hipsters might employ it themselves as a term of abuse), or was it always an outgroup epithet for something viewed as exclusionary and pretentious (in which case first-wave hipsters were its object)? This uncertainty repeated itself in a second ambiguity: Did hipster begin as an authentic style, later co-opted by outsiders, or was it always at heart a style of co-optation, as many have argued (tracing its appropriative sweep to punk, queer, skater, hip-hop, and working-class fashions)?
Unpacking the discrepancies between the history of the term and the history of the type sheds some light on these confusions. It also drives at deeper questions about what separates a subculture from a style, and what role a subculture plays in the culture writ large. (...)
This history matters because it emphasizes the semantic crux of hipster, which like hippie always worked as an outsider designation. Those within the group did not self-reflexively adopt the term, except perhaps ironically. This dictated an overwhelmingly negative usage. To call someone a hipster or hippie meant to dismiss or deride that person, and so everything the term evoked—not just individuals, but the paraphernalia and fashion by which such individuals were classified—took on a negative cast. What fell under the “hipster” umbrella was ipso facto inauthentic, lame.
The idiom of hip bifurcated in the 1980s, first attaching to the burgeoning hip-hop movement in the South Bronx. Hipster, which begins its slow resurgent ascent in the second half of the ’90s, peaking in 2004, appears to represent a different, distinctly pejorative spur. Articles on the revitalization of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg from 2000, in the New York Times and Time Out New York, describe “bohemians” and “arty East Village types,” but neither, tellingly, uses hipster. Just three years later, when Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook appears, the term has found its way into widespread use and some consensus on its meaning has emerged.
Genealogy of the Type
The figure of the hipster may well be an example of polygenesis too. No coherent origin story has emerged, and as with any significant current in culture and fashion, multiple tributaries appear to flow together. One could, for instance, envision hip-hop and punk influences in the Lower East Side; Hispanic and skater culture in East L.A.; an Americana element in South Austin; queer and surfer aesthetics in the Bay Area; and suburban irony in East Portland and Capitol Hill, Seattle. Take each of these inflections and weave them together, as people migrate and mass media bring news of the latest styles, and one can imagine a composite fashion as liberally appropriative as hipster emerging in the late ’90s from several decades of subcultural style preceding it.
This story leaves out much nuance, but—obvious though this may be—it reminds us that the style and type precede the rehabilitated term. A new fashion or subgroup necessarily exists before the culture gives it a name and, in so doing, fixes it in the mind as something that can be thought about and discussed. The picture always gets more complicated after the name emerges, since the name introduces a meta layer—the understanding of the thing—which overlaps imperfectly with the thing itself and inaugurates a secondary discourse around authenticity. To name a thing is not necessarily to kill it, but to spark a never-ending tussle between the reality and the concept.
The ur-hipster—the turn-of-the-millennium character outfitted in aviator glasses, “wife beater” undershirt, and trucker hat—looked like your typical ironic urban scrounger at the moment when ’70s and ’80s “white trash” leftovers dominated thrift and vintage stores. 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. For “mysterious reasons to the participants,” writes Greif, the trappings of ’70s suburban whiteness “suddenly seemed cool for an urban setting.”
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. Fifties-inspired nerd chic had little to do with the ’70s-porn look, after all, although both fed into hipsterism. One side of the style evoked the grainy, sepia-tone aesthetic of the Beastie Boys’ 1994 video for “Sabotage”; another entirely showed up in Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” also from 1994, whose music video used footage from Happy Days, a ’70s sitcom set in the ’50s.
In such cultural artifacts one sees the first stirrings of the new hipster. By 1996, in recordings such as Beck’s Odelay (and video for the track “Where It’s At”) and Wes Anderson’s film Bottle Rocket, an element of kitschy Americana had joined the mix. (Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused evinced affection for the ’70s filtered through the prism of the ’90s South Austin flâneur.) The ground for hipster was effectively laid.
On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen years ago and subtly different, it is both hipster and not. American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy, but in cities and towns across the US the styles forged a decade ago at the epicenters of bohemia still filter out. Urban Outfitters is going strong. In Zürich, on the banks of the Limmat, elaborate tattoos cover the bodies of the children of Swiss bounty. The French use Brooklyn as a metonym for hip. In this context, in such saturation, hipster can no longer stand for anything, except perhaps the attempt or ambition to look cool. But since coolness venerates its own repudiation most of all, every considered choice bears hipster’s trace. Hipster is everything and nothing—and so it is nothing.
Yet even before hipster petered out, confusion dogged its meaning. Starting in 2009, Mark Greif and his colleagues at n+1 undertook the most serious attempt to date to understand and situate the hipster in context. This realized itself in essays and panel discussions and ultimately a book, What Was the Hipster? Admirable as these efforts were—and Greif’s essay of the same name remains the high-water mark in hipster criticism—something elusive always troubled the boundaries of the concept. As Rob Horning wrote for PopMatters after one such panel, “The participants never really made much of an effort to establish a stable definition of what a hipster is,” a failure that may reflect the impossibility of the task.
Still, if hipster eludes strict definition, one can nonetheless diagnose the confusion that vexed its discussion and, in so doing, back one’s way into an understanding of the phenomenon. The problem always arose in the incongruity of the use of the term and the reality of the type. The word meant to describe the figure, of course, but since the word always carried a pejorative connotation—since those recognized as hipsters would never so self-designate—no one could ever achieve clarity on what, if anything, made up hipster’s authentic core. The term registered inauthenticity. But did it describe latecomers and poseurs, second-wave adopters who appropriated an authentic style (in which case first-wave hipsters might employ it themselves as a term of abuse), or was it always an outgroup epithet for something viewed as exclusionary and pretentious (in which case first-wave hipsters were its object)? This uncertainty repeated itself in a second ambiguity: Did hipster begin as an authentic style, later co-opted by outsiders, or was it always at heart a style of co-optation, as many have argued (tracing its appropriative sweep to punk, queer, skater, hip-hop, and working-class fashions)?Unpacking the discrepancies between the history of the term and the history of the type sheds some light on these confusions. It also drives at deeper questions about what separates a subculture from a style, and what role a subculture plays in the culture writ large. (...)
This history matters because it emphasizes the semantic crux of hipster, which like hippie always worked as an outsider designation. Those within the group did not self-reflexively adopt the term, except perhaps ironically. This dictated an overwhelmingly negative usage. To call someone a hipster or hippie meant to dismiss or deride that person, and so everything the term evoked—not just individuals, but the paraphernalia and fashion by which such individuals were classified—took on a negative cast. What fell under the “hipster” umbrella was ipso facto inauthentic, lame.
The idiom of hip bifurcated in the 1980s, first attaching to the burgeoning hip-hop movement in the South Bronx. Hipster, which begins its slow resurgent ascent in the second half of the ’90s, peaking in 2004, appears to represent a different, distinctly pejorative spur. Articles on the revitalization of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg from 2000, in the New York Times and Time Out New York, describe “bohemians” and “arty East Village types,” but neither, tellingly, uses hipster. Just three years later, when Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook appears, the term has found its way into widespread use and some consensus on its meaning has emerged.
Genealogy of the Type
The figure of the hipster may well be an example of polygenesis too. No coherent origin story has emerged, and as with any significant current in culture and fashion, multiple tributaries appear to flow together. One could, for instance, envision hip-hop and punk influences in the Lower East Side; Hispanic and skater culture in East L.A.; an Americana element in South Austin; queer and surfer aesthetics in the Bay Area; and suburban irony in East Portland and Capitol Hill, Seattle. Take each of these inflections and weave them together, as people migrate and mass media bring news of the latest styles, and one can imagine a composite fashion as liberally appropriative as hipster emerging in the late ’90s from several decades of subcultural style preceding it.
This story leaves out much nuance, but—obvious though this may be—it reminds us that the style and type precede the rehabilitated term. A new fashion or subgroup necessarily exists before the culture gives it a name and, in so doing, fixes it in the mind as something that can be thought about and discussed. The picture always gets more complicated after the name emerges, since the name introduces a meta layer—the understanding of the thing—which overlaps imperfectly with the thing itself and inaugurates a secondary discourse around authenticity. To name a thing is not necessarily to kill it, but to spark a never-ending tussle between the reality and the concept.
The ur-hipster—the turn-of-the-millennium character outfitted in aviator glasses, “wife beater” undershirt, and trucker hat—looked like your typical ironic urban scrounger at the moment when ’70s and ’80s “white trash” leftovers dominated thrift and vintage stores. 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. For “mysterious reasons to the participants,” writes Greif, the trappings of ’70s suburban whiteness “suddenly seemed cool for an urban setting.”
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. Fifties-inspired nerd chic had little to do with the ’70s-porn look, after all, although both fed into hipsterism. One side of the style evoked the grainy, sepia-tone aesthetic of the Beastie Boys’ 1994 video for “Sabotage”; another entirely showed up in Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” also from 1994, whose music video used footage from Happy Days, a ’70s sitcom set in the ’50s.
In such cultural artifacts one sees the first stirrings of the new hipster. By 1996, in recordings such as Beck’s Odelay (and video for the track “Where It’s At”) and Wes Anderson’s film Bottle Rocket, an element of kitschy Americana had joined the mix. (Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused evinced affection for the ’70s filtered through the prism of the ’90s South Austin flâneur.) The ground for hipster was effectively laid.
by Greg Jackson, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
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