Are There Hipsters in D.C.?
Sadly, I did not attend the N+1 throwdown over the nature of the hipster, but the Observer’s Reid Pillifant did.
The story brings to mind a question of some local interest: Does D.C. even have hipsters? This question is the subject of not infrequent discussion amongst city residents who may or may not be hipsters. It’s almost universally true that the more likely someone is to deny that D.C. has hipsters, the more hipsterish he or she is. It’s difficult, usually, to get anyone of a hipsterish bent to name someone who might actually qualify; if they do, it’s usually some unnamed fellow originally from New York who has already discovered and discarded out of boredom every band currently playing shows in the United States, and has just moved to a cabin somewhere outside of Portland in order to eat sprouts and make a series of records (vinyl only, dudes), each of which consist of a dozen singles that make use of only one note. “It’s going to be really pop, though. Or that’s what he says, anyway. I hear he’s working on B flat right now. I’m interested, I guess. But it probably won’t be as good as the third track on C Sharp.”
And certainly, no hipster will ever admit to being one him or herself. To do so would be to rock the foundations of everything that hipsterdom stands for. Yet the penchant for denial still seems somewhat curious to me: Perhaps hipsters increase their hipsterosity by denying their own membership? Perhaps it’s a form of penance for, say, failing to correctly identify an old Flying Luttenbachers song while listening to music at a friend’s apartment? Or perhaps it’s a secret-society sort of thing — denying in hopes of protecting the existence of the order. The first rule of hipster-club, etc. etc. “What? Hipsters? I don’t know. I’m sure they exist, but I’m not one. Not even close! I think I’m skipping the festival this year, by the way. I don’t want to miss my leather-working group, and, you know, it just seems like mumblecore is kind of played out already.”
At the same time, anyone who cops to being a hipster immediately attracts suspicion about his or her hipster bona fides. There’s a certain Alice in Wonderland quality to it all, really. Hipsters must refuse to acknowledge their own hipster status or risk losing that status. No one can ever admit to it, probably even to themselves. And no one can ever truly be certain of who is or isn’t a hipster. Which means that answering the original question is rather difficult. D.C. may have hipsters. It may not. I’m certainly not one, and it’s unclear whether anyone of my friends count, though I may have met one or two in my life. It seems mostly doubtful that a city so earnest and unstylish might produce true hipsters. Still, the city’s undergoing something of a renaissance, so one never knows: A friend took this picture of the crowd outside the bay window of rad local dive DC9 last summer. I’ve shown it to others in the past, and some say it’s proof that hipsters are here indeed, while others say it’s evidence that hipsters will never — could never — exist in this city. Make of it what you will.
Being a hipster is a certain pose, a presentation of self to the world. It’s hardly the only one, nor does it strike me as much more mannered or affected than plenty of other poses people strike. In D.C., presumably because of the nature of the institutions that bring youngish people to the city and keep them there, noticeably fewer people strike this pose either as frequently, or (more importantly) with as much gusto and commitment as they do in some (not all) other large cities. The young journalist/blogger/wonk crowd tends to have some hipsterish traits, but they also tend to be strongly invested in other personae (for whom traits like seriousness, intelligence, and success are important status markers), and you can only get so hipsterish while keeping that pose up as well.
— Christopher M · Apr 15, 02:25 PM · #
By dropping so many hipster shibboleth’s into an essay in which he denies his own hipsterdom, Peter is effectively outing himself by not outing himself, in a way that lends credence to his thesis, which is sort of clever. By the way, my inability to hear many of those dog whistles confirms to me that I am not a hipster, which is something of a relief. My ignorance is my armor!
— Blar · Apr 15, 02:32 PM · #
Having spent many years in Seattle I can tell you that hipsters are just regular people that like certain kinds of music, facial hair, body decorations, and clothing. It’s just a fad or non-organized club. THey are just like the old hipsters who would go hear jazz in their berets and nod thier heads in time to the music in a certain charactaristic way, or just like metal heads (when they combined interest in cars and drugs with metal we called them heshers) who wear black leather jackets over band t-shirts and nod their head in a certain way at concerts. If there even are still metal heads.
I don’t think any of these groups say anything profound about society. Like I say, these are ordinary people who do ordinary thing like have jobs and relationships and go to college and buy clothes and food. The particulars of their group identification rest, in the vast majority of cases, only on the surface. I think the fact that groups of people like these adopt such obvious and widely shared signifiers shows the ordinary person’s lack of imagination.
— cw · Apr 15, 02:58 PM · #
For some reason reading this post makes me think of the song(?) “It’s Saturday” off of King Missile’s 1992 album “Happy Hour”. I bought it at a record store in Ashland, OR many years ago because I liked the cover art. Mostly hippies in Ashland, but a few hipster too, even back then.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 15, 03:50 PM · #
DCers are generally just as cynical/self-referential as hipsters. The difference is that living in DC basically constitutes an ideological commitment to what the “important things” are, which is more foundationalism than true hipsters are generally willing to accept. (I mean that both philosophically and in terms of typical conversation topics.)
I think this helps illuminate the C11 backlash, actually. For those on board with the operation (it seemed to me), C11 was interesting because it examined culture and politics with the same critical eye. Many of the critics, on the other hand, enjoyed the political heterodoxy but saw the cultural stuff as something fundamentally different: it wasn’t on board with the “important things,” so it was trivia, or “self-referential hipness.” My favorite C11 postmortem was “it went to your heads, like a nerd who becomes a popstar overnight,” which sounds like a decent description of plenty of hipsters.
Then again, by having adopted that quote ironically, I suppose I’m helping the argument that C11ism is/was hipsterism…
— Dara Lind · Apr 15, 04:37 PM · #
I thought that all the potential hipsters DC were recruited aggressively into hardcore SXE punks. And though the subcultures can mix – there are hipster gays in SF – it is very tough to be a hipster who listens to Dischord Records.
I can’t even imagine walking down the street in a trucker hat and seeing Ian Mackaye – I would feel such, such shame.
— rortybomb · Apr 15, 05:27 PM · #
As the paradigmatic non-hipster (a still-Michigander 40-year-old with eight children through a single marriage) I’m scratching my head. I love the seriousness of so much of this blog (including some Suderman contributions), but have no idea why any serious person (including myself) would be engaging this conversation. This ties into my internal Reihan Dilemna: Fully half the time, he’s amazingly, insightfully brilliant. Nearly half the time, his posts seem like pathetic inconsequential “hipster” drivle.
Are we adults? Tony Comstock has proven that he is (though his worldview and mine are nearly-polar opposites). What on earth is the significance here?
I graduated nearly 20 years ago near the top at the premiere public policy undergrad program in the midwest (James Madison College, MSU). Many, many of my classmates are now in positions of influence in D.C. Due to “life circumstances” coupled with the last Great (Bush I) Recession, I forewent U-M law and desperately entered “consulting” in the auto industry (which only recently has proven a grave error). I haven’t had cause to set foot in D.C. since the mid-90’s, hanging out with college friends in Georgetown while consulting with Land Rover in Maryland. At that time, I was still listening to Pearl Jam, “old” Cobain, etc. The D.C. crowd, even then, didn’t get anything beyond “what mattered” (at that time, Hillary and Newt’s exploits) any more than the Wall Street crowd or the Auto Industry crowd.
We truly are at a world-historical moment that’s been building for generations. Who the hell cares who’s a “legit hipster?”
Dara Lind: As with my “Reihan Dilemna,” I had a “C11 Dilemna.” Nearly half of what they were doing was brilliant and helpful. Over half was garbage. And I suspect a perfect negative correlation between the level of “usefulness” and attempted “hipsterness” of any given contribution.
rortybomb: I was thankfully not able to decipher a word of that last post. That’s not a pure slam, though. It puts you in league with Reihan. P.S.— My senior thesis focused on Rorty, and his contributions in the years since continue to fascinate and stimulate. What do you think he would make of this sort of conversation? With what level of condesension would he address kinda-sorta-wannabe (or even “legit”) hipsters?
— tim a · Apr 15, 07:36 PM · #
Seriously, who cares? It’s such a broad stupid term to begin with, and then there’s all this hipster hate. Frankly, it says more about the people decrying hipsters than the “hipsters” themselves. Maybe it’s these haters who should look at themselves more closely and understand where that comes from.
— central squared · Apr 15, 08:12 PM · #
I guy at the place I work rides a fixed gear with a sticker that reads “This machine kills hipsters” Very ironic
— trevor b · Apr 15, 08:34 PM · #
You hipsters have a long way to go to become one of us cool guys.
It’s kind of sad to embrace an identity just one step away from square.
— JA · Apr 15, 08:35 PM · #
That sticker on the track bike, those stickers were printed up quite some time ago by a messenger who was tired of seeing non-messengers everywhere on track bikes. Another more recent sticker from the same community was “Rookie is the new black.”
And DC does pretty much blow.
— Luke · Apr 15, 08:50 PM · #
I posted underneath that Observer article that for most of the people called “hipsters,”
***almost all of them are actually “yupsters,” who steer themselves according to hypothetical, almost mythical hipsters out there, of whom there are very few and impossible to take seriously. Yupsters want to take a few things from hipster lifestyles but affirm their authenticity by not being them.
However funny the blog Stuff White People Like is from day to day, it’s brought out into the open how many people feel cooler about themselves and their social circles for having a batch of likes or interests that could qualify as hipsterish/socially progressive/indie.
In a certain age and privilege bracket, there’s a group who are not shallow necessarily but are measuring themselves against an ideal: to be as cool as possible without seeming to make a second career out of it, i.e., without being a hipster.
They’re shooting for a fair balance of likes and interests which (coincidentally) possess modish-bourgeois appeal, and those which carry less potential for hype, that are supposedly thankless — altruistic, or underpaid for some reason, sometimes just quirky or awkward-cute — and so ground a person from entering the hipster’s stratosphere.
In Oscar Wilde’s time, someone could be admired for playing “the dandy”—a sort of forbearer of the hipster—to perfection, but we would disown all stereotypes. We’ve learned the mortal sin of appearing like a faultless example of any one image — whatever its supposed charms — as if there were no artist behind the picture, who gets inspired and could make something else. So that’s why people usually only pose as hipsters for a night on the town, but would never proudly claim to be one.***
— Adam · Apr 15, 11:38 PM · #
tim a (and, I suppose, everyone who wonders “why bother?”): I understand why the topic seems a waste of time, because so much of the discussion seems a waste of time, because it seems both marginal, and yet foolishly scholastic. However, I think it is worth caring about because it boils down to a question of where a generation of educated, privileged, creative class sorts of people are ending up. As a group, those who wind up being hipsters tend to have a good deal of opportunity, so if hipsterism is a kind of psychological/cultural zombie state (suggested by the Time Out New York article, and the Adbusters article from a couple years ago “Hipsters: The Dead End of Western Civilization”) then there is a vast amount of potential being wasted. So, for all it’s patina of self-indulgent squabble, it has some roots in serious questions.
— c.t.h. · Apr 15, 11:44 PM · #
Hipsters, like most species, differ slightly from place to place. The D.C. “hipsters” sort of look like midwest (in my case GR, Michigan) hipsters. The ones out here in Boston are a whole other breed. At the other site Sullivan linked to, some of the pics just look like punks, which are totally distinct from hipsters (rortybomb’s post is instructive if you already know what he’s talking about). I have found that it’s hard to be a hipster if you’re fat. I probably listen to “hipster music” (or as I like to call it, “not crap”) but without skinny jeans or stupid tight v-neck t-shirts, I will never be thought of as one.
— mpbruss · Apr 15, 11:48 PM · #
There’s an OXES album where, on the cover, people are protesting the band. Someone holds a sign that says “SARCASM IS NOT IRONY” – that’s the best meta-commentary I’ve seen on hipsters.
@mpbruss, re: punks/hipsters
There is a legend that floats around Chicago about the venue owner who had Fugazi play at his place in the late 1980s, and, not knowing what their deal was, tried to pay Ian Mackaye in cocaine. That story still cracks me up. I imagine, unlike the DC DIY righteous punks, most hipster bands are quite ok being paid in coke.
There’s a bingo night in Chicago, hipster-ish, where people with SXE tattoos are dared to come up on stage and do a shot for free. Holding people who’ve broken their edge as a wink-wink ironic form of entertainment is the level of cross-subculture contempt I’ve seen in that direction. The other direction is far more virulent (but from the comments above, that’s coming from everyone).
— rortybomb · Apr 16, 01:09 AM · #
I still think there’s nothing to get excited about. Hipsters are not some unique cult signaling the end of civilization, nor are they a huge pool of tragically wasted potential. They are just average young and youngish people who, like young people have for centuries, choose to model themselves after a particular harmless identity group for what ever reason. No need to get all rockers vrs mods about it.
— cw · Apr 16, 01:17 AM · #
~~“P.S.— My senior thesis focused on Rorty, and his contributions in the years since continue to fascinate and stimulate. What do you think he would make of this sort of conversation? With what level of condesension would he address kinda-sorta-wannabe (or even “legit”) hipsters?”~~
That depends. There are certain parallels between the “hipster” in this discussion and the “ironist” of Rorty’s ‘Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity’:
“Historicists in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates (e.g., Heidegger and Foucault) still tend to see socialization as Nietzsche did — as antithetical to something deep within us. Historicists in whom the desire for a more just and free human community dominates (e.g., Dewey and Habermas) are still inclined to see the desire for private perfection as infected with ‘irrationalism’ and ‘aestheticism’… This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and the private, and are content to treat the demands for self-creation [e.g., dandyism, aestheticism, hipsterism] and of human solidarity [e.g., politics] as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable…
I use ‘ironist’ to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires — someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance… In my view, an ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom’s ‘strong poet’ rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth-seeking, ‘logical,’ ‘objective’ scientist… Whereas the liberal metaphysician thinks of the high culture of liberalism as centering around theory, the liberal ironist thinks of it as centering around literature (in the older and narrower sense of that term — plays, poems, and, especially, novels)… Within ironist culture, by contrast, it is the disciplines which specialize in thick description of the private and idiosyncratic which are assigned the [political goals of binding human beings together and eliminating cruelty]…”
— wtgstn · Apr 16, 02:02 AM · #
Quite possibly one of the worst articles ever written. I had to read this essay three or four times to get the gist of it. You write the same way that Aesop Rock raps: Mouth Diarrhea.
Perhaps you should re-read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
— Aloysius K · Apr 16, 02:10 PM · #
I live in DC, and I’ve seen hipsters around a lot, so I don’t get the hullaballoo. There’s a lot of museums and colleges here, and thus hipsters. What’s odd to me is that many people in DC call things “hipster” that aren’t – they’re yuppie or trendy or something else. People have called the restaurant/lounge Marvin a hipster hangout, which is not the case – it’s yuppies, law students, people like that. It’s like people (Hill staffers, reporters, whoever) don’t see a difference.
— andrew · Apr 16, 02:33 PM · #
Calling some one a hipster is akin to calling them a poser.
You should reread this article and replace every instance of the word “hipster” with “poser”.
— ebinnyc · Apr 16, 04:21 PM · #
Like most attempts (earnest or not) to define hipsterdom, this one falls into a trap, wherein the writer offers a straw man of the hipster as an overweening pretentious aesthete, and then tears it down in a self-effacing manner. Here’s a news flash for you: nobody has ever actually moved to a cabin outside of Portland to make 7“s involving one note of music. If they have, it was certainly not as a conscious decision to thumb their nose at the masses.
Its unfortunate that the term has degenerated into a slur hurled by yuppies at fellow yuppies, or applied self-deprecatingly by the unimaginative. A hipster is someone who identifies the subversive power of forever occupying the evolving frontiers of style. If they are loath to self-identify, it’s because they don’t want to give away their position. It’s strange though, that you are unable to identify perhaps our generation’s most prominent hipster, who also resides in DC. It’s the Spiv, man!
— evan w · Apr 16, 05:34 PM · #
Again, it seems quite mistaken to identify “hipsters” as a class of people. There are no hipsters; there’s just hipsterism: a set of cultural practices and attitudes, associated sometimes by coincidence and sometimes by a common sensibility. Lots of us have our hipsterish tendencies; for the great majority of us, it’s just one part of our identity, and often a valuable one. I’m glad some people are more hipsterish than I am, and I’m very glad that many people are less so. I would also associate myself with the long quote from Rorty, above, and with evan w’s comment as well.
I do find the photo Peter posted quite puzzling, though. What is supposed to be hipsterish in that picture? If people standing outside a bar talking constitutes hipsterism, then I guess we’re all hipsters now. Or a whole lot of us, anyway.
— Christopher M · Apr 16, 07:44 PM · #
Another way to put the phenomena of hipsterism and anti-hipsterism in a larger context:
“Historicists in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates… Historicists in whom the desire for a more just and free human community dominates…”
—Rorty
“…anti-elitism is a hardy perennial of American life. It expresses what is our national second nature—the rage to purify bound up in the simplifying power of ‘American pastoral,’ as Philip Roth calls our ineradicable will to innocence that divides the world in two. Nature—the preserve of the rural, the pre-modern, the authentic, and the masculine—defines itself against the Unnatural—the Babylon of modernity, urban foppery, effeminacy, and intellectuality… Like Du Bois, Locke studied at the University of Berlin before taking a Harvard doctorate. And as they returned from the relative freedom of Europe, both men would wrestle with ‘unreconciled strivings,’ as Du Bois called the tension between race man and aesthete, between puritan and pagan, between the pursuit of social justice and the self-cultivation embodied in their cherished German ideal of Bildung…”
—http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=e9d5f5c3-16b0-4506-ac08-2911400f4ad4
— wtgstn · Apr 17, 08:14 PM · #