Speaking of Hipsters
I have nothing against hipsterism. I really don’t. It’s had a truly commendable run, musically. All those good vibrations, from Arcade Fire to Animal Collective, I totally dig. But I have to admit to a certain pleasure that I don’t think is Schadenfreude in seeing us arrive, with a sort of dialectical inevitability, at yet another moment in which a pop-cultural tendency that is at once undergroundish and hegemonic becomes itself in the eyes of the wider public and is, thus, annihilated.
How can the people on that website even be classified into one group? I’m sorry, but I think a ton of this anti-hipster business is just more intellectualizing a very primal human desire: to enforce conformity. Now it’s not enough that people dressing in a different way is bad, now it also has to be because they’re all affected, or ironic, or something. No thanks, to the whole business.
— Freddie · Apr 17, 01:59 AM · #
LATFH is fun, but I much prefer Hipster Runoff.
— Peter Suderman · Apr 17, 02:06 AM · #
Freddie – I’m not saying it’s pleasing because they deserve it, I’m saying it’s pleasing because it’s inevitable, like the swallows coming returning in the spring (or whatever season the swallows return in). But I think your point about this being a big backlash on behalf of conformity is largely overdramatic and bogus. There’s about a zillion ironies to relish that have nothing to do with any eros of conformity, not to mention all the attendant scurrying and mode-changing to relish as well, when a subculture loses by winning. Indeed, if there is Schadenfreude in these instances, it’s usually animated by distaste at the weird and pointless rigor with which conformity is sometimes enforced by the subculture.
— Matt Feeney · Apr 17, 03:45 AM · #
I’m sorry guys, I can’t do it anymore. It’s not you it’s me, we’ll always have Paris, yada yada, narf.
See you on the flip side.
— JA · Apr 17, 04:06 AM · #
Hmmm…it’s this entire debate that makes me remember why, as much as I thought I wanted Culture 11 to succeed, I didn’t, actually, because debates about hipsters are as entertaining as, um, having a fir tree grow in my lung.
Please don’t let the American Scene devolve into the Culture 11 refuse.
P.S. It’s not me, it’s you.
— Bill · Apr 17, 05:40 AM · #
JA and Bill, this one’s for you:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=lqZFrxgr3hGo4HS4BR50VA&_render=rss
— Dara Lind · Apr 17, 06:31 AM · #
I defy anyone to look through the site Matt linked to and find any consistent principle in the clothes the people therein are wearing beyond the assumption— on the understanding that ESP is not real— that the people wearing said clothes are wearing them as affect or artifice.
— Freddie · Apr 17, 07:11 AM · #