Ceci n’est pas un hipster
| October 26, 2011 | Posted by Sophy Bot under Hipsterdom |
I know, I know – you hate hipsters. Maybe somebody called you one once, but they were clearly mixing you up with the real hipsters. You know the ones.
Hipsters have beards. Or mustaches. Or neither. They wear skinny jeans. Or maybe they don’t. They’ve got thick-rimmed glasses. Or sometimes not. You may not be able to describe one offhand, but you know one when you see one. Right?
As elusive as a unicorn yet as common as an ant, the hipster seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. The only definite thing about a hipster is that nobody wants to be called one (yet pretty much all of us are guilty of having called other people hipsters). It’s become one of the worst insults you can bestow upon somebody (yet it’s also among the most common). If you want to completely discount a person and everything that they stand for, just break out the H-word and watch their credibility to go down the drain. Once you’ve been dubbed a hipster, you yourself become meaningless in that context. You become one of those people and we all know what those people are like.
Or do we?
The definition of a “hipster” is at best a collection of vague cultural artifacts that we associate with a certain set of personality traits, very few of which actually exist in tandem. The prototypical hipster is a trust-fund baby who spends his days talking about art projects that he never gets around to starting. He drinks the cheapest beer available even though he can afford better. He does this ironically, and he wears his clothes in the same way. He judges you, the non-hipster, based solely on your appearance, quickly dismissing you as a non-member of the hip elite. He listens to bands you’ve never heard of and thinks it’s sad that you can’t keep up with his cooler-than-cool musical tastes. In short, the prototypical hipster is an asshole – but for the most part, he doesn’t even exist.
In a way, we’ve vilified the hipster archetype as a way of dealing with our own insecurities. Being cool was something most people never worried about once they graduated high school. Our internet-fueled society has since changed that, bringing the hunt for the newest and most interesting things into our day-to-day lives. There is a burden to be cool that now follows you into your 20s and 30s and beyond, whereas before these things were safely relegated to lunchtime cafeterias and high school auditoriums. And with the internet now spitting out a different concept of cool with each and every day that goes by, it’s almost impossible to keep up. Eventually we throw up our hands in exasperation and, whenever we see somebody who looks like they’re trying harder than us, we spit out the word: hipster.
My argument echoes the one joked about in both of the above comics. The hipster only exists in comparison. This is why nobody is willing to call themselves a hipster – there is no absolute meaning of the word. Hipster is a label used on somebody who’s trying harder to be cool than you are. That’s it. Whether they’re actually trying or whether they just happen to like that particular pair of skinny jeans is a completely different matter. We use the word hipster to dismiss others who may then turn around and judge us as not being cool enough. By dismissing them and all their thoughts immediately, we protect ourselves from their judgment. Yes, there are prototypical hipster assholes out there who can and will judge you based on what you wear, but let’s be realistic and realize that those assholes are the minority. Most people wearing thick-rimmed glasses just happen to like how they look. Most who drink PBR are too broke to afford anything else. Most who liked Animal Collective’s first album better are telling the truth (in the internet era, we are constantly exposed to new bands, making it more likely that you’ll enjoy a band when you first hear them rather than 3 or 4 albums later when you’ve discovered other new bands to explore). In other words, most people we call “hipster” aren’t.
It’s time we understand that the word hipster is used solely as an insult that dismisses people just because they wear a certain item of clothing. We call people hipsters based entirely on their appearance, yet for the most part we’re totally off-base in what we assume about them. That makes it the most widely acceptable form of discrimination today. Not everybody with a waxed mustache is a bad person. And if you happen to meet one who is – ignore him. He’ll probably do the same to you.
Comic credits: Toothpaste for Dinner and Dustinland
" and has spoken about the hipster effect at 
Screw those unambitious drinker and their budget conscious decision making. Why won’t they do their part to pull up the economy? Fuckin’ hipsters I tell ya.
…this from the guy who got called out on Gawker for adding hot sauce to his PBR.
I had bees, like, before they were cool.
[...] Cross-posted at The Hipster Effect. [...]
Not that I’m applying labels to anyone, particular my close family members, but #5 counting from the left is spot on for my brother and I’ve heard him use just such a phrase when referring to someone amazingly similar to #6 counting from the left. Hence, your argument is invalid.