| Title | : | What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0982597711 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780982597712 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 200 |
| Publication | : | First published September 15, 2010 |
What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation Reviews
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Rather than write anything else about this odd but entertaining little book, I will post the beginnings of a Facebook conversation that developed about it tonight after I finished it. It's currently stopped because I was too tired to keep it going, but hopefully I'll have some time (and others will have some willingness) to keep it going over the next day or two.
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Micah: Just finished "What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation," a 190-page excursion into 21st century hipsterism. It oscillated wildly between super insightful analysis and critique of hipsterism (on whiteness, consumerism, gentrification, irony, cultural capital, the hipster/douchebag dialectic, etc.) and absurdly over-the-top and nearly-nonsensical intellectualizing--sometimes within the same paragraph (as is the style of n+1 magazine, who released it). But it was an enjoyable read. It takes the phenomenon of hipsterism seriously and worthy of study and critique, which I think is proper. Hipsterism's specificities aren't accidental, nor is its rise; they are, in my estimation and in the estimation of the book's authors, the result of structural conditions which have shaped it. Anyway, some of the essays sucked, but on the whole it was worth my time.
Chris: How does the book lay out the structural conditions?
3 hours ago · Like
Micah: From the introduction:
"The hipster represents what can happen to middle class whites, particularly, and to all elites, generally, when they focus on the struggles for their own pleasures and luxuries--seeing these as daring and confrontational--rather than asking what makes their sort of people entitled to them, who else suffers for their pleasures, and where their 'rebellion' adjoins social struggles that should obligate anybody who hates authority.
Or, worse: the hipster is the subcultural type generated by neoliberalism, that infamous tendency of our time to privatize public goods and make an upward redistribution of wealth. Hipster values exalt political reaction, masquerading as rebellion, behind the mask of 'vice' (a hipster keyword). Hipster art and thought, where they exist, too often champion repetition and childhood, primitivism and plush animal masks. And hipster anti-authoritarianism bepseaks a ruse by which the middle-class young can forgive themselves for abandoning the claims of counterculture--whether punk, anti-capitalist, anarchist, nerdy, or 60s--while retaining the coolness of subculture."
3 hours ago · Like · 2
Micah: I didn't start typing that up in order to answer your question, Chris, but I guess it does in some ways.
3 hours ago · Like
Andrew: I'm buying this
2 hours ago · Like
Geoff Thom Ramsey Question: what *was* the hipster? Does it assume that "hipsterism" has run its course?
2 hours ago · Like
Micah: The book is all over the place. The first third or so is the transcript from a public event that n+1 held in New York. That section is by far the most frustrating part of the book, as the discussion jumps from one claim to the next wildly, particularly during the question-and-answer section. Most of the rest of the book is made up of reflections on hipsterism in light of the things that were discussed in the forum.
There's a lot about hipsterism as being a subculture (or almost "ethnicity," as one of the authors describes it in discussing mid-aughts gentrifiers in NYC) that emerges from the wreckage of so many other subcultures that have been commodified and then eventually destroyed. Unlike many of those other subcultures, like the ones mentioned above, hipsterism seems to see no need to stake any kinds of claims, to plant any kind of flag anywhere. It's not about making positive claims; it's simply about a kind of curatorial capability to assemble the veneer of superior taste--rather than making its own contributions, creating its own distinct aesthetic. It creates an aesthetic stitched together from other aesthetics, the assemblage of which is not even seen as a genuine attempt to create something that can stand alone on its own merits; it's done merely out of a sense of irony. Hipsterism lacks courage, in a way, and has no interest in developing or encouraging it; in fact, it scowls upon it. It's almost like hipsterism sees how subcultures in the past have been co-opted and neutered and how all of those subcultures' super earnest claims (political, aesthetic, etc.) were eventually commodified and stripped of everything that made them dangerous; it sees that, and says, "Meh. Let's just skip that whole earnest stage and just bask in consuming shit."
You could say a lot about where this comes from: maybe, as we've gone further into the 21st century, we've exhausted our ability to create new, compelling art or subcultures or whatever, and all we're capable of (or at least have the energy to do) is create this bizarre thing called hipsterism that doesn't feel compelled at all to make any kind of new contribution of its own to culture. Capital certainly hasn't had any problems figuring out how to effectively push hipsterism as a lifestyle, completely stripped of anything that might prove threatening to it. I dunno. The book goes in a million different directions, but those are a couple of the themes it touches on.
2 hours ago · Like
Micah: Stated more succinctly, from one of the critical essays called "Hip-Hop and Hipsterism" in the second half of the book:
"As a black boy looking at white boys,* hipsterism strikes me as what happens when white folks become aware of power and inequity--but then say, 'Well, what are we supposed to do? Throw our hands up and mean mug for the camera.'"
2 hours ago · Like
Nathan: what's wrong with wanting to have good taste? Or not contribute to culture?
2 hours ago · Like
Micah: The problem isn't with good taste--it's when good taste is what's at the heart of the subculture, and there's nothing else there. Because the subculture inevitably becomes simply about consumption.
2 hours ago · Like
Micah: Geoff: different contributors in the book have different opinions as to whether or not hipsterism has run its course.
2 hours ago · Like
Nathan: Yeah, I just wonder if it isn't speciously assuming that cultural consumption happens in place of some truly worthwhile human endeavor (making art, making the revolution, whatever). Seems like a sort of specious criticism unless you have a pretty robust sense of what the worthwhile endeavor is, and why it, ideally, ought to be worthwhile for everyone, not just you
2 hours ago · Like
Micah: I mean, I have some pretty strong ideas about some worthwhile human endeavors! (Making the revolution is one of them, actually.)
2 hours ago · Like
Micah: But in general, to me there's something really worrisome about a subculture that doesn't even try to make any kind of positive claims. I spent my teenage years in the DIY punk scene, which is about as earnest of a subculture as one can find. We were all full of shit, of course--we produced some truly god-awful grindcore music and album art with screaming skulls and pictures of starving children on them--but I would actually take our often-terrible productions done out of a sense of earnestness over the spirit that seems to animate most of what hipsterism produces, which is that there are no worthwhile endeavors, so... fuck it.
Because where do you go from that kind of hipster attitude, smug in your knowledge that no one really knows what a worthwhile endeavor is and everyone who is attempting it is full of shit? How do you evolve from that? I started out in the punk scene, and gradually evolved into the person I am today; through punk, and all of its specious claims to worthwhile endeavors, I eventually came to anti-war activism, then student labor activism, then the labor movement, etc. My participation in a subculture that thought it had a "robust sense of what [a] worthwhile endeavor [was]" oriented me in a certain direction, propelled me out into the world unafraid to act out of a sense of knowing what those worthwhile endeavors were. Those claims were often wrong, but at least they gave me that kind of push that I needed to go out into the world and act.
I feel like hipsterism is incapable of doing this. How does one evolve into someone who engages in more worthwhile endeavors if the fundamental orientation of the subculture is that there's no such thing as a truly worthwhile endeavor?
2 hours ago · Like
Nathan: Right, these are big questions. Your case is a great example. I guess I just get nervous when leftists complain about people doing innocuous things like making record collections. We should have a hard bias toward allowing people to do what makes them happy. I assume we agree that not everyone should be an organizer, or attend rallies, or spend a lot of time on politics. These activities might, in retrospect, turn out to be instrumental in ushering in a better society, but I sincerely hope that our great grand children will not have the same obligations. And, if we turn out to be wrong, if our ‘going out and acting in the world’ does not improve society in any durable way, then we’ve wasted our very, very short time here. If someone prefers dressing stylishly, feeling cool with friends, and smoking clove cigarettes, do we really begrudge them this?
about an hour ago · Like -
So, I got it, thinking it was supposed to be funny. It wasn't. It was a combinations of articles and a forum (which I'm not even sure ACTUALLY happened) about hipsters. They were acting like this was a summit on an important issue. As someone who recently conducted a ridiculous amount of research for my thesis on human trafficking, this read like a pamphlet composed after a meeting at the UN on a conversation to stop child abuse. Except that's a subject that matters. These are hipsters. It's not important at all. And to be honest, real hipsters happened a while ago. It's on the decline and into mainstream. They were using racial, feminist, and post-colonialist lenses to analyze the whole thing. On top of that, they kept applying Marxist terms to EVERYTHING, but they threw the terms around willy-nilly, and at this point, I'm not even sure if they've read anything of Marx or his followers. Certainly not Lenin, even though they slapped "vanguard" onto something hipster-y. And the only way they described hipsters tended to be "skinny jeans." Way to be social anthropologists, guys. And again, I'm not sure if this was supposed to be humor or not. It failed on both levels so hard, though, that there is no going back. If I can't find the humor anywhere in the work, and it's supposed to be funny, that's a failure on the author, not the reader. If this was serious, way to be a bunch of pretentious intellectuals when there are more important fish to fry.
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If the book contributed more essays to balance out a complete transcript of the n+1 panel on hipsters at the New School, I'd be inclined to give it another star. Unfortunately, I think this portion and the two reviews that accompany it offer the most nebulous and least interesting viewpoints on the subject at hand, even if one of the audience members is a friend's brother and a report is filed by a casual acquaintance. I was also surprised that few contributors touched on digital and social media in any real way, and disheartened that hipsters were treated as either global interlopers or a coastal concern. Ever been to Austin? Hello.
I certainly recommend it. The book offers several points of inquiry and sociohistoric context into the evolution of the hipster over the past decade that were glazed over for the sake of brevity in Mark Greif's recent New York Magazine article. And unlike the work of Mike Davis, which gets invoked, it's not in love with its own impenetrability. I would have liked more of an interrogation on race, though whiteness, ethnicity, class, and urban migration patterns are given considerable emphasis and nuance. There's even discussion of gender and hipsters, best illustrated in Dayna Tortorici's essay on fashion, photo blogging, and the rise of Cory Kennedy. Jennifer Baumgardner also touches on hipster homophobia, which I've talked about with a friend and is worth exploring.
I don't think it adds too much to ideations about hipsters put forth by Norman Mailer, Anatole Broyard, Thomas Frank, or James Baldwin. But as a collection of essays that gesture toward this particular moment in post(-post?)-modern youth culture, it's worth a read. -
very interesting book. the original panel, transcribed at the beginning of the book and providing the framework for the remainder of the analysis, failed entirely. it suffers from exactly the same self centeredness that it claims to abhor. the panelists being up the issue of class dynamics, only to ignore them for the rest of the panel.
fortunately, the responses to the panel make up for nearly every deficit in the original conference. overall, however, the entire body of work adds little new to the conversation. -
I've always been baffled by the modern day hipster, and then this book fell in my lap and gave me multiple perspectives on how the hipster came to be and how the negative connotations associated with hipsterism are not always well deserved, if anything, the hipster can be an active agent in the community and one that pushes society forward or preserves the culture of the generation before their own. I was pleased with this book, and the fact that it was more of a discussion rather than a factual/historical explanation of how the hipster evolved. You'll definitely hold in a chuckle or two cause you will most likely relate it to at least one person you know if not yourself.
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General conclusions between the different views it seems to draw as an answer to the question of this book:
1) Circa '99-'03, Brooklyn: young white middle class (or lower middle class, but not working class) kids moving to the city and living in poor ethnic neighborhoods decide to take their fashion cues from an "ironic" source of "ethnic whiteness", hence whitetrash/working-class cues: trucker hats, southern big belt buckles, 70s creepy mustaches, PBR, etc. as a way to justify their gentrification of Brooklyn zipcodes.
2) Circa '03-'09—year of the talk, Brooklyn (and other places by then: Peru, Dubai, etc.): new bunch of young white middle class guys or same ones changing looks decide to go more femme masculinity with skinny jeans, glasses, etc but also big mountain man beards. Women develop their fashion sense in the clique with glasses, floral dresses, polaroid selfies, etc. The whole ethos of both fashion groups seems to be indie consumption and fashion, sort of like the mods in 60s England. There's not a lot of political bite in the overall "subculture" if really any. There is a doubt among the whole group as to the authenticity of the identity, held up only by denial, confusion, "irony", and the latent need of youth without enough capital of their own to adhere to the identity of their now globalized cultural capital brand.
3) Or something like that, it gets a bit murky, confused, nebulous, and ambiguous and probably speaks most to the effect advertising, branding, and hypercapatilistic consumer culture has on everyone. Perhaps as someone suggested it is a moment of unmediated postmodern exhaustion as youth subsume themselves to a consumerist worldview barely different than their elders. And perhaps now the term 'hipster'—used since the 40s, 'hip' or 'hep' used even further back stemming from African Americans use of the phrase from an African language root as a sort of enlightenment and knowingness in 18th century slavery America—has become so ubiquitous that it is supplanting terms such as 'bohemian', 'counterculture', 'alternative', and especially 'indie' to represent a generally-subcultural (or post-subcultural) youth of today.
4) In terms of the hipster being dead or over, think again—are hippies dead more than 50 years later, punks more than 40 years later? No. And hipsters, though different than those two vanguard moments in youth subculture, will likely stick around much longer than anyone thinks it can. Even though as some people theorize, perhaps the whole thing was a set up from the get go, a little implanted marketing here and there with a goal of hypergentrifying Brooklyn and selling new products to disaffected youth, it's possible, and I think it's even more possible now when you hear about fad identities such as Normcore and Healthgoth, which seem to come out of marketing departments before they're actually anything one could discern on urban streets. Is it all a silly game of distinction and cultural "superiority" manipulated at many turns—pretty much, but I'd less likely say that at 21, looking for an urban identity to distinguish myself.
*Note on "irony": I'm scare quoting irony, because it gets thrown around like M&Ms in this book and the discussion of hipsters more than any other concept (gentrification the 2nd), and really I think we can call into question its use, irony itself of course is an ambiguous word, because there are many types of irony. The one brought up with hipsters seems to be less a tongue-in-cheek joke, though maybe circa '99-'03 they've got something (but even then, not really that funny of a joke), and more about doubt, doubt of their identity. I mean why does someone deny they are a hipster: doubt. A doubt that it's an authentic identity, and hence they must "ironically" doubt it, they must point to it as "ironic" authenticity. But really how can someone have an identity and deny it at the same time, sounds a bit exhausting and schizophrenic. Sounds like it opens one to being vacuous as a way to cope. Or to accuse everyone else around you as not being in the know, not being authentic enough, but neither are you—at least according to the ethos.
Quotes & Notes:
Participants were welcome whatever bad motives and resentments they no doubt harbored toward ex-neighborhoods, rivals, or people who dress better or more expensively.
"Hippie"—a term of abuse invented by hipsters or beatniks of the postwar generation for "little hipsters", who just liked to dance and smoke pot but knew nothing about jazz or politics or poetry.
Hipster anti-authoritarianism bespeaks a ruse by which the middle class young can forgive themselves for abandoning the claims of counterculture—whether punk, anti-capitalist, anarchist, nerdy, or '60s—while retaining the coolness of subculture.
Request for essay from magazine to kill off the hipster once and all: "What started as an organic, cheeky, postmodern lifestyle is now a carbon copy of a copy—co-opted by Urban Outfitters and sold like fast food. Your essay would wonder, when everything cool in an urban context automatically gets subsumed by now uncool hipsterism, how can anything be cool again? How can cool recover?"
The ungenerous reading is that Peru's hipsters have too much money and neocolonized brains. These poor rich kids only value local culture when repackaged by other, cooler countries.
The rise of the hipster is intrinsically liked to widespread internet use, and the dwindling time in which a fashion moves from an expression of individual style to something photographed, blogged, reported on, turned into a trend, marketed, and sold.
Artists, not hipsters are gentrification's shock troops. And in many cases, before the artists think to move in, the children of a neighborhood's original residents are the ones who first start tinkering with buying houses there and opening up things to a new market, a new income bracket, a new set of amenities. By the time the hipster appears in a neighborhood, the gentrification process is well underway.
If anything, the presence of cool independent coffee shops staffed by white waiters with tattoos they can easily cover for a job interview signifies that a neighborhood will soon reach its coolness peak.
People who are upwardly mobile from the lower-middle class, to an artistic bohemian class, but wind up essentially serving coffee and beers for the people who believe themselves to be downwardly mobile, from the upper middle class.
In French, a bobo, the closest french word to hipster, is one who acts cool but has money, pretends to make art but buys shoes, pretends to be radical but hangs on to privilege. Branche is an older and more general term, closer to the word trendy. Hipster can be used but may relate to branche or bobo.
[Do hipsters help the homeless—of course not, at least not unitedly. Do they mock them? Ape them? Unlikely. The connotation of hipsters looking like the homeless obviously comes from a class pretension of the unhip middle class who in jealousy of all the attention these young people are getting insult them on aspects of fashion and lack of wealth, taste, etc. It's a consumer-eat-consumer world.]
[Hipster: apolitical youth consumer movement? Unread, vacuous, not far from the aesthetics of the dominant older middle class?]
Hipsterism: essentially, on some level, happened in order to convey to our generation the fallacy or the flaws in deregulation. It was the deregulation of culture.
We really, a lot of us—this is the suburban thing—were missing out on culture, we've got every other commodity but it.
Subculture was deregulated by the internet. If you would enter some sort of subculture, say punk or rockabilly or twee or something like that in the 90s, there were all sorts of controls and bureaucratic red tape on whether or not you could get in, and once you were in there were limitations on what you could do, say, and be.
After this whole mortgage crisis, are hipsters going to stop being an urban phenomena and be like squatting in suburbs?
I actually like this idea of hipster flight from the city, so suddenly everyone's going to be drinking PBR and wearing detachable belt buckles.
Everyone will just go back to Milwaukee or wherever they're from.
Are there artists who are setting up entire housing developments as squats?
One: hipsterism as the mechanism of the assertion of distinction. Where everyone is trying to distinguish themselves from other people in increasingly trivial ways, thus taking their eye off of essential matters. Two: hipsterdom as homogenizing force, creating a kind of overall "rebel" consumer culture, to which one can belong by saying "I'm opting out," when in fact you're opting in.
Where does something stop being ironic and become nostalgic?
The usual stigma of hipster culture is that it's completely nihilistic—that there's no value except pleasure, that there's no use, that hipsters don't believe in anything, they don't do anything.
I've been around the world and seen a lot of places that are just hipster-proof.
A lot of people go to Portland because it's sort of like the opposite of New York. Portland is like, if you don't make it anywhere else, then you move to Portland. But I think that's why a lot of people are successful from a place like Portland; you can be a really big fish in a small pond and start succeeding and get traction.
Are outsider groups the only ones that make possible new forms of cultural capital? And thus are hipsters always necessary to the powers that be? Perhaps, in an endlessly repeating pattern of co-optation, hipsters serve as agents for the stakeholders in the established cultural hegemony, appropriating the new cultural capital forms, delivering them to mainstream media in a commercial form and stripping their inventors' groups (if not the inventors themselves, in the best-case scenario) of the power and the glory, the unification and the mode of resistance.
Can you perform a significant act of rebellion on Facebook?
How do we stop running that race, stop worrying about the degree to which we are "hip", the degree to which our treasured self-conceptions can be made into cliches against our will?
One must start with the premise that the hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity.
The faint air of self-satisfaction inherent in the premise of a post-hipster conference grew thicker and thicker.
Some even seemed to confuse hipsterism with an artistic avant-garde when they are in fact opposites by definition.
The hipster as the embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics.
I was a gentrifier in Williamsburg. Like the maligned hipsters, I used my parents' savings to secure a place to live. I hoped for property values to rise, so that I could sell my apartment for a profit.
Is there homophobia in the hipster-hating, a revulsion in seeing men who care "too much" about how they look?
Hipsterism has some sort of repressed white-American sensibility in its essence. Something that arises form the luxury of sleeping through life.
A true hipster rapper would've been the epitome of an Uncle Tom, exploiting a robust, nourishing culture to create an empty white-friendly shell.
De La Soul's second album, De La Soul is Dead, was a concept record responding to the accusation that De La Soul were "hippies".
In my view, the Blipster is a contemporary update on the cool black nerd, picking stuff up from white subculture to develop an accepted type. These skinny, nappy-facial-haired black dudes might even be avatars of our ethnocultural future.
Hipsterism strikes me as what happens when white folks become aware of power and inequity—but then say, "Well, what are we supposed to do?"
It is an unsatisfying partial-truth that the female hipster's privileged knowledge is not subcultural, intellectual, or even psuedo-intellectual, but the familiar "female" knowledge of how to look.
The girls always looked good, if a little dead in the eyes. Not everyone was a famous person, but everybody looked like one.
Instead of doing art, people everywhere were "doing" products.
A subculture of pro-consumer, pro-consumption, amoral, pro-lifestyle.
Something in the "white hipster" imagination moved inexorably toward justifying rich whites in not having to be anything but white. Hipsters rationalized white colonization and separation by unconsciously forming an ethnicity for themselves.
It's all about superiority: you may be tending bar, but if you are tending bar in hip clothes and you're in a band at night, you'll always possess higher status in culture (if not in income) than the bond-trader losers ordering vodka tonics in button-downs. -
Before I write anything, let me specify that I’m a little (in size, in age less so every year) girl from the Old Continent. And yes, this premises is necessary so that I can write freely about What Was The Hipster? and not feeling guilty even if I have no business in holding opinions on such matter.
Before moving to the US I heard the word ‘hipster’ a few times, but mostly I saw it on magazines and in my mind I started to link it to a certain fashion style. In late August I crossed the ocean and the presence of the hipsters became a reality. One of my flat mates told me that I have something of a hipster while another argued that it wasn’t true, my European origins are those that give me a certain ‘flavor’ that, in her opinion, hipsters aspire to acquire, or at least to respond to somehow. The first time I dared to wear converse, skinny jeans and a flannel shirt I got looks that left no doubts. If people associated me so easily to hipsters, I might as well find what a hipster actually is. That is how I got to buy the N+1 small book.
Let’s move to the core of this post: what is the hipster? I thought I had a reasonable idea of who the hipsters are but after this short book I’m more confused than ever.
The first thing that surprised me was the gravity of the tone. The fact that the complete title is What Was The Hipster? A Sociological Investigation might have given me a clue that of sociological investigation they are actually talking about. Anyway, I though some humor was going to be employed. I was wrong. The preface by Mark Greif was probably the part that mostly made me nostalgic of some healthy self-irony. And this in literally the first eleven pages. Let me be more specific, the purposes of this project are ‘social-scientific’ and ‘the hipster of the period 1999-2000 will remain of historic interest’. Towards the end of the preface Greif mentions something that should have been written at the very beginning ‘partly the challenge is that the topic seems too stupid and demeaning’.
The preface is followed by the transcript of a Symposium that took place at the New School where three people expressed their theories on the hipsters and then there was a discussion. Here I should say: thank you Christian Lorentzen. The one that actually seemed to take the whole issue more lightly. Not strictly related to the sociological issue at stake but funny nonetheless:
'I am now of the opinion that procreation should be prohibited before the age of 30, except among the rich and in Alaska.'
Of course, out of curiosity I googled the editor and what do I find out? He wrote plenty about the hipsters before (in his defense, he does mention the fact in his statement).
The rest of the book is composed by a Dossier with articles about the discussion, followed by a selection of Essays. I don’t mean to liquidate the rest of the book but I got more and more confused and lost focus. Perù, ‘too much money and neocolonized brains’, ‘pinning the blame on a straw man in skinny jeans’, and, wait for it, the best of it all: hipsterism as an ethnicity. I’m feeling exhausted all over again just reviewing my note of the book.
Josh Stanley does raise an interesting question:
'What I wanted to ask is whether there’s nothing interesting about it, whether it is only one of the necessities of capitalism, as a homogenizing impulse as capitalism expands.'
As ironically I thought about it, this book offered me points of reflection and gave me a new view on some cultural reality in a part of the US (probably more of NY than anywhere else). The problem is: I don’t understand all this interest in the hipsters. Are they really so relevant from a cultural or sociological point of view? -
Who knew that the much-maligned hipster could generate so much provocative discussion around issues of culture, gender, race and consumerism? A surprisingly interesting and educational read.
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Funny, despite itself.
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Sometimes funny, with varying degrees of academic and anecdotal insights, painfully self-conscious, and, of course, ironic, What Was the Hipster? opens up with a transcribed panel discussion of what the Hipster *was* as of 2010, a distance of 7 years from its "death." This seemingly brash claim assumes an elegiac, post-mortem view for a cultural character-type that doesn't exist anymore, or at least not as how we once knew it.
"Against Everything: Essays" writer and n+1 magazine editor Mark Greif opens with a powerful series of attempts at defining the 1999-2003 era of hipsterdom that was re-abducted, the first time, from black, jazz era culture by counter-cultural white liberals of the 50-60s, and again from America's turn-of-the-millennium bohemian enclaves into the marketplace, making the hipster a consumable, global brand in aesthetics (ie instagram) and materials (ie Urban Outfitters).
Following this, Greif's n+1 peers make more strained or circuitous attempts prescribing the hipster's definition, (lack of) depth, and finally, death. Jace Clayton's "Vampires of Lima" avoided some of these opacities with a look at how U.S. cultural tourism abroad determines how regional ethnic scenes (in this case, cumbia in Peru) are both scalped and made visible, even validated, in one fell swoop as they enter American mass media. But the transcript and its Q&A got bumpier.
I cringed furiously at how much the first section of What Was the Hipster? seems to be so deeply "about New York," making it was a book that was "talking to itself, about itself" in this small bubble, though it does touch on Portland, Chicago's Wicker Park and LA's Silver Lake. Then again, cosmopolitan navel gazing is so characteristic to the hipster, the self-absorbed merchant of Cool. Fitting, to that end.
Some of the measured, haughty responses to the symposium in the second half are essential reading, especially as to how non-white males configure into hispterism. Dayna Tortorici's "You Know It When You See It" was a fascinating investigation into women's roles that figured into what a "hipster" is (aesthetically dominated by by male images and masculine symbols), Patrice Evans' "Hip-Hop & Hipsterism" particularly interested me in using Woke Rap (née Backpack Rap) to address topics of blackness, performative blackness, and the currency of cool. "On Douchebags" by Robert Moor cleverly defines one of the hipster's foils, the douche(bag), and in doing so, paints a duality gives us a a richer view of both.
In my opinion, this is a great starting place, an epilogue to see the fragments what what the '99-'03 hipster shattered into, and created identity prototypes that we now call "Instagram models," "Soundcloud rappers/DJs," "YouTube celebrities" or even "Social Justice Warriors."
Like the word "hipster," none of these modern categories are labels anyone wants to enthusiastically self-identify with, even if they so clearly are one or the other. Self-identifying as such would be embarrassing, because they reduce vocation to the limited digital real estate of a social media channel(s). As if their performances and postures are not "real" by virtue of being online (vs. IRL modes). These influencers see things like photography, fashion, music and film less as inherited culture we synthesize into personality ornaments (i.e., shaping a sense of self via Wes Anderson movies, Pitchfork reviews or ironic text tees) as if what media you consume constitutes a sense of personal creativity, or says something authentic about you. The reality being we are assemblages of Xerox'd culture with slim chances at ideals like 'freedom' or 'the authentic self.'
Some influencers seem to operate under this paradox of digital dualism, so they are what I would propose are the closest things to hipsters in 2018. They perform conspicuous gentrification of cultural and economic whitespace, the newest mediums where you may be very visibly "fashionable," where what is cool can now be transparently performed on behalf a personal-brand aesthetic and as #sponcon for companies commodifying the new stems growing out of the hipster's corpse. Cool is no longer a monolith embodied in the hipster, it is a series of business verticals. -
"Se piensa que ser hipster significa estar permanente y obsesivamente comprometido con ser auténtico; se tiene la impresión de que los hipsters son auténticos y que sus vidas son auténticas y que sus experiencias personales son ricas y fértiles en significados". Manoah Finston.
"Las drogas son prácticamente lo único que todas las subculturas aman por igual". Mark Greif.
"¿Qué tiene de beneficioso ir siempre unos pasos por delante de los demás si siempre permaneces en la senda hipster?¿Cómo podemos abandonar esa competición, dejar de preocuparnos por la medida en que somos modernos, por la amenaza de que el atesorado concepto que tenemos de nosotros mismos se convierta, en contra de nuestra voluntad, en un cliché?". Rob Horning.
"A los veintidós años, sin embargo, cuando los ambiciosos graduados universitarios se mudan a la metrópolis, la subcultura puede adoptar un nuevo papel. Con su llegada a las ciudades muchos sufren la experiencia de verse desclasados. El recién graduado proviene de un estatus elevado pero de pronto se encuentra sin ingresos y en un entorno diferente a las jerarquías de la universidad. Él o ella posee enormes reservas de lo que Pierre Bourdieu denominaba capital cultural, reservas a la espera de ser utilizadas -una titulación, la preparación ganada en la universidad para apreciar y extraer conclusiones a partir de pequeñas diferencias y hechos, para descubrir los códigos culturales y utilizarlos- pero él o ella ha perdido de forma temporal el poder y el auténtico capital característicos de su clase social. Ciertos tipos de cultura permiten la activación del capital cultural para obtener distinción y no sentirse desclasado.
De ahí la afirmación (no del todo cierta): Todos los hipsters son ricos" (...) a la gente ambiciosa que llega a la ciudad proveniente de una clase media-baja, sumarse a los hipsters le provee de una valiosa distinción, ayudando a su ascenso social. En cuanto te unes a ellos tienes la impresión de que te aguarda una posición superior. Puedes atender la barra de un bar pero si lo haces con ropa hipster y por las noches tocas en un grupo, posees un estatus cultural superior (aunque los ingresos no lo sean) al de aburridos vendedores de bonos que te piden vodka-tonics". Mark Greif. -
pretty nice but chaotic book about hipsters and around, a lot of pseudoscholar trash detected.
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honestly kind of think it deserves a 3, but it gets credit for format, and being at the sweet spot between academia/actual sociology and something gossipy but analytical and highly satisfying?
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As a Minnesotan, discussions of “hipsters,” whatever they are, seem topical. Minnesota was declared
the most hipster state in the country a few years back and just a week ago, St. Paul was named the
most hipster zip code in the nation. What is all this? What are we to make of it? It was for some answers that I went to this collection of essays.
Fascinating stuff, but also frustratingly vague and obtuse, “What Was the Hipster” is a transcript of a discussion on a sociological approach to subculture and essays responding or attempting to clarify the discussion. The participants only barely scratched the surface focusing on reasons behind various styles, discussions of classicism and racism, and identity but these ideas are hardly given any space to really get to the guts of the debate. The very discussion of the phenomena of the “hipster,” the current counter/sub culture (if it can even be called that) is very complex and difficult to parse and the participants struggle to convey and formulate their ideas, talking around each other and name dropping everything from philosophers, ‘90s bands, and ‘80s TV-shows in but in fact, it seems, they are unable even to come to a consensus on what a hipster actually is.
One of the goals of the "investigation" was its hope to express the reality of the hipster to future readers, which is itself a bit ironic, as the book, now three years old, is already showing its age. The hipster meme has already been declared dead and/or dying numerous times. In particular, the descriptions of the Peruvian hipsters from Lima who only embraced their Peruvian chicha musical identity when it was embraced as ironically cool by a French recording studio based in New York. This globalizing presence appears to be part and parcel of the hipster idea, as things become "cool" divorced from their origins only to lose their "authenticity" in the process. Themes of irony, authenticity, sincerity, and nostalgia all seem to be at the heart of the idea and lead to some of the most incisive essays in the collection.
To me, an essential part of hipsterdom, like that of all putative modern “subcultures,” if any such even truly survive, is consumption. With the proliferation of the internet, ideas and styles merge and mutate, leading to conflict among groups about meaning and identity. For my own part, I find subcultural studies like these to be very interesting, exploring the creation of modern social identities; the weird dichotomy of what is “cool” and “uncool.” For instance, the typical pursuits of the geek/nerd stereotype were traditionally the very definition of “uncool,” while the aspects associated with stereotypical hipsters were what “cool” people wanted, but there has been an odd shift; now, self professed geek activities have a social attache that approaches “cool,” while hipsters who ironically wear nerdy glasses and play D&D or whatever are insulted as in-authentically appropriating these things. "What was the Hipster?" only discusses these aspects in passing, and thus, it may be the starting point for an academic study of modern youth subcultures but it is a flawed beginning. -
There are some sharp essays here in the second half, its being fodder for which is the only reason to read through the transcript that begins the book.
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"[H]ipsterism strikes me as what happens when white folks become aware of power and inequity---but then say, 'Well, what are we supposed to do? Throw our hands up and mug for the cameras.' Any relinquishing of power is inevitably an aesthetic gesture."
"[The douchebag] is everything he has been taught to be; he does everything society asks of him. And for all of this effort, he assumes that he will be granted a slight, unspoken modicum of respect and admiration.
Yet this respect---respect predicated upon normalcy rather than uniqueness---is exactly what the hipster withholds. Only in this way can the hipster maintain his complacency, believing he deprives some douchebag of his. But when douchebags have discovered skinny jeans, as they surely will . . . with what will the hipster then cover his pale, skinny ass? Parachute pants?"
"It takes a very strong-minded person not to enjoy the restoration of privilege." -
Somewhere between irreverence and academia, there is this book. Absolutely wonderful. It may seem like a self-indulgent exercise in developing a taxonomy of hip, but it really is an intriguing and eye-opening look at the socio-cultural movement that is hipsterism. A series of essays, a transcribed discussion from a New School debate, and a series of response essays. The best: probably, the identification of hipsters as promoting an infantilized, entitled white-ness, politically nihilist, representing nothing, and circling around an almost neo-conservative fetishism of suburban whiteness from the 80s. The worst: I was horrified (HORRIFIED) to learn that my beloved Slavoj Zizek is apparently a hipster fetish object, and thus loathsome to those who don't want to be seen as hipsters (i.e. everyone). CAN THIS BE TRUE!? I refuse to accept it.
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by the end of this book i felt about the word 'hipster' the way i felt about the word 'vagina' at the end of watching 'the vagina monologues,' which is: able to say it without feeling awkward / laughing like i would have beforehand.
the discussion around which the book is centered features a few interesting ~2 page theses, but no real coherent discussion seems to happen. which is fine.
feel this book will be important as a historical document of 1999-2009 New York City, but also could contribute to a bigger conversation about hipsterism, subculture, counterculture and what it means to be young in america 'in the age of the internet' -
I give this book an extra star for Christopher Glazek's essay, "South Side Story: Hasidism vs. Hipsters." The opening connects the initial freeway expansion of the 1940s and 1950s, which Glazek represents with the delirious, cartoonish Judge Doom from the film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" ("eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena"), to the Bloomberg administration's present day 14-mile greenway project; the resulting "hipster traffic" stirs conflict in the traditional Hasidic neighborhood of South Williamsburg. Also, Glazek wins with the line, "Franz Kafka, a significant hipster if not the original one..." A very fun read.
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Equal parts funny and obnoxious, I can't help but be amused that this treatise serving as a sort of ethnography of the modern hipster, manages to also be the very distillation of hipsterism itself. But because I think that the panellists are achingly aware of this, I give it a general thumbs up. As one reviewer said, I think I like the idea that this exists more than I actually enjoyed the work iteself.
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En abril de 2009, un grupo de investigadores de la revista n+1 organizaron un panel de discusión en la New School de NY con la idea de definir quién fue el hipster contemporáneo (el que vivió de 1999 al año de publicación del libro, 2010). Este libro es un transcrip de las opiniones de ponentes y público de ese panel. También incluye ensayos de académicos y otras cosas por ahí. So far, so very good.
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Lo acabo de terminar.
Me lo regalaron en mi cumple, y nada... mayor sensación de haber perdido el tiempo mientras lo leía no he podido tener (a excepción de algún momento en que no he podido evitar la "risa" por tantas paridas irónicas y petulantes juntas...).
En definitiva, la mayor mierda que te puedas echar a los ojos.
Para los que duden, antes de ponerse con esto, hay mucho donde elegir...
(Y no es que no me gusten los ensayos, es que para ser un ensayo, no hay por dónde cogerlo). -
I enjoyed the fact that this book exists slightly more than I enjoyed the book, but it’s worth a read if you’re interested in or amused by the hipster thing. The “academic without the rigour” style is well pitched, and although the transcript of the event is a bit dull (or real, I guess) it’s a useful centrepiece. Kept me amused for a couple of days.
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I got so confused at points because I had no idea what they were referring to half the time. Also, a lot of the writing was like an 11th year students' sociology essay - way too much use of a thesaurus. The last essay about the community battle between the Hasids & Hipsters in New York was hilarious, though.
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En liñas xerais, hipsters falando sobre hipsters, para un público hipster. Logo dun comezo prometedor, pronto pasa a ser máis un brainstorming ca un libro, e aínda que aparecen algunhas ideas interesantes, están lastradas pola desorde e a falta de profundidade. Pouca solidez, e nada que non vaias aprender se googleas un pouco o tema.
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Interesting, though somewhat shallow, examination of the contemporary iteration of the “hipster.”
I still feel like I did before I read the book that if so many people can be lumped into the term “hipster” these days, there is no way that all of them can really be that hip...
It was interesting getting a little more insight into the origins of the term.
