Pabst Blue Ribbon, fixed-gear bikes, and saving the universe

When I lived in Richmond I once went to a friend of a friend's apartment in one of the cooler neighbourhoods of that crooked little place. There were shoes nailed to the walls, lines of crushed valium on the coffee table and a giant hookah taking pride of place, centre-living room floor. I exclaimed, "This apartment is the shit!" They laughed at my accent, offered me some shisha, and turned some music on. I watched as Joe, the friend-of-my-friend, flicked through his iTunes on shuffle: "Don't like this song... or this one... don't like this one..." It was the Dandy Warhols, the White Stripes, Death Cab, Interpol, etc. I laughed and said, "Did you take your music straight from the indie handbook?" He looked at me with a combination of disgust, shock and hurt that I have never seen replicated to this day.

That was 2005, and since then I've seen a lot of grungily cool apartments with shoes on the walls, powder on the surfaces and shish smoke clogging the ceilings, and I finally get why Joe took such offense: I called him a hipster.

Oh, hipsters. Those thick-rimmed-glasses-sporting, ash-flicking, slouching, skinny-jeaned creatures we all love to loathe. And loathe them we do. There is no neutral ground here. In fact the first thing you'll see on the Wikipedia page is a 'neutrality-disputed' banner, because, for some reason, hipster culture causes immediate fury so intense as to wipe out coherent thought in most people. There's something inherently offensive about so much pretentiousness being so vilified. But wait, wait - what is a hipster, exactly?

The word 'hip' comes from 'hep', a jive word from the start of the jazz era. People who dug hot jazz were 'hep' and 'hepsters', and jive talk was a way of distinguishing themselves from a mainstream culture that was, at times, hostile towards the jazz movement.

Now, evolved into 'hipster', the term applies, often in a derogatory sense, to young middle-class people who wouldn't touch the mainstream with a ten-foot pole. There's more to it, of course, mainly the appalling cultural appropriation - being the absorption of a cultural marker into a totally different context, thus stripping it of its meaning, diluting it, and generating a lot of resentment from a lot of different people (the keffiyeh is a good example of this). Hipsters are also famous for being self-absorbed, aloof and elitist - look, just watch the Hipster Olympics and get back to me.

Done? Awesome.

So it's easy to see why people call 'em leeches, posers, scum. But this article is what I really wanted to talk about. It's in a magazine called Adbusters, right? Do you know the biggest demographic that reads Adbusters? Alternative young middle-classers!

But this is the crazy thing about them: hipsters can read articles hating on hipsters and NOT GET IT because no self-respecting hipster will acknowledge being a hipster. They're the original, man. They've got ideas. Everyone else is the fucking hipster. It's some sort of self-perpetuating identity crisis based around a need to be the most unique, original, alternative. If that's what you're after, you can never pledge yourself to a single subculture. You'd be selling out!

Hipsters are emblematic of a generation that is hyper-self-aware, borrowing shamelessly from previous subcultures, documenting and self-deprecating their still-forming history with the ever-giving help of the Internet - so how can you possibly call them the dead end of an entire civilisation? Saying that kind of shit puts you in the same perspectiveless bubble as the rest of them. It's not a crime that our youth are disaffected; it's not even necessarily a bad thing. And pretentious or not, a ton of hipsters really do buy green, support local businesses, use energy-saving lightbulbs and eat vegetarian, as well us supporting gay rights, feminism, and all the minorities they shamelessly borrow from. As much as they might shit you, they're doing some stuff right.

And let's be as real as our rose-tinted re-released Wayfarers will allow us to be, people: the Adbusters article itself is a load of hysterical crap. I mean, sure, hate on them, but please don't give hipsters as much credit as to be the "dead end of Western civilisation". What nonsense.

The fact that there is such hysterical reaction to a hipster phenomenon says a lot about us, although what exactly it's saying, I'm not sure. Maybe we chafe under the scrutiny of those who proclaim themselves cooler than us without our approval. Maybe we're intimidated by the aggressive obscurity that's apparently necessary to be accepted into those circles. Maybe I'm projecting a tiny bit here. But look: historically, the subcultures with the greatest backlash have been the most influential. I'm not trying to suggest that hipsters are the new punks (nor will I agree that hobos are the new unicorns). I'm just saying, why don't we see how this whole hipster thing pans out before we go ahead and announce the end of Western civilisation at the hands of some skinny art history majors with nicotine-hands and an overdeveloped sense of self-importance.