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Kill the hipster
Why the hipster must die
Illustration Credit: Jesse PhilipsHas the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it die the day Wes Anderson proved too precious for his own good, or was it when Chloë Sevigny fellated Vincent Gallo onscreen? Did it vanish along with Kokie’s, International Bar and Tonic? Or when McSweeney’s moved shop to San Francisco and Bright Eyes signed a lease on the Lower East Side? Was it possible to be a hipster once a band that played Northsix one night was heard the next day on NPR’s Weekend Edition? Did it hurt to have American Apparel marketing soft-porn style to young bankers? Was something lost the day Ecstasy made the cover of the Times Magazine? Or was it the day Bloomberg banned smoking in bars? And how many times an hour could one check e-mail and still have an honest, or even ironic, claim on being cool?
Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.
It was in the real-estate section of one of the city’s lesser dailies, under the headline luxury seems to be set for the lower east side, that I found an astonishing remark attributed to Michael Desjadon, the director of sales at Massey Knakal: “The profile of the typical renter in the area is changing from the ‘counterculture hipster’ to the ‘more mainstream’ hipster and young professional.”
“I wish I’d thought of this phrase, but we call the Lower East Side ‘the last real neighborhood in New York,’” Desjadon, an amiable fellow and a patron of LES bars, told me when I called him up. “The mainstream hipster,” he explained, “is not an artist or a musician. He has an office job, and wears one hat to work and another at night.” Presumably, the latter is a trucker—or a porkpie—hat.
The mouth of a real-estate agent is rarely the source of truth, but Mr. Desjadon knows his territory (and is no doubt cashing in on this knowledge). He has unwittingly explicated the transformation of the hipster into the “indie yuppie,” an avatar we might imagine as the fusion of Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik. The indie yuppie is (literally) the child of the bobo, and just as his father the baby boomer did, he has learned to simulate rebellion while procuring and furnishing a comfortable two-bedroom. His haircut may be asymmetrical, but his dog never misses a walk. And around the corner, sleeping on couches, neophyte slackers dream until they wake up late for their temp jobs. The savvy among them soon grasp that they’ve arrived at the party too late.
Photo: Alexander MilliganUnder the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.
Of course, hipsterism being originally, and still mostly, the province of whites (the pastiest of whites), its acolytes raid the cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity in the pot. Similarly, they devour gay style: Witness the cultural burp known as metrosexuality. As the hipster ambles from the thrift store to a $100 haircut at Freemans Sporting Club, these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod.
All isms seek dominance of human affairs, and in this, hipsterism in New York City has proved more virulent than any of its forebears. (Punk, after all, never really broke—except in the form of hipsterism.) At last there was nothing left for hipsters to do but to convert the squares, take them to the bar and let them pick up the tab. Secrets were shared. The hipster hooked up with the common consumer; he woke up a zombie.
How can this be undone? I propose that the only hope for a reanimated bohemia, if not a dezombified hipsterdom, is civil war.
Hipsters in their present undead incarnation are essentially people who think of themselves as being cooler than America. But they are afflicted by that other ism sociologists made an industry of decrying in the 20th century: narcissism. The late prophet of our current moment, George W. S. Trow, posited that television had obliterated the context of American life. The only refuges remaining were TV, God and the self. Young people who live in cities notoriously shun God and television to cultivate themselves. Now, as the age of MySpace comes due for a backlash and the former teen idols of our crypto-ironic fascination start to show their age, the time has come for the hipsters in the garden of Union Pool to open their eyes, realize that they are surrounded by jackasses and milquetoasts, and stage their own dive-bar putsch.
The fault lines are clear enough already. We know that there are Sweet hipsters, who practice the sort of irony you can take home to meet the parents, and there are those Vicious hipsters, who practice the form of not-quite-passive aggression called snark.
On the Sweet end of the spectrum, The Believer lavishes its literary and pop-culture idols with a uniform layer of affection that renders it near impossible to distinguish the great from the mediocre. This aesthetic of relativism grants everybody an A for effort and allows anyone projecting the image of an artist to conceive of himself as such. It proliferates as a social plague among hipsters who invite their entire address book to readings, shows and art openings. The e-mails arrive, and though it is known in advance that the art will be nothing much,the trek is made. The avant-garde illusion ultimately sustains itself on free beer.
As the war claims its casualties, the Sweet may discover that behind their aesthetic relativism is an impulse more political than cultural: They are rightfully activists. Their cause has emerged in the form of global warming, and I would not be surprised if the color of cool in their future is green. Along the way they might rediscover a concept hipsters have lately had little use for: love.
Meanwhile, among those who adopt the Vicious pose, a lighthearted scorn perfected by Gawker is roundly applied to the objects of pop celebrity, both talented and (mostly) otherwise. The effect is akin to dipping sushi in wasabi sauce: The flavor is a little less bland, but it’s still mostly rice. The hipster who keeps up with the antics of Hilton, Lohan and Spears does so sneeringly, and her knowingness introduces one degree of difference between herself and the Midwestern housewife who buys Us Weekly at the Wal-Mart checkout line.
When I asked Gawker managing editor Choire Sicha whether it was possible to ignore talentless celebrities, he responded with the remorse of a custodian of cultural decline: “Everyone can, and should, be ignored. We were warned about this situation we find ourselves in by philosophers, and well before it happened. It’s just too bad we weren’t warned by celebrities, or we would have listened to them.”
So the Sweet will turn on the Vicious, and the Vicious will shun the Sweet. The sniping in the blogosphere will escalate, and turf wars will ensue. Power will be consolidated in the frontiers of the outer boroughs as the Vicious tighten their grip on Bushwick and the Sweet flee south to Kensington and Windsor Terrace, or give up and move to Queens (better yet, to their rightful home: the West Coast).
If they can vanquish the Sweet, the path for the Vicious is less obvious. A good first step might entail purging the lawyers and bankers lurking in their company. But on the other hand, those guys are good at footing the bill. Another tactic would require the conversion of snark to self-criticism, and that would necessarily involve ignoring no-talent celebrities, and mean an end to playing it safe. The safest game in town—in fashion and music especially—is retro, and if there is no Ezra Pound in corduroys out there to say, “Make it new,” let me be the one to say, “Stop making it old.”
What distinguishes the zombie hipsters at large today from the “white Negroes” Norman Mailer described in the 1950s is a lack of menace. The original hipster—Mailer had in mind James Dean and the Neal Cassady who inspired On the Road—was a “philosophical psychopath” who might steal your car and drive it to Mexico. The myth of menace survives in the pages of Vice, but the magazine’s signature feature—the “Do’s and Don’t’s”—suggests a safe path to transgression, a notion as oxymoronic as the “mainstream hipster.” Mailer, who traced hipster psychosis to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, would likely point to September 11 as the event that left hordes of twentysomethings whispering, “We would be safe,” to quote the Sweet hipster novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. Menace is now lost on anyone older than 20. It is left to those born after 1990 to move to town, frighten the zombies away, destabilize the real-estate market and restore something unsavory to what used to be called hip.
Until then, the battle will rage. Which side are you on?
More in the Hipster Issue:
- Why the hipster must die: A modest proposal to save New York cool
- Why the hipster must die: The hipsterati talks back: We asked hipster-leaning bloggers to defend their constituency. See what they said.
- Why the hipster must die: Your responses: We've declared war on the hipster. Now it's time for you to pick a side.
- A hipstory: View a timeline on how this monster was created.
- Hipster quiz: The first sign of hipsterdom is self-denial. Take our quiz and get your hipster rating.
- Cool or played out?: We name 20 recent hipster markers; you vote on whether they have any cool value left.
- Name that hipster: The train that cuts across the greatest swath of hipsterdom is not the L—God, that's so two years ago—it's the G. See if you can match these swingin' youth to the stop where we caught them.
- Hipster detox: Quick impressions: See how three New York hipsters coped with two weeks of mainstream living.
- Hipster detox: Full assessment: After two weeks of ditching his Union Pool-and-Proust lifestyle, our resident cool guy breaks down his new life as a "reg."
- True originals: To look at them, you wouldn’t think these New Yorkers are hip. But then you find out what they did last night. We asked an octogenarian jazz maven, an avant-garde dance critic and Russell Simmons’s artist brother about NYC cool.
- Cool as shhh: The truly “hip” stuff is unpretentious and off the radar—until TONY reports it and ruins everything. So we thought we’d make amends with these blind-item tips.
- Cool as shhh: Guess the answers: Do you know what's cool in this city? Then prove it.
- Special Hipster-Issue Seek: Guest editor edition
Time Out New York / Issue 609 : May 30–Jun 5, 2007
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Although Lorentzen targets people who are followers, he ignores the benefits of people following a trend that is good for society. Do you really think suburban yuppies are really are changing the world for the better? There are alot of people leading these movements that KNOW their roots. If you aren't gonna help then shut the fuck up because some of us are getting some work done.
I am a hipster and fucking proud of it. First of all not everyone getting into "it" is going to get "it". Those seem to be the article the people are targeting. Here are the benefits to Humanity that being a "hipster" gives to society. Veganism/Vegetarianism - Good for the soil and the planet as well as your body. Vintage clothes - Good for the planet. Reduces unnecessary capitalism. Trackbikes/Bicycles - Less pollution. Good for the planet. Great exercise. DIY - Lessens capitalism.
Man, what a stupid article. I can't think of a more pointless thing to write about. Especially the part where the author tries to make this a serious critique. September 11th? Really? Every day I'm thankful that I stayed in the midwest rather than moving to NYC or San Francisco. The only thing more annoying than the people you describe is how you continue to talk about them as if any of this is significant. Get over your own mediocrity.
great article. i consider myself aligned more on the vicious, snarky side of hipster. i dont usually go to the shows, dont smoke or drink coffee and cant stand art snobs and would never be at a fashion show. meanwhile i dress well, drink 40's of schlitz alone and am insufferably snobby if anyone wants to talk books/film/music. i have two friends.
Shut up hipster...quit self-loathing and try smiling
The problem with TRYING to be a hipster is one of being inauthenic, fake, and phony. There is nothing more uncool than being a phony. If you have never seen it, try to locate that picture of Richard Nixon trying to look cool and hip on Laugh-In. He looked more cool when he was just being himself, however square that might have seemed. If you are middle-aged, please don't try to copy the kids, they will like you better if you don't.
This article and another from Adbusters entitled "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization" single-handedly inspired me to create my own pro/sort-of-anti/but-more-pro hipster website: http://hipstertrashsf.blogspot.com/ It focuses more on SF, where hipster hatred doesn't seem quite as rampant... enjoy.
There are too many of these articles. Writing bizarrely general pieces about hipsters is the new knee socks!! "Along the way they might rediscover a concept hipsters have lately had little use for: love." FACT Number of people I've fucked with that pick up line since reading this: 6. Thx Christy !
no, no, actually, just forget everything you've learned about appropriateness and affectation, do what's great for your mind and self and surroundings. If you get bored, it's so easy to change without an ego-driven agenda.
This is a great article, and if it upsets you, perhaps you have too much attachment to where you stand in relation to hipsterism. Too jaded into believing originality is dead? I know how that feels, but cool comes from the self-projected and the bravery of self-belief, if you still think cool is what is most important in life. Flushing away the ego in an attempt to wash away segregation and elitism will probably wipe the slate clean... also, remember, coolness only happens when you don't know it
True hipsters and false hipsters: both are hipsters - distinguishing between the two is useless. When will Western culture transcend hipsterism and materialism?
Useless article. Do some research, look at where the word came from. The hepkat of the 1940s gave birth to the Beatnik of the 1950s which gave way to the . . . The more things change, the more they stay the same. Go ask your dad. And get the fuck over it. As long as it's in the lexicon, it's going to be taking up that precious space reserved for "real cool" (wtf?). If you're so hungry for the next wave of authentic coolness, go out and start it yourself. After all, that's what real hip kids do.
Wow, TERRIBLE article. How many "man, i wish new york was GRITTY AND REAL like it was back in the days of sexandthecity/seinfeld/taxi driver/king kong" articles are there anyway? "Oh man, yeah you could get raped and eviscerated on your way home from getting a glass of milk, but it had SOUL, man!" Blame rudy giuliani for turning your scumfuck paradise into a place where someone can actually raise a family, not some kids who have access to the internet and their parents credit card. Fuck you.
Bleh, I meant to say that I agree with the comment below. Anyway, I realize that snobbery is a big part of being a "hipster," but there is that fraction who are unwillingly called "hipsters" but appear to be "hipsters" just because of the way they dress, the music they listen to, etc. It seems like most of you people who hate "hipsters" are really hating snobs. In which case, yes, snobs do suck.
"My point below is that you can't just look at someone's vintage clothes and assume that this person is a sneering snob rather than someone trying to make magic out of the mundane. Don't mistake play for affectation. Oh, and your focus on the word "hipster" is as silly as the way "Emo" has gone from being an adverb to being a noun." < this.
Please do not send any more hipster scum to the West Coast, and if you do, tell them Knochti is more ironic than San Francisco. We already have our own infestation!
Fuck em Hipsters!!! It's time for us real new yorkers to take back our streets!!!
Hipsters suck. period. vintage t's, tight jeans and neerdy glasses dont define a person, what you do defines you, no matter how hip or poorly dressed you are. just be yourself and be positive.
Isn't Time Out New York the ones responsible?
Et tu, Christian Lorentzen?
It's over. This recession will destroy the hipsters. Don't believe me now? Just wait until the Summer of 2010. No more douchebags with winter hats on in Boston, New York, D.C., Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, SD, etc. etc. Trust me. And new countercultures will be borne. Economics are the driving forces behind these things. 20% unemployment in 2010.
People have responded pretty intelligently here, and I'm wayyyyy late, apparently. Wish I'd read this during the heady times of August, but Christian, 'The avant-garde illusion ultimately sustains itself on free beer' is one of the lines of the year. Nice job. Thanks for this. Some holes, but it's a well-described trend piece about something that most New Yorkers just bemoan vaguely.
i agree with yr stance on hipsterism wholeheartedly,however, i feel yr writing style is a bit elitist,it seems like yr writing to impress an english professor not to convey a message to the common man.i hope you take the criticism in a positve light and consider it in yr future articles.thank you.
get your own culture. project and create something new and i will respect you or be forced to, just like earlier generations were forced to deal with true punk rock, old school hip hop, real rock and roll, etc. you are a bunch of worthless parasites. that's why you're a joke and hopefully the hoodlums that you've displaced from their homes will wake up and take revenge on you. real culture comes from the bottom, not from trust fund brats that need stab wounds.
Honestly how about we give up the ghost, our culture is on the decline so better to be picked apart by vultures of our own ilk than those of another. Locusts plagues or the hipsters vague, really don't we have more important things than reporting on how the trappings of the hipster-centrists are ruining it for the rest of us XY&Z-centrists? Let them eat their own . . .
Self indulgent, narcissism is the claimed failing of the "hipster" by those who want to protect the larger, historical and cultural narcissism of the "cool"; and you say you're sooo over irony? All this 'tempest in a teapot' to save poisoned fruit, meanwhile I say let it all rot on the vine. I agree that the Hipster is a cavity devouring the core of our culture, but I see it as a blessing let culture be damned. You want honesty, rather than irony?
It's all cyclical. Youth reaching back in time to repackage something as their own movement, culture, style, etc. Look at the last few seasons of clothing design for women - 60s, 70s. What's next shoulder pads?
time out, adbusters and other hipster critics are failing to recognize to things. 1) Hipster culture is nothing new. Check the age old african word "hipikat" ("hip cat" in the 20/30s). Hipsters are a necessary element in every society, especially tribe based societies like ours. 2) What writers in their mid 30s now call "hipsters" represent a new culture more powerful than punk in the 70s. The fact that it is criticized by old people means it’s already a big deal. It will for sure get bigger too
if you think hipsters dont exist youre wrong, just go out st night in san francisco , NYC, LA etc, and you will be unpleasantly awaken to the horror of being surrounded by obnoxious zombies, they all talk the same garbage, they have attitudes you wont believe, they wear skinny jeans and will sneer at anything that threatens them, which are things that are cool for real, they hate and attack anyone and anything that is seen as cooler than them, which includes everyone who isnt a hipster
All I have to say is Blech! You should all see this ridiculous site that mocks hipsters of every ilk: http://www.hipsterhunter.com
The word "hipster" has lost its meaning. It now means anyone non-yuppie, non-hiphop, non-"normal." Compare Williamsburg to the Lower East Side. Both sets of kids are called hipster, yet they both look different: one is decidedly more laid-back, smelly, bearded, and midwestern than the other--who is more coked-up, spastic, and narcissistic.
im pretty sure you're categorizing a bunch of people who dont belong to a category. if you didnt know, there are "hipsters" that aren't destroying society. take each person case by case, dont clump them all together. ill be sure to do my part against the ones that deserve it. ill start by pouring their mocha on their laptop and then putting REAL prescription lenses in their fake glasses. that'll make them trip over stuff.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
I think Hipsters are fucking dirtbags who mooch off their parents and the parents got so fed up with their sorry asses they bought them houses all around the nyc and these asswipes don't work,sleep all day and go to Manhattan at night to drink and drug. They came to Harlem,bushwick,redhook and priced out all the locals because their parents have money and paid them off to get rid of them. Death to Hipsters. Lick my soiled Anus.
A few law and order republican mayors cleaned up the formerly crime-infested streets of NYC allowing yuppification and gentrification to spread from the Lower East Side well into Brooklyn. The trust fund babies and spoiled brats would be back in the suburban malls otherwise. My fantasy: I'd like to see the old tough guy New Yorkers and hoodlums come out of the woodwork to take back the streets for authenticity. I'm thinking a coalition of toughs like that in "The Warriors." Can you dig it?
My point below is that you can't just look at someone's vintage clothes and assume that this person is a sneering snob rather than someone trying to make magic out of the mundane. Don't mistake play for affectation. Oh, and your focus on the word "hipster" is as silly as the way "Emo" has gone from being an adverb to being a noun.
What comes across as ironic posturing to some is sometimes merely having fun with the hidden absurdity and uncanny strangeness that the familiar takes of when viewed from a remove. When the sense of play is taken away from pop culture appropriation, the smile turns into a sneer.
My theory is that there really is no such thing as a hipster and that all this chatter is about a certain group of uncategorizable people whom the press and or marketers have chosen to categorize. people who don't exist as a group in any real sense
BTW, does anyone know where I can get some pot?
funny yak yak yak
A new element is missing and Mr. Lorenzten does touch upon the issue of class and leisure in his articles regarding the pathetic legacy of Wes Anderson, Solondz, Bumbach. I would add Harmony Korine to the top of the list of hipster legacies that must die now.
What does it matter anymore? Everyone's a snob, bitching about when they were cool and how "Oh no! This is the last cool Neighborhood!". Just get a life already and be your own darn self.
This article simply engages in the obvious next move of the hipster: being hipper than hip, or better yet, not hip. It defines itself by what it hates and therefore is itself derivative of its hipster object of hatred. And really the article simply identifies something that has always been true about bohemia and the cool. They are narcisstic and require the very mainstream to which they are opposed to make sense. So the ultimate melding of the hipster and the mainstream simply is built into what it is to be hip and cool in the first place. This is not a paradox or the destruction of what is cool. It is the culmination of the basic truth of coolness since it's inception. Yes, we live in an era when being a hipster has become a very broad, rather than niche, phenomenon. But that is the only difference. What's more, weren't the cool kids, for the most part, always the children of the wealthy trying to escape and rebel against their upbringing? The wealthy fetishizing the differene of the under classes? There is thus nothing paradoxical about the banker hipster, it is almost a requirement of cool. In the end, this article seems essentially motivated by resentment at the populariztion of something it wants to hoard for itself. And that is truly narcissitic.
I see what you're doing. Being unpretentious, appreciating cool things like nerdy t-shirts, vintage clothes/nik naks, and knowing the definition of irony has gone by the wayside, so you're pouring the Seventh Seal in the Hipster Book of Revelations...And lo the Archangel Kerouac saw the Legions of Cool Kids lay waste to the Army of Uncool with a few simple words. The elite Uncool forces, or Poseuschutzstaffel (chosen for their uncanny ability to assimilate and regurgitate hipster magazines as their own opinion) fell upon each other in a battle to outcool each other in knowledge of all bands arcane and as-of-yet undiscovered origins. As the Poseuschutzstaffel struggled to outcool each other, they found there was nothing new and cool to bastardize and appropriate...But how? And as the clouds parted, the Legion of Cool Kids rejoiced, Archangel Kerouac had sent them the Arc of the Internet. With the mighty Arc in hand, it no longer mattered who was there first, or who was O.G. Everyone knew everything as it happened and the Army of Uncool could no longer look down their noses and be "The First". As the collective heads of the Uncool Legions exploded simultaneously (as there was no longer a way to increase their poseur cred), there was much rejoicing, and all was set right with the world again...Free to enjoy cool shit. Free to make sardonic jokes, smart-ass banter over a fine beer or liquor...Free to be kick ass, and not have some asshole at the bar look down their nose at you. To stand up and proclaim to the heavens, "I AM A HIPSTER!", never to find shame in such a statement ever again. You cool kids out there keep rockin. Save my city, please! I was forced to move to San Diego as a kid, and I've always wanted to move back to NYC...Until now. Destroy these evil legions of snot-nosed know nothings and pretentious douchebags! Fuckin-A, enjoy life, cool shit, and good friends, baby! Toad