Subcultural Backlash

Criticism of the hipster is reaching fever pitch. But why? To what do we owe this displeasure?

Brigid Delaney has written article on the wave of hipster critique that appears to be cresting, a nice cap of foam forming, determined to crash down the 21st Century's first sub-cultural trend. As with every fashion-led avant-garde, the hipster is both universal and specific—a combination of imagined stereotypes and social-map anomalies, it has come to represent youth culture at a time when there are a series of questions being asked of cultural movements as a whole.

Most probably brought about by the recent publication of What Was The Hipster?1Greif, M. et al: What Was The Hipster? A Sociological Investigation; n+1 Foundation (2010) (a brief excerpt is available), the article seeks to briefly open up the sub-culture's intricacies for the world to see. As with every newspaper article, it's light on heavy research or detail. It seems that the writer "hangs around" hipsters, but isn't one herself.

As a brief aside, my moment of hipsterdom revelation came at the markets roughly six months ago, although my involvement (as such a thing can be classified) stems to well before that moment. Walking around the markets is an engrossing activity in and of itself—sights, sounds and smells are constantly entertaining, let alone the additional joy of people watching. My partner and I had spotted a couple of low-grade hipsters wandering the aisles and were remarking on their appearance. And then it happened. The moment of realisation—we were those people. The clothes, the hair, the organic fruit and veg, the off brand Wayfarers, even the fact we were 20-somethings shopping at the markets all led to this single conclusion.

Regular readers, and those who know me, will understand that I am cautious of labels, and prefer sliding scales to black-and-white definitions. With that in mind, it's worth pointing out that although a taxonomist may place my partner and I firmly in the hipster australis melbournean family, we do not go anywhere nearly as far as some of our more esteemed internet colleagues.

To continue, I am wary of any sub-cultural definition, and particular references to the hipster have failed to grasp the full spectrum, as well as the longevity and metamorphoses, of this particular grouping. A hipster from Melbourne in 2010 would be an entirely new species of youth from that of the mid-2000's or earlier. Sure, the clothes have shifted from wifebeaters and aviators (guilty) to skinny-legs and wayfarers (still guilty), but there is a more fundamental difference here.

In particular reference to Australia, the contemporary hipster now fulfill's their role as the alpha subcultural group—that is to say, the most dominant of the vast seas of cultural diaspora that inhabit our metropolitan environments. While they have existed for a decade, their time in the sun is only coming around now. Previously we had emos, punks, goths... all variations on the broad church of the subcultural. And now we have the related backlash.

Hipster critique (of which there has already been a fair amount) has focused on their class, their race, their irony and, most of all, their supposed lack of originality. It is as though those who raise this last point seek to repudiate the nihilism that directly results from post-modernist thought, arguing that their generation was original in it's culture, and so this should be also.

It's hard not to see a little bit of tall poppy syndrome at play here—the particularly bilious critique offered by Burton-Bradley in The Hipster Has No Clothes smacks of someone bitching about a really great party they weren't invited to. Ultimately, as explored by sociologist Georg Simmel, this level of hate fuelled bile cannot be sustained—it is a futile exercise to criticise difference amongst the seemingly endless population of the metropolis.

Where quantitative increase of value and energy has reached its limits, one seizes on qualitative distinctions, so that, through taking advantage of the existing sensitivity to differences, the attention of the social world can, in some way, be won for oneself.2Simmel, George: The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) p18

To paraphrase; the only way we can maintain our identity in the face of overwhelming numbers is by seizing on the small differences and emphasising them. Along with a long line of other sub-cultural movements, hipsters differentiate themselves with their clothing—perhaps the most visible, easiest to modify part of one's identity.

Critics like Burton-Bradley have focused on their lifestyle choices and apparent lack of originality, conveniently ignoring the lessons learned from the post-modern project. How are those raised in the zenith of post-modernist thought meant to be original—and how is it that those who level this critique at the hipster fail to see the bright neon of post-modernist critique? This leads us to conclude that their distaste for hipster lifestyle choices is merely a front for the real source of their outcry.

To that end, we have both hipsters and hipster-critiques pointing at each other, shouting: "I'm still here."
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