"You die more hipster": The attack of the time. Others speak of a subculture parody, others of a phenomenon that will soon be extinguished, as it will be sucked in by the marketing that created it to make something else. In any case, the mythology of hipsters as such, refers to the stereotype they have created: To deny that they are hipsters.
Trying to find out in books and sites what it is about, I got more lost than a neo-hipster who just pulled his first roll. He is definitely a zeitgeist who is difficult to identify.
Putting down 15 questions, as they arise through the hipster and hysterical discussions about hipsters, I found that we all more or less behave like hipsters or have individual hipster-like elements.
If I'm wrong, say "yolo" and it's over.
Question 1: Let's start upside down. Who are NOT hipsters?
Nice question and not to be confused, to clarify that the term "hipster" certainly does not apply to every clarinet groom who wears Ray Ban with red frame, green stars and V-shirt showing the hair on the chest. Not even in every thiol-looking who works as an accountant in the morning and a bartender at night and who has platinum androgynous wool and a buttoned shirt, we have a neck. Wherever you see a sophisticated creature with an iPad in hand and a brand new retro bike in the garage, do not rush to call it a "hipster". The above just make "hipsters" or "hipsters", according to the "official" hipsters who, as we will see below, will never admit to you that they are hipsters. Sit down now.
Question 2: Do we have "experts" who can tell us who are considered hipsters?
Hm, when we talk about "experts", to think of a bunch of people with a point of view and each one individually to say his long and short. And then to think of an asshole, good time, to dig into what they said and try to put it all in order. Call me a hipster, I do not mind. From what we have read, we tend to believe that the view of the journalist Christian Lorentzen, from the magazine "Time Out" in New York, is the most compact to get into the subject: "The hipster fetish is authentic. It is a mixture of beatnik, hippie, punk and grunge, which combines elements from the cultures of different nationalities ".
On the other hand, in an editorial in the New York Times, Mark Greif will write that he finds it difficult to interpret the term. This is because any attempt to identify the specifics - who consider everything to be a bluff in this life - falls into the void. "Everything for them is made in such a way as to leave you with the feeling that nothing concerns them."
In an article in the Huffington Post entitled "Who's a Hipster?", Journalist Julia Plevin will argue that the reason we can not give a clear description of hipsters is because "they do not accept the labels and refuse to identify themselves", such as other subcultures have been identified in the past. "In any case, they seem to comply with non-compliance, all dressed just as carefully," Plevin said.
Journalist Rob Horning in an article in "PopMatters" magazine will rush to kill them. "The Death of the Hipster" is the title of his text, written in 2009, which describes the whole situation as follows: "The consumer forces of postmodernism have revealed to us what happens when imitation and irony exhaust themselves to be presented as aesthetics ".
Now, the rest of the "experts", you can read for yourself through a rich bibliography that hosts titles such as "What Was The Hipster ?: A Sociological Investigation", "The Hipster Effect: How the Rising Tide of Individuality is Changing Everything We Know about Life, Work and the Pursuit of Happiness »,« Stuff Hipsters Hate: A Field Guide to the Passionate Opinions of the Indifferent »,« So You Think You're a Hipster »,« The Hipster Handbook » and the list goes on and on.
Question 3: Well, where does the word "hipster" come from?
Definitely not from the depths of the centuries but, as we say, for a hipster the 40s can be the depths of the centuries. The word appears in 1902, and was used by African Americans, as it is a slang of the word "hep" that describes anything current, "today" that we say. The word hepster is the ancestor of the word hipster and will be featured in the book "The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary of Jive".
In the 30s and 40s, the word "hipster" became more widely known and used by African-American jazz musicians to describe the aficionado, the initiate, implying the initiate in opium to be more specific. Then in the "hip" will come the suffix "ster", following the trendy words of the time such as spinster and gangster. Very soon, the African-Americans themselves will kick the meaning of the word and use it to playfully describe the whites who listened to or played jazz music. In the video below you can get a taste of the hipster of the time.
In an attempt to describe the situation in 1948, Anatole Broyard wrote an article in the Partisan Review entitled "A Portrait of the Hipster". Broyard will present a Negro figure who was related to the subculture of that time, without imagining that sixty-many years later, we would also attribute it to a subculture, with the difference that we would now talk about whites.
Seven years later, an early hipster named James Dean will become widely known in the movies. The otherwise wonderful movie in which he stars, will be titled "Rebel without a cause".
The word "hipsters" will later be used in writings by beatnik writer Jack Kerouac, describing them as "characters of special spirituality". The author Norman Mailer will also make a reference in "The white negro" of 1957, calling the "existentialists of the American avant-garde" and people who lived surrounded by death, with the agony of the atomic bomb, war and strangulation from the compliance required by society. Yes, as you rightly understood, we are talking about the surviving generation of World War II. So hipsters will reappear around the late '90s, early' 00s.
Question 4: Sit down for a minute, from the late '50s, do we jump to the millennium?
A hipster would tell you that whatever he wants he jumps and does not have to give an account to anyone but that is not the case. So we were left somewhere in the late '50s and then. Silence. Not exactly because other subcultures appear there. We have the hippies of the '60s with sexual liberation and so on, punk, metalheads, grunge, hip hop and a bunch of other subcultures. You logically remember the britpop and the yuppies of the stock market more vividly, but let's not confuse the armaments with the thing now. And where everything was going well, junk food and record companies were selling musk, chup, to the generation of echo boomers and emo. Well, at some point this subculture had to be bathed in and that's how the hipsters came to us timidly.
The updated and glorious children of the so-called "lost generation" no longer concerned the children who survived World War II but all of us who caught up and saw the bubble, like another atomic bomb, explode. The fact that the hipster landscape cleared up around 2008, with the first teenage hipster duo being considered blockbusters Pattinson-Stewart, makes me suspect why hipsters are ashamed to call themselves hipsters. [Are ρικό vampires in vogue? Really?]
Question 5: So they woke up one day in the '00s and said "Hello, we are the hipsters!"?
Not exactly, so take a look at the '90s. The metal that is beginning to melt and give way to alternative and indie music, pop "that was at its best" by many, overconsumption, MTV, junk food chains, Britney-my-god- what-we-pulled-Spears, the yaps, the globalization in its pick, great movies-stations of the 90s like "Reality Bites", "Pulp Fiction" and "Natural Born Killers", the high street fashion, the sax pants and all that that we want to remember only through the photos - which were not digital then - and to laugh.
In all this turmoil of things and situations, some kids decided to turn their backs. After all, they had been puffed up by a lot of reality TV, mainstream celebrities and fashion, plastic food and consumerism. And they created, without pre-planning, a new turmoil. Sociologist and professor Richard Lloyd, observing his students graduate, stay unemployed and then take jobs in bars and restaurants as waiters, framing their degrees until recently, called them "neo-bohemians" in an article. This team was not only welcomed by Lloyd but also by the rich children who wanted to feel alternatively unique and to be freed from the shackles of the… ready-made restaurant. Thus, they also entered the game, turning their backs on consumerism… consuming. So, you can understand the neo-achtarma as we see it today, with hipsters looking alike but coming from social classes of the type… all-numbers-win.
Question 6: Excuse me, is it about the millennials we are talking about?
E, yes, about. Hipsters are their offspring. This is the generation that whatever you tell her will think she is "hipper than thou" but will not state it, she will show it. "Vice" magazine is the new book of millennials and their new career is any, as long as they have free time at their disposal to do their own thing. They are the children who do not watch traditional TV, who dug up Silvia Plath and William Burroughs but at the same time the phone is an extension of their hand. They are the children who eagerly want "new experiences" but do not imagine that they take special risks, and that their last concern is whether the world or even the government of their country will change, or whether wages have fallen or unemployment reached the heights. Everything is targeted and doomed for them, all they want to change is their life.
Question 7: Well, what is the reason for the existence of hipsters? I did not understand.
But are we serious now? We are going through the mid '10s and you are looking for a reason to exist? We do not know what is happening to us here we say.
Question 8: Do you have any suspicion that this subculture you say was created?
I suspect that once Western societies have run out of ideas - and money - all this hipsterdom is very convenient and can be easily placed under the microscope of the advertising industry, circling things and becoming part of the economy again. . On the other hand, I can only justify all this fusional tendency that is observed because, bad lies, as much as it saddens us to be called a "lost generation", well, we are thin. And he who sees everything around him collapsing, but the enemy and the weapon nowhere, is ready to write anything he can bring to the real. Or at least he wants to be convinced that it is true.
Question 9: What do these hipsters believe in?
In whatever comes down to them. To God, to the Buddha, to Muhammad, to the tree opposite and to the beneficial properties of ginger, to laughing yoga, to proper nutrition, to perversion, to the manners and customs of our place. And the most wonderful thing is that they can analyze how all this ties in and guess what, you will believe them.
Question 10: Are these hipsters reactionary? Are they dangerous?
Come on mom, they are not jihadists either. Do not be confused by the beard. They are quieter than a five-year-old when you tell him "Sous, to get you ice cream". We are not dealing with reactionary behaviors here, these are the Nipsters [another story], nor have they ever been described as "flying anarchists" and such. On the contrary, we are talking about peaceful and very clean cut people who only want to be alternative for the sake of the alternative. And this is because… YOLO *.
[* For the illiterate "YOLO" will say "you live only once", and I learned it the day before yesterday, from a twenty-year-old.]
Question 11: What are hipster gadgets? What music do they listen to? What do they do?
Eh, what can I tell you now. We call it Achtarmas. However, their favorite gadgets are probably anything that has an apple logo on it, anything that takes a respectful photo to upload to Instagram, a device that stores a cart of songs from music groups that no one else knows - okay, we beat Coldplay - etc. And all this in combination with activities of the type I spread-trahana-with-my-grandmother, because it is very alternative and at the same time I am looking for a signal in the village, do not run out of online reality.
Question 12: It also plays a bit of marketing in the case, so to speak.
If we go by the interpretation of social analysts Arsel and Thomson, yes, the whole case stinks of marketing. This duo believes that hipsters are about a cultural myth, a stereotypical categorization as it is presented in marketing. And that's why we can not determine the behaviors of hipsters with certainty or specify them. Even their attempt to "impoverish" the lifestyle as we knew it, falls into traps and very often in marketing networks. No matter how much he denies it, even the most honest hipster will be lost in this economically and politically confused era that insists on surviving what is left of the traditional norms that these ruthless hipsters are trying to break.
It is a phase of late commercial frenzy, fetishization of the old, assimilation into the strange and the new and with the eyes tuned to the absolute… nothing, since everything is black and outdated,
Question 13: Are there hipsters in Cyprus?
You must be joking. Of course there are. They exist and it makes sense. They figure with a "slight" delay of a decade from the rest of the world, but they exist. Justified if you ask me. The Cypriot children also ate the berry, the lifestyle, the reality show, the parents who wanted to see them make a career. A quick walk in the old town will compensate you if you want to have a picture. Going deeper into the matter, you will discover that this is the generation that refuses to vote, that eats gluten free [but if you ask what good is gluten it will google to read the terminology from Wikipedia] and that he eagerly wants to move to Berlin and Los Angeles.
They are children who studied from fine arts to law and science, but their parents probably did not have the plug to arrange them somewhere [times have changed] and now they work for the basic and in addition to bars and random jobs for the extra. They hang out and mingle with the other hipsters [those from the fireplaces] whom they may look like on the outside but the latter are sophisticated homeless chic since they have money, they do whatever they want, all they lack is the essence and the meaning . [mainly because they have money and do whatever they want].
If you see a hipster muse in Nicosia and you make a joke, he will tell you that he had a beard before his beard became trendy, if you see him cycling in the park, he will tell you that he did it from his genuflections, if you hear them applaud with the word "respect Whatever alternative passes in front of them, say "respect" because they will not appreciate it, sit down and analyze it.
We do not talk about sexuality, we have overcome the issue, everyone is and does what they want, and the word "experimentation" is hotter than ever. Their hangouts are impossible to determine, since you will see them eating and drinking from the most luxurious restaurants [wearing new, neat versions of t-shirts with Che Guevara] in the cafes in the old town. It is everywhere we say.
In general, we are talking about a phase of late commercial frenzy, fetishization of the old, assimilation into the strange and the new and with the eyes tuned to the absolute ποτε nothing, since everything is black and outdated. However, hipsters only state that they feel "happier than ever" in all this emptiness of the need for freedom. A freedom that is not precisely defined.
We are no longer talking about nerd, trendy, asshole, dude. Not for gay, straight, bisexual, etc. Not for left, right or center. We do not put signs, we say. We are talking about an entire generation from 18-20 and until it takes you.
Question 14: Well, you who wrote all this, did you understand what hipsters are?
Yes and no. There is even an attack that says that "Hipsters are like Stasi agents: they deny that they exist". Since no one will admit it to you, you also make an image of what is circulating around you, observing behaviors or even yourself. The only audience one would say is the "next big thing" syndrome that devours them / us. This is a mainstream subculture, so it's a bit difficult to get rid of. The word fauxhemian also plays a role if it helps you. I tell you a lot of matrix things.
However, what we observe and sometimes feel part of, is that this generation, we managed to make a statement as intermediaries, from hypercommunication post-capitalism to something that no one can predict what it will bring us.
Question 15: Am I a hipster?
Look, from the moment you endured to read all this download and you have reached here, what can I tell you. You can be. Know that it is not a shame, you can personalize the term "hipster" based on your own data if you want to feel unique. YOLO basically, even if you want to do this quiz, time will pass, since the world is not going to change in the remaining half an hour.
Source: City Free Press