Hipsters

I think it's time that I weighed in on the whole hipster thing. Since their inception they've been widely ridiculed; even their Wikipedia article is mostly devoted to criticism of the culture. Their defenders are few, and are drowned out by the loud, and getting louder, voices of those who see them as easy targets for jokes and derision. Their use as a punchline has been so overdone at this point that it's becoming less funny and more boring; but nevertheless, I think it's useful to speak out in their defense (as a side note, I read this article as research before writing, it says everything I could hope to say and more, so you should probably read that).

Before I even knew the term hipster I was aware of the trend. Back in highschool there seemed to be disdain for anything 'indie' and those 'indie kids' ; for me it was mostly as a reason to keep private about my burgeoning music taste (mostly Grizzly Bear, Wilco and Animal Collective). I was concerned with distancing myself from 'emo' kids which my musical preference strayed dangerously close to; but I always maintained that I was not emo because I didn't like bands like Death Cab, or Panic! At the Disco, or Blink 182 in their later years (In my weakest moments I may have crooned along with Elliot Smith a little).

But distancing myself from the right bands became more difficult when indie music became a movement in its own right, one that I was well in the middle of. I was caught up in angst trying to make the tricky distinction between the right indie bands and the wrong indie bands. I remember a pivotal moment when I denounced the Arcade Fire as too pretentious after seeing one of their music videos, without so much as listening to a full track.

Then I went off to university and (after an extended Bob Dylan phase) I began sampling the territory of indie music once again. This time, however, I was free from whatever influences I had internalized in highschool and could finally decide what I liked on its own merit as music. Much of this, it turned out, was the music of hipsters, and so, before I could so much as identify a hipster, I was immersed in their music. It wasn't till after my first year of university that I could fully formulate an idea of the typical hipster.

This led to another crisis point where I was faced with a dissonance between the bands that I loved and my feelings towards the image of the hipster. This time I was stronger though; I had conviction about what I liked in music, and what I knew was good; the ghost of the hipster could not sway me. Yet I still distanced myself from the image; I reasoned that even though I identified with their music, the definition of hipster was multifaceted and I did not satisfy that definition.

This, however, is the same reason that no one identifies with the definition of the hipster. It is the result of maximizing, to the point of absurdity, those attributes which are common in most of the West's urban youth: interest in music and art maximized to pretentiousness and elitism; liberal and 'green' tendencies maximized to snobbishness; following cultural fashion trends maximized to conformity (and overall looking ridiculous); indiscretion with drugs and sex maximized to hedonism. It is true that some people exhibit one or two of these maximums; but I have never seen (and I would love to see) someone who conforms to all of them, and so, fulfills the true hipster stereotype.

Do I fit into the hipster image then? Let's see: I've experimented with writing poetry and fiction, I'm a philosophy major in University of Toronto, I'm open to drugs and drinking, I've been called a hipster because of the way I was dressed, I like lots of 'hipster bands', I'm 20 years old, I have liberal tendencies, I come from a well-off family, I study with my laptop in coffee shops, and to top it all off, I'm writing in a blog right now. It would be hard to deny that I am a hipster.

And yet, for people who know me, so far from the true hipster that everyone imagines. The reason is because the true hipster is an invention of those who seek to hold anger towards today's youth. It takes what is unique and interesting from the culture and distorts it, and takes what is ugly from the culture and magnifies it, until you have a concept which no one can identify with, and so everyone hates. That is why you will never find anyone who will call himself a hipster. So, as the beginning of a revolution, I willfully take on the title so that there is someone to defend it, so that there is someone who will serve as the example of what a real hipster is, so that the term might incorporate what is good about the culture, and not just the bad.

*edit* I just realised that I wrote the Arcade Fire, when it should have just been Arcade Fire. Funny that I've managed to shatter my hipster cred so soon after my self-indoctrination into their ranks

*edit* Also, despite what I said, I do find hipster jokes to be funny most of the time.