Meditations on Hipster Culture

During my days in the cultural abyss that is middle school, I had a friend who made it her personal crusade to defy society. She adamantly refused to enjoy current music, wear trendy brands, or even use language from this century. For her, it came down to intellectual superiority; she floated above the tastes of the masses. She had been born into the wrong era. I never found the courage to point out that by indiscriminately rejecting pop culture, she let it dictate her every move.

Looking back, this pathetic irony suited a 7th grader, but it remains a mystery why the self-same rebellious angst has trickled into today’s adult population, lurking behind the coveted social label “hipster.” “Hipster” used to refer to a fashion whiz who stayed one step ahead of the spotlight, someone who could sniff out the next major trends before they took off. Before that, hipsters like Gnossos Pappadopoulis blocked out the world with equal parts psychological detachment and opiate smoke. Only now, when we hear “hipster,” we think of Ray Bans, Rainbow flip flops, Free People jeans, maybe a plaid top. Today’s hipsters tinker with Polaroid cameras, dabble in acoustic guitar, and grow mustaches that put Nietzsche to shame. The boundaries of the socially acceptable are stretching like the line out of Urban Outfitters on Black Friday.

I’ll give a quick shout out now to those original hipsters, people who lived on the fringes. They enjoyed an unusual taste without forcing it down everyone’s throats, and then someone decided that sepia pictures are inherently better than their unfiltered cousins, and BAM! Hipster mania! If you don’t wear high-waisted shorts or listen to Indie music, you belong to a lesser-evolved species. And if you buy your coffee from a certain mermaid franchise, well, there are places for people like you to get help.

All things uncool, in this rapidly expanding subculture, are cool. For no other reason than that they aren’t cool. Hipster culture has turned reactionary, like my old middle school friend. In defying pop culture, it lets itself be governed by the whims of the crowd. The hypocrisy surfaces most in those militant hipsters who rail against anything they find commonplace and vulgar. It boils down to ego. Some people want to believe that they are ahead of the curve, and they want everyone to acknowledge it. If hipster culture originally celebrated the offbeat, now it has the whole world believing that some quirks outrank others.

And I’ve been there, turning my nose up at a song because 14,000 people already purchased it; we all want to feel special in a world of ballooning population. The dawn of hipster culture has merely engendered a pressure to be special according to certain pre-specified guidelines. I won’t say “be yourself.” The raging popularity of hipster-ism comes from people who still need to find themselves. But at least know that being hipster will not assuage your insecurities. It will simply drag you into an exhausting race to discover new music and clothing before your peers, until you burn out and realize that the weird stuff hasn’t brought you a whit more happiness than a good country song.

We have centuries of social mores calling us to conform. It’s redundant to let legions of hipster intelligentsia talk us out of the things we love. So ignore this passing fad, or at least, treat the movement’s undertones of “anything goes” as a means to experiment with style. Find what you love. And if you love your Indie folk jams better than my rock, that’s great…but keep it to yourself.