Thursday, January 27, 2011

Hipsterisms of the anti-hipster.


Hey kids! Its been awhile but I'm still throwing my thoughts down and then putting them on this blog for both of you to read. Anyway, what I would like to talk to you about today is the word hipster and hipsters themselves. For the last couple of years this term has really taken off and is way overly used by the kids these days. Please join me in my small yet wonderful rant about the hipster......



The term hipster was coined sometime in the 1940s and was used as a way to best describe young people who took to liking jazz at that time. It would later be picked up by the Beat Generation of the 1950s who seemed to identify with the term even more. According to the great Wikipedia, Jack Kerouac (if you don't know who this is, you need beaten to death) described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere as characters of a special spirituality." However, it was Norman Mailer who gave the movement definition. In an essay titled "The White Negro" Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death - annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity - and electing instead to "divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self."

Now let me tell you, the above description has depth and texture far greater than the douchenozzles of today have given then term. With today's society it is really rather hard to put an actual meaning on the word. Most individuals use it in a negative sense of their own fashion with a meaning being a blanket description for middle class and upper class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, alternative hip-hop, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local beer (or even brewing their own), listening to public radio, and riding fixed-gear bicycles. Why this is so bad is beyond me, I mean, who really gives a shit?? But this brings me to something I have noticed quite often......given today's "negative" meaning of the term, it is often the anti-hipster who is in actuality the biggest hipster there is.



I'm willing to bet that at this exact moment the type of person that I am talking about here has popped into your head because we all know one. Some are friends some are foes and not trying to stereotype here but the id is usually the same; tight jeans, shirts consisting mostly of plaid or flannel, a pair of Chuck Taylors, a hairstyle that says "fuck mother nature and my cowlick, my hair is laying on the oposite side of my head!", and finally the real kicker.....the tow hook keychain (the actual term for this is carabiner, I just found this out). AAAANNNNDDDD, to top it all off, most of those people enjoy everything listed in their "negative" version of the word but are the first to throw the word out to describe someone as if its such a bad thing. From the things I've seen what makes these people worse is the fact that they will always try to out "indie" one another. For example they will listen to a band until that band has more than two fans and after that its only "hipsters" that listen to said band. They try so hard to show their "indviduality" yet they are surround by peers that all act and look exactly the same and anyone outside of that group is generally considered a hipster and is shunned. This makes absolutely no fucking sense what-so-ever to me and brings me to my point........The anti-hipster is trying so hard to not be a hipster that they inturn transform into some of the biggest hipsters there are.

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