Allow me to start this entry with an apology: I should keep this updated more often. Two-and-a-half months is far too long. Without making too many excuses, I’ve been studying hard and writing papers, and after writing 1,500 words on the Byzantine aesthetic, the final thing on my mind is writing an opinion piece for my blog. For that, I’m sorry.
Thank you for the comments on the previous entry. There are some wonderfully insightful issues that were brought up with regards to wireless power. However, time is precious, so I’ll move on.
Have you ever set foot into an art college? No? Pardon my wit, sharpening by the day, and let me paint you a picture of the culture within. The students are able to be classified in just a few distinct groups: punks, hipsters, miscellaneous hippie-type counterculture folks and normal people. The first are an established subculture that have been a core independent offshoot since the 1970s, and the penultimate group in that list is too easy to pick on. The final set of normal students is a rarity at art college, and almost all of them are typically found in the design studies and not fine arts. That leaves hipsters, arguably as easy to mock as hippie-types, but more fun in the process.
The hipster subculture was born from the roots of punk, hip-hop and indie musical followers and put in a sort of counterculture smoothie with a sprinkling of a disheveled, deliberately uncool dweeb factor. Hipsters will carry a carefully decorated notebook, rife with poetry painstakingly plucked from a thesaurus, in a canvas bag made from an old potato sack and sold at Urban Outfitters for $38.50 in a measured aesthetic of uniqueness. The hipster will point out irony like Alanis Morisette, which is the true irony they fail to see – their counterculture of individuality results in a ubiquitous landscape of bad hair and ill-fitting shirts. When presented with the reality of a song called “Isn’t It Ironic” not containing a single instance of it, Morisette went on the defensive and claimed that it was her intention all along. An obvious defense, and one which not a single person believed, yet one which your average hipster will be quick to use.
Of course, this being an art school, I must point out a design irony: the mecca of hipsterdom that is American Apparel. Yes, a store with a cult large enough to invade Spain with its vertical integration and semi-pornographic ads (which I am not offended by in any way, but that’s another blog entry for another two-and-a-half months away). American Apparel appealing to scenesters (a synonym, finally!) because it sells individuality, markets the atypical and dyes its v-neck-to-your-stomach shirts a variety of neon colours. For a store so focused on uniqueness, they have ironically, deliberately or not, selected Helvetica, the omnipresent sans-serif for their brand identity.
The word “hipster” carries with it some negative clout. It could be that it’s just a scene of ugly glasses and ’80’s clothing, or that, owing to its general mediocrity, they are the only consumers of Pabst Blue Ribbon. As such, a hipster won’t identify themselves as such. For a group who isn’t ashamed to pay $29.05 for an ironic t-shirt, the very mention of “hipster” is oddly embarrassing. Maybe it’s the way it rolls off the tongue, with a kind of venomous spitting, or the group’s aversion to labels.
After reading the last 600 words or so, you may be asking yourself why I have such a problem with them. Oddly enough, the fact of the matter is that I don’t. Why would I spend 600 words on something I plainly couldn’t give a damn about? That’s a very good question. I think I’m just trying to make an argument for how juvenile subculture can be. Of course, I don’t think society should be a simple wave of suits and overcoats. However, by creating a countermovement there is an odd phenomenon of conformity in a calculated collective counterculture of anti-conformists.
Perhaps that’s the real irony.
Addendum: I’ve posted a hipster-centric blog post prior to this. However, that was copied from (and attributed to) an anonymous Last.fm user. I chose to write a more considered piece.