2013-03-23 - 10:49 a.m.
In apology of the �Hipster�: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
The term hipster�along with words like tuna fish and good�should be in quotes.
The term is sleek, oblique and�like all things that issue easily from the mouths of the masses�misleading.
As the Ur hipster�I had big glasses back in 2002� I am prepared to speak with a level of objectivity usually reserved for people like drug reps, old spouses and other scions of Western integrity.
I first bathed in the hipster waters at the tender age of 14. I didn�t realize then that by not shopping at J. Crew and Banana Republic, yet all the while looking for J. Crew quality stuffs at discount prices, that I was, by nebulous definition, a hipster.
Materialistic analysis has it that the easy criticism towards all things hipster is just one more BTU applied to the shrinking ice cap of a formerly vast, potent and awe-inspiring group of people, who now do embarrassingly enthralled things like pick a favorite basketball team or discuss the virtues of their latest free-willed electronic acquisition.
Here is the short list of comments I have heard deriding hipsters
1. Diabetic dude in a Green Bay Packers t-shirt lamenting �Coors Light is now a hipster beer�
2. Guy in jogging pants asks me �Why are you wearing hipster pants?�
3. Girl in bar writes down a phone number with pen and paper, man exclaims �That is so hipster!�
Breakdown
1. Coors light is not a hipster beer so much as it is a cheap beer, people who have proscribed job prospects try to give cheap beers cache.
2. I am wearing the hipster pants because they are comfortable, they were cheap and they look a heck of a lot better than jogging pants.
3. So the guy who called the girl a hipster was a lawyer sporting a new i-Phone and the girl who doesn�t have the smart phone was working her way through community college. She�s not really a hipster so much as she�s a survivor.
These three �case studies� leave out a lot, but the common thread linking all things hipster is that it�s just one more senseless middle class purblind trying to examine working class culture and to add insult to injury, it gets conveniently fobbed off as �choice.� The so called choice makes a lot of sense�from the self-centered, narrow-minded, �provincial�, �bucolic�, vista by which all things external are understood. From the middle class perspective, everything in life is a choice, in fact, by definition, that�s what being middle class is! So the middle class child, mollycoddled and bathed in money from a young age becomes misguided or gathers �false consciousness� in their attitude that people actually desire to go spend hours of their life sifting through disgusting used clothes that may or may not (9 times out of 10�may not) fit.
Being cool, or making a virtue out of something that is not cool� like wearing outmoded articles of clothing�is the last refuge for people who do not have the ability to make gobs of money. So do you want to take that away from us too?
