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Like Christian Lorentzen before him, Douglas Haddow deconstructs the hipster in the latest Adbusters cover story. Just as in Lorentzen's Time Out NY piece, "Why the Hipster Must Die," Haddow doesn't really have a solution to the hipster problem, except to allude to the fact that ultimately, one day, their blood will be on their own hands. Until then, they are today's main suspect in the murder of Western Civilization...something that Haddow makes sound so damn poetic.
The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah [sic] and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.Whereas Lorentzen's article asks when the hipster's death gurgle was loudest (Bright Eyes signing a lease on the LES, Wes Anderson becoming too precious, etc), it's more likely that the hipster didn't even exist until the idea was marketable--and Haddow now questions how long until the skinny jean set implodes, and when "the idols of the style pages" will realize they've hit their own wall. But after Generation Disaffected dies out, who will take over, and will anyone actually care?We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
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Jen, nothing like reading your own obituary, huh?
I'm not defending hipsters or anything, but the ones in San Francisco are considerably more annoying. And abundant.
Mad props Yakitori.
Funny and biting.
As much as I hate the Hipster I'm dreading their replacement. Can you imagine the kids that have been brought up watching Barney, Teletubbies, Pokemon in the 90's and have now graduated to watching the hills, laguna beach and my sweet sixteen and all that reality crap? They are listening to fall out boy and miley cyrus. They have another 5 years before they get to prominence and it's really gonna be bad.
Isn't this just a tad too melodramatic?
it must be pretty expensive printing high resolution on all that glossy paper, and without taking ad money.
alas, there's a brilliant marketing solution: write about hipsters!
Hipsters and those who notice them live in their own sad worlds. The rest of us who work for a living in jobs where you actually work have little time to worry about the comings and goings of idiotic trends and the shallow quasi-humans that embody them.
Hiptsters=Hippies, a small sub-segment of the social scene that gathers outsized attention for their efforts that will persist for decades and eventually bleed into the historical context of an entire generation, despite their absolute irrelevance in the greater scheme of things.
kudos yakatori!
hipsters eventually grow into yuppies once they start spawning, they will be the whining entitled residents of all those condos they abhor now. need proof; visit the UWS.
Hilarious Yakitori! And ever so true!
The sad thing is, it's going to be worse!
A time will come when the Hipsters today will be middle age yuppies and the newer generations becoming hipsters themselves.
Unless there is some sort of revolution, I don't see this trend dying out anytime soon (quite the opposite!).
Hipsters turn to yuppies then yunnies but never Guidos.
In parts of Brooklyn, hipster is not a subculture, it is popular culture.
Isn't that better than popular culture everywhere else?
VOM!
why does this keep getting posted on various sites? it's a poorly-conceived and badly written apocalyptic puff piece. does anybody actually take this shit seriously?
Hip has been dead for the better part of a generation. Hip meant knowing stuff the squares didn't know. But today, everything is everywhere all the time, and everyone knows about it, at least if you have DSL. No one is square; therefore, no one is hip. Today's hipsters, insofar as they are "hip", are actually square, because they are unaware that everyone and everything is hip.
If you doubt this go look at the condo ads. They tell you you can have a hip, boho lifestyle even though you're filthy rich and own a glossy condo.
One thing -- the hipster cannot die because he is already a zombie. I suggest sending them to Staten Island -- or Belmar, New Jersey.
babyhitler you are 100% right
Roquentin, you are a hipster.
jenspellnogood check out Williamsburg NOW, and Ft. Greene & Clinton Hill too
Hipsters are harmless. Some are even nice people.
Wall Street yuppies are far more destructive, as they use their obscene (and arguably undeserved) capital to plow over neighborhoods and destroy culture. And as we're now discovering on the news, they even screwed the entirety of America with their unscrupulous means of making that very same money they use to build luxury condos on top of former art spaces.
So what's this about hipsters again?
the guy from Middle Village who chopped up the guys in a bad drug deal, Not a Hipster.
Wall streeters could be weekend hipsters until they get spawn and then it's entitled tough talking yunnies.
But this is not about whether Hipsters are 'good' or 'bad.'
Rather it's about how HIpsters are now the new square/lemming/whatever you want to call it and how they are no longer hip and original.
How can you be hip and original when everybody is a copy of a copy?
I go to some of the 'hippest' neighborhoods in the city and everybody overall seems to have this self-delusional POV (and the irony!!) of SEEMING to be hip when they actually are not (how can you when everybody and their mother is 'hip').
Hipster is mainstream, to be a Hipster is now to be Mainstream.
Even your average little worker bees want to get on the action!
It has now transformed into this plastic and superficial lifestyle.
I know a few groups out there that would be considered 'edgy' and yet they don't consider themselves hip in the slightest (as it's not about that at all).
Rather they probably be called 'crazies' 'anarchists' or 'constitutionalists.'
The ones that do their grocery shopping pulling a Radio Flyer cart; the ones with exaggerated facial coifs that pretend they're in a band; the ones who compare ringtones at parties. Need I go further? They exist in a bubble created by parental wealth and a society that no longer openly challenges these douchebags at every turn. We created these monsters by not testing them to the limit and forcing them to stare long and hard at their own abyss. And with the economy in shreds, they won't all become yuppies, many will be like their counterparts in Italy that live with Mama until they marry at forty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTmGMkZ0vbo&fmt=18
here you go :)
"The ones that do their grocery shopping pulling a Radio Flyer cart"
I did that during one of the gas droughts in the late '70s when I was stuck out in the 'burbs. I had no idea it was hip. There was a gas station between me and the stupidmarket, and drivers gazed astounded at me while they waited on line, their fat, slack jaws hanging open. They're probably still there.
So where's my glitzy condo in Williamsburg?
I still can't believe someone wrote rise of the idiots in earnest.
Doesn't adbusters have better things to do than level accusations at their target market? I seem to recall we're being shafted by large corporations and stuff more than usual... I'm glad pointing fingers to sell issues has taken precedence over a meaningful agenda.
Here's the confounding thing about hipsters: No one will EVER admit to being one, and every one you ask will claim to hate them. Ever met anyone who LIKES hipsters? Ever met anyone who would proudly say, "Yes! I am a hipster"?
Even the hippies would say they were hippies and be proud of it.
So maybe you are a hipster and you don't even know it. Maybe I'm a hipster, and blissfully unaware! Maybe we are ALL HIPSTERS and it's true, it's the END OF THE FUCKING WORLD!
But is it the "hipsters" (such an overused word that it really doesn't even mean anything anymore) who have Disneyfied the whole city? Have they put Will Smith in all their films? Made us listen to American Idol singers on our radio? Hell, have they ruined radio for that matter? Have they given us the Jonas Brothers, and Miley Cirus?
I didn't think so.
Say what you will about the skinny jean set, but they are not the ones destroying our culture... and certainly not Western Civilization.
Superficial articles like this are certainly not helping the cause.
i think i got a bit dizzy reading all these comments....
my guess: things will continue to be ridiculous and we will continue to have these frivolous debates about hipsters and yuppies until things are so bad that they have to change drastically and these distinctions of cool and uncool and hip and blah blah blah don't really matter anymore. Until then, we'll all keep blathering on... (i don't exclude myself, don't worry).
Wiggers are the real sign of the decline of Western Civ.
really? Like totally self absorved individualism based on anything that might seem cool has not been the staple of consumerism?
Don't blame hipsters,look at the system first, man!
"They are listening to fall out boy and miley cyrus" Those are the hicks! not the hipsters...get your hipster parameters right!
Hipsters are just nerds playing dress up.
#23, you get a pass, but here's hoping you score that luxe condo anyway.
Hipsters, to me, are a failed hippies. Hippies were failed Beats. Beats were failed Bohemians. Bohemians were the only revolution, but the Beats did a good job themselves. The Hippies still had an ounce of genuine thought. But hipsters are the result of a consumer culture exploiting the previous efforts (Bohemians, Beats, Hippies), they're just oblivious to this.
theres no such thing as a hipster.
Wow – what a bunch of losers on this board dissecting the characteristics of a hipster…The beauty of a metropolitan/cosmopolitan areas is that you have a mélange of many cultures, styles and financial status…Yes many of the wannabes and “hipsters” end up in large cities but ultimately contributes in part, to what the city is…If all of you haters don’t like it then you should move to Boise, Idahoe; where I’m pretty sure that there is no “hipsters” there.
Live and let live…
BTW – I don’t consider myself a “hipster”, whatever the fuck that is…
must... label... self!!
i want to step on that guys face.
Flappers
Greasers
Beats
Hippies
Slackers
and now
Hipsters
They are all the same
they arent "the end of civilization!"
they are just the counter culture that ends up becoming mainstream
this guy needs a reality check
everything is the same over time
just the details are different
Deconstructionism is the philosophy for the scared and confused
It serves no purpose and makes people miss the big picture of the human narrative
Wow it only took 2 comments to get to unprompted SF hating. Impressive.