Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

Towards A Precise Definition Of “Hipster”

Posted on | August 12, 2010 | 3 Comments

ATTN: MUSIC BLOGOSPHERE. The next time someone mentions that the term “hipster” is meaningless, doesn’t exist, is a social construct, etc., etc, please refer them to this blog post. It’ll save you the time and energy.

What do we think of when we think of a beatnik?
beatnik dreawing
What do we think of when we think of a hippie?
hippie

What do we think of when we think of a punk?
punks

What do we think of when we think of a yuppie?
yuppie

These are all very clear concepts, even if their application to actual human beings in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s/90s was rather flexible and indeterminate. People went in and out of phases (or as conservatives love to say, fads), never being purely classified as a pure hippie, pure punk, or pure yuppie for their entire lives (mostly), but a legitimate community of these types did exist, and the term applied loosely but accurately to actual people.

All of these terms were specific variations of their times that fit under the blanket term “hipster.” “Hipster” was a term coined by Norman Mailer in The White Negro, and it refers to the subculture of the educated, art-minded, young urbanites that resented and fought against the mainstream trends of its era, many of which were established by previous generations of hipsters. Hipster is a distinctly post-war American variation of the well established concepts of “bohemian” “bourgeois” “squatters” and “artist colony,” and in his definition, Mailer referred to the tendency of young, white, arty college graduates adapting black culture as a radical slap to the face of the establishment during the civil rights movement.

Each of the generations of hipsters listed had their distinct ideology: the hippies were a mix of peace and love that turned to violence when drafted, punks were a nihilistic, borderline anarchistic response to a world that had lost its innocence after Watergate/Vietnam, yuppies were responding to the rebellious identities of their parents by gentrification and business savvy with alternative culture thinking. Again, these are all generalizations that when applied to an individual person from that era, or even a group of people, don’t necessarily hold up. Nonetheless, as a national, broad, sweeping trend, the terms no doubt have resonance.

The term “hipster” as we use it today features the same resume and place in society as previous generations: Liberal arts college graduates, exposed to the most radical ideologies of their era, resenting the older, power-wielding generations, and focused more on art rather than immediate political goals (though it’s arguable that hipsters were one of the driving forces that elected Barack Obama.) The modern use of the term hipster probably originated from 2003′s The Hipster Handbook, and was promulgated around that time by Vice Magazine.

Once Mailer’s hipsters entered the mainstream, so did the commodification, appropriation, and condescension of black culture with rock and roll, rebellious advertising, and post-Civil Rights Act racial politics. While this continued through the 70s and 80s, it didn’t rear its uglier side until the culture wars took on political correctness in the mid 1990s. Most likely, the reason the term hipster has taken off in the ’00s is because of the fear of the of generalization and condescension that had been an integral part of hipsterdom up to that point. Furthermore, the hipster class is unprecedentedly diverse: it’s still predominantly white, but affirmative action in liberal arts schools and the boom in Asian and Hispanic populations have led to a much less uniformly. Look no further than the debates about “bipsters” and TV on The Radio, metrosexuality as a hipster appropriation of gay culture, films like Harold and Kumar and Better Luck Tomorrow, and the stand-up of Aziz Ansari and Donald Glover, to show the ethnic variations of hipster culture. In reality, the hipsters of today reflect the demographics of contemporary liberal arts colleges: unprecedentedly diverse, though still with a long way to go, and despite a heavy emphasis on financial aid and geographic diversity, still disproportionately from wealthy backgrounds.

In fact, the blanket use of the term “hipster” is really a convenient method of defining a group of people who reject being labeled in essentialist terms. The only consistent characteristic of contemporary hipsters is a refusal to be defined as such, though that is certainly not the only defining characteristic. Fashion, music, and artistic trends change so frequently thanks to the internet that it is hard to keep up with the changes in hipster fashion, though certain brands (American Apparel), music authorities (Pitchfork.com), film auteurs (Zach Braff, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach) stay relatively consistent in their influence (and simultaneous resentment).

The upside of the blanket contemporary use of the term hipster is that it helps avoid anger, resentment, and in-fighting due to a refusal to be labeled (if you think the internet noise over the term is bad now imagine if the term hipster didn’t exist.) The downside of the blanket use is that it prevents any coherent, transcendent ideas and cultural attitudes to come out of the hipster class except for the confusion, with the anger of previous generations muted rather than removed.

Depending on how you view things, this can be seen a great way to keep diverse opinions flowing and create a wide array of artistic and cultural attitudes. Alternatively, it can be seen as a convenient method of the powers that be to have the younger generations squabble amongst each other and let the military-industrial complex proceed unchecked by the demographic that’s traditionally fought against it. The breakdown of the music industry, another by-product of the internet and legitimately of a desire to “stick it” to a corrupt industry, has helped this confusion along, and the literary and print world is no less starved (though film, television, comedy and art worlds, all things considered, have done rather well, while theater has remained in dire straits as always).

One thing’s for sure: 20 years from now, when your kids see this image:

hipster

They won’t be thinking of an arbitrary social construct; they’ll think “hipster.”

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Comments

  • http://thingsisawthatilove.tumblr.com Carrie Griffin

    I don’t think I’ve met one person in their 20s who wouldn’t fit into this category to some extent. I suspect this possibly has something to do with “hipsterism” being such an important part of mainstream culture now that whatever it was that hipsters were acting AGAINST has been lost and now it’s more a tool for consumerism than an active subculture that relates to anything.

    I would say most notably for ME is this lack of clear definition–I STILL think after this thing you’ve written out there are questions. I understand the blanket definition of what a person who is a hipster is. But what makes hipster art hipster art?

    You mentioned Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, and Zach Braff. I can’t speak for Braff given that as far as I’m aware he’s only ever really made the one movie and then appeared in one thematically similar to it and then just went back to being on Scrubs, but the defining commonality, to me, between these people as writer/directors is an influence from 60s French cinema. BUT that can’t be something unique to hipster filmmaking because Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman…plenty of people we wouldn’t consider “hipster filmmakers.” But you also mentioned Harold and Kumar, which is a pretty straight-forward stoner road movie that happens to star two non-white guys. And, outside of film, Donald Glover and Aziz Ansari who–outside of Glover self-identifying as a hipster–I fail to understand as hipster comedians. Isn’t hipsterism somehow rooted in ironic appreciation of things? Isn’t Aziz Ansari’s stand up almost exclusively celebratory of things that he actually loves?

    I don’t know enough about fashion to even begin addressing that, and as far as I was aware even hipsters hated Pitchfork at this point.

    I also take issue with its use almost exclusively as a pejorative but I tried to write out why that’s an issue to me about a billion times and can’t get my own thoughts straight so…I guess do with that what you will.

    I feel like I’m coming off as…in attack-mode or something. I DO understand the subculture you refer to, I just a) think it needs a more precise word and b) don’t understand exactly how the art associated with hipsters is “hipster art” outside of the fact that it is appreciated by hipsters.

    I’m also not sure “The White Negro” is particularly relevant here…yes it describes a lot of what subcultures in general ARE but the hipsters of the 40s barely if at all resemble modern hipsters–not least of all because the implication is that countercultural white people are essentially appropriating black culture. If that argument is still relevant today, we’re living in a far less post-racial America than I thought.

  • http://www.tynansanger.com Ethan

    George W. Bush was using beatnik slang in the white house, so that says something about how flexible the whole thing is.

    Hipsterdom gets tricky when you get into comedy—irony is integral to both, but their not overlapping, some comedians are outcasts to the point where their contrarians to the contrarians (Norm Macdonald comes to mind). Eugene Mirman probably is the closest demographically to what I’m talking about, but it’s not a pure fit either. I do know that comedy audiences in Brooklyn tend to be much harsher/jaded than those in Manhattan, and that older comedians complain about them all the time.

    But all this confusion is probably why the blanket term is necessary.

  • http://beinvigorated.com/ Julia Kious Zabell

    Love it, Ethan….apparently there was something in the blog ether compelling us into some term/adjective/concept/people dissection.