Looking online, I’ve found that almost everyone has something to say about hipsters. Some identify with them by revolting against popular culture and revolutionizing fashion trends. Others find them pretentious individuals obsessed with reveling in a superficial manner. Many of these discussions regarding these ‘outward-focused and shallow’ hipsters can be found on forums like Reddit.com/r/hipsters. This forum is dedicated to poking fun at hipster culture and outing them whenever possible. I found something interesting though while reading about this culture. Many people discussed hipsters as if they were a ‘culture’, but I specifically remember both everyday people and hipsters defining the movement as being counter-culture. Somehow this doesn’t make sense though. Can you be considered a culture if your whole movement is considered an expression of individualism through something called counter-culture. To get a better understanding of what hipster means, I looked up the meaning in a few online dictionaries. The Marium-Webster dictionary describes ‘Hipster’ as “A person who follows the latest styles and fashions”(Marium-Webster). This seemed odd to me, because I thought a hipster was quite the opposite. The Oxford dictionary defines it as “a person who follows the latest trends and fashions, especially those regarded as being outside the cultural mainstream”(Oxford). This definition made more sense, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was a contradiction. It seems that scholars seem to define hipsters as people who follow the latest trends and at the same time they despise popular trends known as mainstream culture. I looked up the meaning on Urban dictionary and I found this. “Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20’s and 30’s that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.” This sounds more like the hipsters we hear about everyday, but something still feels off. Maybe it’s the fact that this is becoming more mainstream then we realize. Everywhere you go in major cities, university campuses, coffee shops and bars, you see people sporting plaid shirts, long beards and fake glasses. And if not then you have a friend who doesn’t exactly fit this mold, but they still consider themselves a hipster. And if not, then ask a few of your friends if they like “independent thinking, progressive politics….[and] creativity” (Urban Dictionary). You find that it’s actually pretty easy to fit the mold of a Hipster if you use any of these definitions. So this begs the question, what is a hipster? It seems that their is mass confusion not only among average people and scholars, but hipsters themselves.
I found an interesting video on YouTube where a popular youtuber explains what a hipster is. He says “Hipsters adopt the styles and affects of many cultures, cultures that aren’t theirs, cultures that they don’t actually belong to…we see hipster choices as performative. They are pretending and worse yet…mocking”(PBS Idea Channel). This explanation gives us so much more depth to what it means to be hipster. If the hipster culture is more performative than people expressing their actual own tastes, then is it all just (forgive my language) bullshit? Are people acting out and just wearing lumber jack shirts and sporting handle bar mustaches just for the sake of seeming ‘counter-culture’? It seems like we have an entire population of young adults having a simultaneous identity crisis. An identity crisis that is scarily similar to what we see in adults in their 50’s who have their first mid-life crises. But can we so easily write it off hipster culture just that easy? I believe that their is so much more depth to this then what’s on the surface. I asked a self-diagnosed hipster what he thought a hipster was and he gave me this response. “A hipster is someone how doesn’t go with the grain, but against the grain of society. They are people who don’t follow societal peer pressures.” Now this could be taken as another aspect of individuality that hipsters possess, but why are they so obsessed with individuality? I asked another friend of mine who wasn’t a hipster, what it means to be hipster. She said “Hipsters are a subculture linked by the desire to be counterculture, however, the interests and actions of hipsters often fall in line with the same societal norms that they often oppose.” So what we can take from this is that she finds hipsters to be hypocrites.
I did some thinking and I did it while watching the Simpsons. And light bulb went off in my head. I remembered a popular phrase. “The Simpsons did it!” Then it hit me, what if we live in an age where creativity is for the most part dead. Every time you write something or do something, you can’t help but feel as if its already been done. Nothing is really original anymore or at least it feels that way. You see this in movies, books, history and trends. I think as a society, we’ve unconsciously realize that we’ve used up all of our creativity. This realization has its consequences. Old movies are remade, tropes in books are redone over and over again, history repeats itself……hipsters revive old fashion trends. I think as a society we’ve hit what some call ‘writer’s block’. We’ve hit an impasse in our creativity and they only way we can express our individualism is to revive old passions. Some people hate what they see in the mainstream, because they are tired of seeing the same thing over and over again. Can you blame them? For example, If you watch the same TV show on Netflix over and over again because all of your friends love it, wouldn’t it drive you crazy? It would. You would demand to watch something else, but if their is nothing else new on, what would you do? You would put on a classic or maybe something a little weird, just to try it. This is what hipsters do, but with their lives. They are the people to tell us “We’ve quite had enough of this mainstream nonsense, let’s try something else for a while even if its something we’ve done before.”