The True Hipster
I keep tossing around ideas for what, exactly (or, more realistically, inexactly), it is that makes a hipster a hipster (or, in my usage, a Stupid Hipster, since there are some genuinely hip and interesting people out there…).
I used to say that hipsters were those guys (always guys…) who very visibly mistake fad for fashion, pose for stance, novelty for newness, attitude for irony, copying for creativity. So many sheep mistaking themselves for wolves.
But those are symptoms, not causes.
At the core of it all, of course, is inauthenticity — a studied, derivative, borrowed, very second-hand, narcissistic sort of inauthenticity, for sure. It’s the old story: what defines the authentic hipster is always the solid core of inauthenticity at the centre of his personality.
But what distinguishes that from any of the other flood of narcissistic inauthenticities that surround me here in that great centre of self, California (where so many seem to mistake self-absorption for self-awareness)? Demographics (almost invariably white, male, urban, young(ish))? A lack of true self-consciousness (and concomitant sense of humor)? A weak personality (hipsters are, almost by definition, followers)? Tribal circumstances (you’re a hipster because everyone you know is a hipster too?)?
I don’t know, and I’m still searching for an answer (it’s at least Most Of The Above, of course). I suspect it’s no accident that one of the favorite activities of the hipster involves vapour (I remember seeing two identikit Stupid Hipsters — matching knit hats, thick-rimmed glasses, beards, lifestyle dogs, tats — at the SF Ferry Building, and feeling vaguely relieved that they were actually smoking cigarettes rather than vaping).
(Originally written a few years ago, but resurrected by reading a Mark Greif quote about hipsters somewhere in an LRB or NYRB the other day).
