This blog post comes from a book I found lying around in my friend's dorm room about two weeks ago: The Hipster Handbook. Yeah, you might've heard of it. Up until then, I'd always used the word "hipster" (or, less often, its remote affiliates, like "hip") freely, and usually charged with overwhelmingly negative connotation, but I'd never actually tried to define what a hipster is. And now I'd found a book to do it for me. The thrill.
But as I flipped through its pages, disappointment replaced eagerness. In its defense, the Handbook - or, at least, the edition I had in my possession - dates back to 2003; it's understandable that some of its (quite funny) definitions and cunning remarks would feel "dated" and/or irrelevant. But more generally, what struck me was that, in spite of the book's attempts at nuance and relatively diverse categorization, its overall definition of "hipster" felt completely unsatisfactory. So much of my own vague definition of the term didn't seem to fit anywhere in the book; so much of the book's mapping of "hipster" seemed at odds with my personal understanding of the notion. (Because I know even less about style and fashion than I do about everything else, I'll stick with a strictly musical discussion here, even though many people have rightly pointed out that "hipster" involves an entire "way of life" - i.e. includes more than music taste.)
I'm not trying to say that I would've written a better Handbook. I am certainly no more of an authority on hipsterism than anyone else. And I'm not even trying to reflect on what my own definition of the term would be - I have too little data and not enough interest to even think of making sweeping sociological generalizations. What I simply mean to say is that, reading this book, I realized that I had I never, ever encountered a satisfactory definition of the word. Not once. People around me, friends, critics, fellow bloggers (quite a few, really interesting articles listed on the Wkipedia page for "Hipster"), all have their own, private definition - one that they usually refuse to share, but that they gladly work from to demean so and so's behavior or clothing style, and, in the musical world, so and so's taste or musical decisions. The word "hipster"'s frequent throwing around in musical commentary and analysis is thus, most often, completely at odds with the lack of clear definition accompanying it. This could be because, like me, most people just write from their own, relatively uninformed perspective, constructing a definition of "hipster" from what they know of think is common knowledge. It seems to me, more and more, that hipster isn't so much a reality in contemporary musical criticism as it is a perception, and as such it has no precise or even fixed content.
The question we then have to face is, "What defines music, and by extension its listeners, as hipster?" Crucial question, if only for my own sake: because of my musical tastes, I've been implicitly labeled as a hipster by several acquaintances (Rob Horning's recap of the New School/n + 1 panel on the "death of the Hipster" shows how, whenever we undertake a discussion around the topic, it's usually to make the claim that we aren't hipster). Now, the best and most articulate attempt at a (again, strictly musical) definition of "hipster" I've encountered goes as follows: a hipster is someone who consciously seeks out a particular and yet eclectic taste in music, strictly (or mainly) because s/he knows that such a music taste will set him/her apart from the larger group of what s/he considers "mainstream." (Thank you Becca.) At first, I was tempted to agree with much of this definition; but I also believe that all of our cultural choices, in one way or the other, are made to distinguish ourselves from another (real or perceived) cultural group. More than we realize, and definitely more than we usually like to admit. And this does not mean, at all, that we don't also make those cultural choices based on what we love, on what makes us feel particular emotions. The two - emotions and cultural distinction - don't seem mutually exclusive to me, and I would even say that they go together.
Another aspect of "hipster" that seems to come up in discussions, including musical ones, is that the hipster's attempt at distinction usually follows pretty predictable and commercially-determined patterns. You become hipster to distinguish yourself from the mainstream, but in the end, your style and taste correspond to so many other people's style and taste that they can easily be categorized into a Handbook. Or, at the very least, can easily be spotted and recognized in the street, on a billboard, or at a concert. As Julia Plevin nicely puts it her Huffington Post article: hipsters "conform in their non-conformity." You can find the equivalent in accusations that a band is simply catering to a trend, or indulging in ridiculous nostalgia/plagiarism. Call me naive, but I tend to think that neither people nor music usually fit that easily into the stereotypes we form in our minds. And if they do, well then it's quite another phenomenon, distinct from hipsterism (because applicable to ALL groups in society), that we are discussing: contemporary consumer culture and the production of standardization. The two have to be distinguished, because when they aren't the danger is to dismiss all aspects of contemporary, youth musical culture as "sold out" and consumerist. See, for example Douglas Haddow's ridiculously simplifying and pseudo-prophetic discussion of "the dead-end of Western civilization" (which echoes in some ways Theodor Adorno's horrified rants against jazz some 60 years ago). If we do conceive of contemporary society as swallowed whole by consumerism and postmodern capitalism, a view with which I tend to agree, then focusing on the "hipster" to denounce processes such as the "selling out (of) alternative sources of social power developed by outsider groups" (Horning) or the co-optation of historical symbols of resistance and identity (Haddow), seems to me highly unfair, and more like a way to place the blame on someone else in order to avoid acknowledging that we all take a part in these processes.
I would then agree with Rob Horning when he asks: "Are there really hipsters, actual hipsters, or just a pervasive fear of hipsters? Hipster hatred may actually precede hipsters themselves." In music, at least, I don't think any quality makes a song or an artist inherently hipster. Dismissals of such kinds (and lord knows I've indulged in my share of them), affecting artists like Neon Indian, genres like so-called "shit-gaze," or blogs like Gorilla Vs. Bear (even sites like Pitchfork), often rest on strictly personal taste or, less often, on debatable assumptions about "authenticity" in music (such and such artist is stripping a genre of its authenticity, or such a public's quest for new and "hip" sounds is calculated and lacks authentic feeling…). Leave the hipster, the hipsterism and the hipness out of music, is what I say - your own, personal opinion is interesting enough that you don't need to buttress it with such accusations. I don't mean to say that hipsters don't exist and that none of the people making music these days would qualify as hipsters. But I do think that the category of "hipster" adds very little to musical analysis - unless it's very rigorously defined. I want to add: of course people are bound to get excited about new artists and new songs, and of course sooner or later more and more people are going to think these artists and songs are "cool." Normal processes of cultural production, as far as I know. Through similar processes, at a given time, of course there'll be a given group of people listening to the same artists and songs, and/or producing similar-sounding music. But they'll rarely have the same exact reasons to do so. What's more, beyond any stylistic similarities between artists and between fans, a song won't ever sound the same to two different people, and two songs, however similar, won't ever be perfectly interchangeable.
Wavves in concert: Hipster? Who cares!
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