Here's the link to the article, as promised.
http://indieartsri.org/2009/06/on-post-hipster-consensus_20.html
not terribly well formulated but i feel there's definitely something there. for expansion perhaps?
email me if you're interested in working on this!
- Aaron Wee
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thanks so much for posting this aaron! ALSO, i'm not sure if you came across this article in adbusters some time ago--it was circulating quite aggressively.
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
i would love to hear all of your thoughts on these, especially after reading the jameson piece today.
Yes, I have read that actually and I take a fundamentally different view about it perhaps because I, through no domestic media influence of my own, through a distant disdain for the initial strains of the hipster I witnessed at Brown, and through no similar disaffect that has plagued Western youth, I have come across as being, to some minds, a hipster - perhaps, in some instances, a bit of a schizophrenic one but a hipster nonetheless.
There are many different channels towards becoming a hipster. I'd like to think that it goes beyond a simple "don't give a fuck view". I've met some of the older Providence hipsters and they would vehemently deny being a hipster, not so much on the grounds of the self-denial that trends in hipster-circles but because there is a sensation that they were there first and that the current generation are just imitators of a lost art. Like Kafka and things Kafkaesque before them, the advent of a mass phenomenon and the acknowledgment of a a generative quality and identifiable aesthetic has seem them labeled as pre- or proto-hipster (I believe, a generative from the punk and post-punk movements as their own cultural geneaologies suggest).
My assertion remains that hipsters have developed their own culture in appropriation - and is now generating its own discourse and creative output. Ostensibly hipster bands make new music all the time - yes, one can say its derivative of Siouxsie and the Bandits or Echo and the Bunnymen but they too were derivative of something and ad infinitum. Hipster fashion, even more loosely defined, goes beyond classification - and yet we can all say Look At That Fucking Hipster when we see one, whether they are in skinny jeans and a grey sweater, imitating the best/worst of the 80s, or embracing all things flannel. Individually, and through history, those trends have never been amalgamated until now... under, presumably, a hipster ideology.
And this is where hipsters truly differentiate themselves from a mere parasitic "end of Western civilization" trope. They have an ideology.
Before I continue, I'd like to welcome further commentary because a) making this sort of claim is a Neo-esque Whoa moment, b) ideology? really Aaron Wee? who believes in that anymore? c) dramatic effect and lunch.
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