What is a hipster?

Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: "What is a hipster?"

One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from “someone who sets a trend” to “someone who follows trends”. In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define hipster, he usually answers by pointing to new trends in New York and Los Angeles. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major hipsters differ from one another a good deal in musical taste and fashion sense.

It is not easy, for instance, to fit Williamsburg and Echo Park into the same framework, and it is even harder with some of the small cities which are describable as hipster. It is usually assumed, for instance, that hipsters inherently are all the same, that they thrive in an atmosphere of drug and alcohol fueled hysteria and can only solve their economic problems by means of starting their own record label or graphic design. But clearly this is not true of, say, Sean Carlson or the various writers at Pitchfork. Or again, the anti-corporate stance is supposed to be one of the distinguishing marks of a hipster; but some hipster movements are backed by major labels. Learned controversies, reverberating for years on end in magazines, have not even been able to determine whether or not hipster is a form of urban lifestyle. But still, when we apply the term “hipster” to Kerri Ferrell or Japanther or people who read THIS site, we know broadly what we mean. It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning. For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no music scene or organized art movement of any kind — which has not been denounced as hipster during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term “hipster.” I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words “hip” or “hipsterism" or just plain “hipster" applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people:

Art fags: All art fags, whether they like it or not, are held to be pro-hipster. Art fag rule in the early beatnik scene is held to be indistinguishable from the original hipsters. Organizations of what one might call an "artsy" and "faggy" type are labelled "hipster" or "hip."
Examples are 19th century bohemians, Banksy, WIRE, Museum of Modern Art, and people who frequent the Smell and ABC No Rio.
Key phrase: "Art schools are breeding-grounds of hipsters."

Indie rock: Defenders of indie rock (ex: Pavement, Sonic Youth) maintain that indie rock and "hipster music" are the same thing. Some journalists maintain that indie rockers have been the principal collaborators in the hipster-occupied scenes. The same accusation is made from a different angle by the people who lived in Seattle during the grunge era where everyone signed to SubPop.

Punks who "don't just listen to punk": Punks charge other punks who listen to anything BESIDES punk as being hipsters and posers. This was widely believed by crusties when some friends went emo. In their ultra-punk phases, punks accused anyone who listened to hardcore acts like the Refused to be hipsters. Then anyone who didn't listen to The Shape of Punk to Come right when it came out became hipsters.

People who always bitch about hipsters: Hipster haters and other anti-hipsters are frequently accused of being hipsters themselves or having hipster envy.

Supporters of Obama: Republicans usually claim that being a hip liberal is worse than being a proper conservative, and tend to apply the term “hipsters” to anyone who wished for Obama’s victory. Members of the GOP came near to claiming that willingness to NOT resist Obama was a sign of hipster sympathy. Shepard Fairey’s HOPE poster was denounced as a hipster ad campaign as soon as it appeared. In addition, the Right tends to equate hipsters with the Left. Politically conscious young nearly always refer to their hipster friends as “liberal-minded.” Voting Democrat, environmentalism, and going vegan/vegetarian are all considered conducive to hipsters. Before it was popular, owning Apple products was regarded as a sign of hipster tendencies. Reading the Leftist blog Gawker and pretending to read Noam Chomsky are both denounced as "hipster phenomena."

Music scenes: Music scenes are universally regarded as inherently hipster, but this is held only to apply to such scenes the speaker happens to disapprove of. Lo-fi, power violence, Norwegian black metal, and electroclash are all described as hipster but not by the same people.
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It will be seen that, as used, the word “hipster” is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to organic food, record shops, skinny jeans, social climbing, Pabst Blue Ribbon, bikes, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, Kanye West, Ke$ha, Justin Bieber, metrosexuality, KXLU/WFMU broadcasts, astrology, seeking a spouse, and even Hitler.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between what is “hip” and what is “played out” or even what is “bro.”

Secondly, if “hipster” means “trying to be cool but not being so obvious,” some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word “hipster” in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By "hipster" they mean, roughly speaking, not mainstream, something retro, obscurantist, anti-Ed Hardy, and pro-American Apparel. Except for the relatively small number of hipster sympathizers, almost any person would accept "scenester" as a synonym for "hipster." That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But hipster is also a subculture. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! We shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define hipster satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the hipster themselves, nor hip hop kids, nor gutter punks, nor metalheads, nor fixies of any color, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

Originally posted HERE