Is it OK to hate hipsters?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/20/is-it-ok-to-hate-hipsters-will-self

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Alex Rayner, journalist and editor

I’m sorry Will Self had a bad time at a boutique motel in LA. I’m happy to see him channel this displeasure into an examination of the “world-girdling mass of mindless attitudinising” – even if it’s a big jump from a receptionist’s refusal to turn down the breakfast music to the proposition that “nowadays someone who sticks old agricultural implements on the wall of a Los Angeles motel regards himself as on a par with Michelangelo”.

But the headline of his article reads: “The awful cult of the talentless hipster has taken over”. Really? I see it as a dreadful craze to categorise and dismiss. Once, when you wanted to describe skinheads or ravers, you adopted their terms. Hipster was the same, when coined as a 1940s jazzers’ idiom. Nowadays, by picking this stale word to describe a narrow iteration of youth culture, you’re suggesting it is similarly stale. You don’t need new words, because the culture is hackneyed, played out; and that’s a remarkably incurious and hostile response to a group who aren’t smashing up bus shelters but, instead, are trying out a bit of amateur beekeeping.

Padraig Reidy, writer

Beekeeping? That’s something people should be doing in their dotage, not their extended adolescence. But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Cool, from the bebop hipsters you mention onwards, has always involved having something of an edge. It may have been cruel, stupid, surly and snobbish. The beekeeping came afterwards, when the cool had nearly killed you and the doctors had advised fresh air and no loud noises.

The gourmet coffee and craft beer so beloved of hipsterdom may be an attempt at the air of exclusivity that any concept of cool needs in order to survive, but the failure of modern hipster life is that it all looks terribly safe from here.

AR Well, some of those bee apiaries got pretty out of hand! But, true: no one is likening the perils of operating your own espresso stall with dodging the draft, bra burning, tunnelling under Manchester airport, or bopping  a greaser with a deckchair after a weekend on diet pills. Extended adolescence? Yes, the average age of a British bride is now close to 30, and a Glastonbury ticket holder six years older still. But are hipsters the gravamen here or victims of circumstances, when steady job prospects are remote and social premium is placed on a good coffee high? Shouldn’t we condemn them a bit less, and try to understand them a bit more?

PR Love the hipster, hate the hip? Maybe. But something that worries me about modern hipsterism is how comfortable people seem to be about its commodification. Sure, British subcultures from trad jazz on have had an element of having the right clothes, the right beard, the right records – but that cultural obsessiveness was what made them interesting. The curious thing about modern hipsterism is that all the signifiers seem entirely ostentatious – the fact we tend to think about pop-up burger vans and espresso stalls when talking about what’s “hip” these days suggests it is entirely an issue of conspicuous consumption in the most literal form – eating on the street. But what is a hipster book? What is a hipster record? Who is the hipsters’ favourite poet? I have no idea. I wonder if anyone does.

AR Yes, that cultural curation is tedious, but isn’t that what young men have always done? What would Richey Edwards’s Instagram have looked like, or George Best’s Twitter feed? I’m sure both would have included shopping advice. As for books and records, people say Belle and Sebastian or Animal Collective are hipster bands; Simon Rich’s new book, Spoiled Brats, skews young Brooklyn beautifully, and there’s even a little fan fiction; I know one hipster has, in the style of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, written a Patrick Bateman pastiche called American Hipster: A Parody. OK, it’s not Nabokov, but they’re trying.

PR The web is central to all this, isn’t it? It’s now practically impossible to have that record, that jacket that no one else can have. Hipsterism’s loss of edge is what happens when cool is democratised. Pre-web, a bar or a club or even a borough would take a few years to build up cool cachet, spend a while being cool, and then, when the squares and the money turned up, the inexorable slide to awfulness would begin. Shoreditch now, compared with the Shoreditch of my student days, seems just a supervised playpen for the children of the rich (I realise that smacks of “things were cooler when I was younger, but it’s true. They WERE).

Meanwhile, the same democratisation has led to an odd expectation that at some point everything must be cool. A bizarre Economist article recently denounced the shops and cafes of Kentish Town, near where I live, as “invariably untrendy and in some cases mouldering”, and wondered why the area wasn’t cooler. It didn’t seem to occur to the author that not every place and every person can be hip. If everyone’s cool, no one is.

AR Sure, if you give a hipster a marginal neighbourhood, then he or she will open a twee, uninspired cafe or bar. Yet annual servings of artisanal coffees per square metre isn’t a useful metric when judging good or bad gentrification. Surely, what hurts a neighbourhood more are huge new apartment buildings, bought by overseas investors, with an ever-churning residential population on short-term lets, not Barnaby’s vintage bikes.

PR I’m not sure gentrification is exactly the same as hipsterisation. Gentrification is what happens when hipsters give up on the loft-life dream and move to somewhere in south London with a garden. Which, I agree, is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is interesting that we should link the two, because there is an underlying class issue here. The hipster vision is essentially a middle-class one. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being middle class, or aspiring to be middle class, but there are twin dangers of tastefulness and tastelessness: as embodied perfectly by the recent fuss over the “death row dinners” pop-up planned for Hoxton Square. I’m sure the food would have been impeccable, but the lack of awareness of the issues around the death penalty left a bitter taste.

AR That’s awful, but one jailhouse- themed restaurant isn’t enough to condemn them all. Hipsters can be crass and attitudinal, they can lack humility, and they can harbour some really offbeat ideas about the rights of way a fixed-gear bike is afforded in heavy traffic. But they’re just as often culturally engaged, self-reflective and trying their best. I mean, come on, we were all young once?

PR Oh I know, Alex. Harrumphing about the youth of today is as old as civilisation itself. I do hope that when the moustache wax has run out and all this is over, and we move on to complaining about the next thing, the world will at least have something interesting to show for it. But I fear that many hipsters have merely measured out their lives in gourmet coffee spoons.