The Great Hipster Debate of 08

[Denim Gremlin]

people who hate hipsters are mad they arn't cool.

[John Junk 2.0]

Also, this is where i stopped reading that dumb article:

"The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning."

Exsqueez me?  Bacon powder?

[masterofsparks]

It seems to me that if you were to place a picture of the group of people known as "hipsters" next to one of the group that constantly complains about hipsters, you'd be looking at two of the same thing.

Funny you should say that. Here's the author:

Douglas Haddow: When not burning the midnight oil writing for some of the world’s most prolific cultural magazines, Douglas Haddow can be found getting his eat/drink on at off the radar Korean, Vietnamese or Japanese restaurants. Inspired by the words of literary greats like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Haruki Murakami and J.G. Ballard and fueled by hearty bowls of five-dollar Pho, his well-articulated and insightful perspectives are attracting the attention of editors world-wide.

I hate that guy. I think every single word of this bio inspires contempt in me. Nice facial hair, jerk.

[Stupornaut]

Also, this is where i stopped reading that dumb article:

"The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning."

Exsqueez me?  Bacon powder?

Parliament cigarettes used to stand for something, maaaan

[emma]

Also, this is where i stopped reading that dumb article:

"The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning."

Exsqueez me?  Bacon powder?

Parliament cigarettes used to stand for something, maaaan

I miss the days when the revolutionary classes only wore american apparel t-shirts. What was that, the '50s? Before that stuff got commercialized.

[ericluxury]

Noticing a few flickers of light splash out from the club bathroom, I peep in only to find one such photographer taking part in an impromptu soft-core porno shoot. Two girls and a guy are taking off their clothes and striking poses for a set of grimy glamour shots.

I gotta say that this sort of stuff is what pisses me off the most. Disco coke-parties with guys looking like Vincent Gallo and Dov Charney trying to get sickly thin girls to strip off their clothing in bathooms like it's a real-life American Apparel ad sounds grimy and lame.

This is a weird point that you (and the author) are making. Even though I am not sure (or the author) wants to necessarily be involved, its a sexy and pleasurable enough image that its hard to hear that kind of hazy morality argument without hearing some jealousy also. I know that a lot of my personal judgemental-ness of hipsters (something I've been called also) often comes from the fact that I am not naturally skinny and am losing my hair rather than being able to have a Small Faces Rod Stewart cut (which I don't want, but the option...).
I do think a lot of the rhetoric on hipster hate sounds a lot like when closeted uber-Christians talk about gay people. There is a lot of 'these people look like they are having more fun than me' and just general envy involved. The part about it that is weird in LA and NYC, and this is just a theory, is that both places are so status-conscious that its like a panopticon of judgement where nobody seems to be having all the fun, but everyone is appearing that way.

edit: I know I am making the point that Gavin MacInnes made, but it seems kind of right.

[erika]

Sometimes I think it's just obvious that people are trying too hard to be hip. And that bugs me. Like when I see two twenty year olds walking down the street with matching mullet haircuts.

Or the guy I saw wearing cowboy boots and a fanny pack a few months ago.

Ridiculous.




I've also always hated skinny jeans. No matter who's wearing them.

[jamesp]

Noticing a few flickers of light splash out from the club bathroom, I peep in only to find one such photographer taking part in an impromptu soft-core porno shoot. Two girls and a guy are taking off their clothes and striking poses for a set of grimy glamour shots.

I gotta say that this sort of stuff is what pisses me off the most. Disco coke-parties with guys looking like Vincent Gallo and Dov Charney trying to get sickly thin girls to strip off their clothing in bathooms like it's a real-life American Apparel ad sounds grimy and lame.

This is a weird point that you (and the author) are making. Even though I am not sure (or the author) wants to necessarily be involved, its a sexy and pleasurable enough image that its hard to hear that kind of hazy morality argument without hearing some jealousy also. I know that a lot of my personal judgemental-ness of hipsters (something I've been called also) often comes from the fact that I am not naturally skinny and am losing my hair rather than being able to have a Small Faces Rod Stewart cut (which I don't want, but the option...).
I do think a lot of the rhetoric on hipster hate sounds a lot like when closeted uber-Christians talk about gay people. There is a lot of 'these people look like they are having more fun than me' and just general envy involved. The part about it that is weird in LA and NYC, and this is just a theory, is that both places are so status-conscious that its like a panopticon of judgement where nobody seems to be having all the fun, but everyone is appearing that way.

edit: I know I am making the point that Gavin MacInnes made, but it seems kind of right.

I can't argue that those people are having more fun than me. My stance in life with casual sex and drug use is that I don't need to make more problems for myself than I've already got. I don't try converting people since it's natural to experiment and enjoy yourself. I just still think doing rails and sweaty sex in a bathroom sounds a little odd. I'm not saying that all hipsters do this (since they don't), but the idea of that sounds creepy to me.

[Pat K]

Also, this is where i stopped reading that dumb article:

"The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning."

Yeah, working class, yes. “Revolutionary”? Not so sure about that one.

You got farther than me, though. I pretty much threw in the towel after "We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum." That's a classic myopic, Chicken Little Adbusters-ism if I've ever read one. It's not like anyone ever said the exact same thing about the hippies, Beats, 1950s JDs, 1920s ragtime culture, etc.

I remember being in high school and reading Adbusters with my cool “political” friends and getting a thrill from it. And then I remember the day not long after that when I saw a layout that had a photo of a random woman walking down a street in a city, with a box drawn over her head that read “WORK, SHOP, SLEEP, REPEAT”, and getting really offended and upset and thinking “Fuck you, Adbusters, you don’t know that lady, she could have a family, be a really cool person, work really hard to do things right and help people, who the fuck are you, anyway?, etc.” That’s when I realized that, upon reflection, Adbusters seemed to be a lot more about that high school impulse of looking smart by poking holes and criticizing everything else you see than I had realized before, and thinking that that maybe wasn’t as cool as it seemed to be at first. Nothing in that mag has ever done much to change my thinking about that ever since then.

[erika]

Parliaments are tasty cigarettes. I like them. I also like PBR. It reminds me of Miller Light or Natty Boh. I don't think of them as icons for anything, really.





(Nonsmokers, please don't start in on me about the "tasty cigarettes" comment...)

[KickTheBobo]

for the record, the Budweiser tall boy was the original "look, I'm totally working class"* beer amongst the young folks.

*thx to HG for that one.

[KickTheBobo]

on a related note, I happened to be flipping through a recent issue of Vice and was really taken aback at the super-expensive Colt 45 ad that was at the front.

It seems that this malt liquor company (which was, btw my drink of choice between '93 - '97) has taken on a total indie-fied approach to it's marketing. They had all these underground comix types write and draw "Tales of Colt 45" for the little comic that comes with the ad. It sort of reminds me of what they did with OK Soda back in the early 90s.

Really though, it's so obvious that they are aiming to ironic-ize the product in hopes that it will catch on with the kids. They even have a site, http://www.talesofcolt45.com where you can "ink the can" with your own designs. I submitted a Hard Hat Radio one, but they haven't posted it for some reason.

I find this kind of stuff fascinating.

[todd]

on a related note, I happened to be flipping through a recent issue of Vice and was really taken aback at the super-expensive Colt 45 ad that was at the front.

It seems that this malt liquor company (which was, btw my drink of choice between '93 - '97) has taken on a total indie-fied approach to it's marketing. They had all these underground comix types write and draw "Tales of Colt 45" for the little comic that comes with the ad. It sort of reminds me of what they did with OK Soda back in the early 90s.

Really though, it's so obvious that they are aiming to ironic-ize the product in hopes that it will catch on with the kids. They even have a site, http://www.talesofcolt45.com where you can "ink the can" with your own designs. I submitted a Hard Hat Radio one, but they haven't posted it for some reason.

I find this kind of stuff fascinating.

Yup. That's what is so hilarious about this article: Adbusters, this marketing "watchdog,"  thinks PBR was STOLEN from the revolutionary-by-default working class by evil college-educated 20-somethings.

I work in advertising (no one hates it more than me, I promise), and my coworkers are on the phone with liquor/beer companies all the time. I can tell you, hipsters didn't make PBR popular by themselves - as soon as it became fashionable a few years ago, PBR dumped piles and piles of money into bars to get them to carry the beer. When a beer company is riding a trend like that, they're careful not to buy a bunch of billboards or TV spots, but they can still aggressively market their beer by making sure its in as many bars as possible. PBR is in almost ever bar now - the whole thing was about as engineered as it gets.

On the horizon, two other bottom-tier beers are trying to do the same thing: Colt 45 and Schlitz. In the next 5 years, you're going to see a lot more bars carrying $1.75 cans of Schlitz.

I wonder if Adbusters is going to shed a tear?

[John Junk 2.0]

The only thing revolutionary about PBR is that a case of it is half the price of any reasonable-tasting beer.

[Steeley Chris]

Also, this is where i stopped reading that dumb article:

"The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning."

Exsqueez me?  Bacon powder?

Parliament cigarettes used to stand for something, maaaan

I miss the days when the revolutionary classes only wore american apparel t-shirts. What was that, the '50s? Before that stuff got commercialized.

Didn't the Gorch invent the American Apparel t-shirt?

I would love to hear Tom read this article on the air with that voice he does when he's reading something so dumb.

People judging people who judge people. Who cares?