The latest issue of Adbusters features an article title Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization. The title pretty much speaks for itself. The piece argues that modern Hipsterdom is the last of the counter-culture movements–a vapid amalgamation of its predecessors (’60s, hip hop, punk) that subsists by rapidly consuming cultural symbols, signs, and customs, evacuating them of all socio-political meaning, and exploiting the remaining facades for their stylistic properties. The author asserts that, if new culture is to be produced, this movement must first die and bury itself.
Anyway the article is well articulated, although it would have benefited from a less condescending/accusatory tone and at least one mildly useful interview. Here are some quotes I liked:
(1) The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks. While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states – be it the head-spinning b-boy or violent thrashings of a live punk show – the hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-committal fear of expression typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist.
(3) Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations…Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.
(4) An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it.
(5) An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.
**I also wander where the Hipster intellectual fits in all of this. The college-educated faction that enjoys the same style and diversions as the crowd the article seems to indicate but is also pre-occupied with applying its similarly anti-ideological stamp on fields like literary theory, media theory, and journalism. Whereas the hipsters in the Adbusters piece avoid their social mandate to create by simply appropriating empty styles, hipster intellectuals seem so paralyzed (be it by fear or indifference) by the writer/intellectual’s obligation to generate new ideas that they retreat into cynical regurgitation of their favorite authors and generally stick to a self-obsessed, (not to be confused with “self-aware”) homogenous, blog/memoir-like vein of writing.
