What the Hell is Wrong With You, Hipster?
Hipsters are a mystery to me. I can identify with so much of the culture but I haven’t the slightest clue why. Self knowledge is, without exception, the quality I strive hardest to distill from my experiences, and the quality I admire most in others. Many times I have asked myself, when observing or remembering someone’s actions, what possessed them to choose an action above other possibilities. I have choices. We have choices. We make choices, and we make them because there are options. The way I speak, walk, react, eat, or anything is rooted in a kernel of my humanity, shaped by the miraculous randomness of my upbringing, and filtered through my brain that will –consciously and/or unconsciously– weigh the options it is capable of imagining to choose the best course of action. If this is true –and I believe that it is– then everything a person does has a reason; a purpose. Going from living in New York, then moving to San Francisco, I have been able to witness a youth culture that constantly defies my ability to understand it. Hipsters.
Despite any assertion that the style, behavior, lifestyle, or culture of hipsters is a new invention, nearly every element of its identity is born in the past. History both distant and recent, but still rooted in another time than now. For instance, clothing. Any self-respecting hipster can likely give you a list of thrift stores that they can be organized by a variety of qualities. Hipsters talk about shopping for vintage clothing like it were sport. For Christ’s sake, there’s even a name for it; thrifting. Some places have better prices, others a better selection of pants, jackets, flannels, dress shirts, or whatever. Amongst hipsters there is a competitive spirit in finding the highest quality gear at the cheapest prices. Certain items are too rare or damaged to be able to supply a wardrobe with –shoes, for instance– and a walk through The Mission will confirm this observation. With the money they saved by buying all their trendy crap at Goodwill, they had $300 left over to buy a pair of calf-skin lumberjack boots. I’m not implying that the average hipster would avoid buying something new, but if one were to look through a typical hipster boutique, nearly all the new clothing was designed as an homage to a fashion long dead. But beyond fashion, there is the collection that makes up the identifiable and obnoxious hipster appearance.
Here are a few examples: Beards, which were obliterated in the fast money 80s; mustache fashion, which harkens back to the turn of the 20th Century; day-glow colors, which tend to be bought new as we collectively destroyed all but a few stragglers at the end of the 90s; oversized sunglasses, reminiscent of Tom Cruise in Risky Business, and there are hundreds of other variations that are never new, and always familiar. This familiarity leads me to believe that there is something deeply personal about the choices of the hipster culture, despite its overt conformity. I’m 30 years old, and I remember elements of the culture from various point in my past.
My earliest concrete memories are from the early 90’s. I was raised in the suburbs of Seattle, so mining my childhood takes me back to the years of grunge rock. One moment that persists is of a day my father took me to Pike Place Market. We had stopped into one of the many coffee shops that filled the streets bordering the market. But I only remember this because the scene is attached to my memory is of our barista. Dark and moody, she made our lattes with and unrestrained sullenness, doing her best to quell the disdain trying to escape from her like noxious gasses from a fissure in the earth. She wore a black tank top, Dr. Marten’s boots, and she had shaved the long, black hair off of the right side of her head. I remember her like I was ten years old five minutes ago. I may have been in love. That was in 1992, and I didn’t see that hairstyle again until 2010. But once I saw it, I didn’t stop seeing it. Once, then again, and another, after another, after another, until, like repeating a word until it loses all associations and meaning, the hairstyle that had forever altered my taste in women became strange and meaningless. I’ve been furious about this since.
I have had a few heated discussions around my feelings of this hairstyle. This impostor. I see it when I ride the BART, or on college students, on girls at the gym, or people waiting to order at the taco truck; and it fills me with a frustration that I haven’t been able to explain. I want to walk up to these phonies and make accusations. “Why have you do this to yourself? Are you the only one that doesn’t realize how hideous your haircut it? You should be an extra for a community theater production of The Road Warrior.” I’ve been having a hard time with this issue. Here is something that is deeply personal to me that is scattered across the metropolitan areas of the country; maybe the world. To see my memory made so drably ubiquitous cheapens it. But something I never considered until recently was whether my experience was as unique as it feels.
The svelte rebel of my memories didn’t invent her hairstyle, and she’s unlikely to be the only person that donned it. Around the country, there was likely a representative, a person or photo, who spread the rules of this fashion and others like it. How many others fell in love with a moody girl sporting a nonsensically subversive hairdo? How many girls secretly wanted to emulate her style? I can’t say anything for certain, but my brush with the ethereal clearly escaped the confines of that coffee shop.
If I am one of many that have a memory of this, once unique, style, then how can I explain its revival? I can hunt through the internet, trying to finding traces of it hiding in the basement of youth culture, hoping to find a pattern. But I know that it was as dead as her individual hairs; buried along with Mother Love Bone and Tank Girl sometime around 1995. So who exhumed it, and why? I don’t believe that human actions are ever random, so there has to be a motive. But what? Within the small boundaries of this hairstyle there wasn’t enough to explore. But within other hipster qualities there are too many familiar corpses for this all to be a coincidence.
“I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville
Tocqueville never had the opportunity to meet Ann Coulter or Ted Nugent, but what he could not help fear happening has happened. Conservatives existed during his time, the early 19th Century, but only recently has the title taken on such a broad definition with so nebulous a goal. Today we can name religious conservatives, economic conservatives, moral conservatives, and throngs of other conservative that all clamor for the days of yesteryear when our lives and future were much brighter. Conservatism is, by definition, reactionary. Without a change in the world that is beyond a person’s ability to adapt, there is no reason to cling to the past, other than sentimentality and nostalgia. The petulance of Republicans fighting against the so called “welfare state”, or Evangelical Christians making a stand for “family values”, isn’t part of an argument for anything; It is made purely in opposition to change.
As much as I disagree with the arguments of most conservative Republicans and evangelical Christians, I see the logic when Ann Coulter so evasively asked in Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, “What about the idealized past liberals cling to?” The conservative Right gets a tremendous amount of attention from the progressive Left for being the barricade to social change. I doubt either side would disagree with that statement, but conservatives are not isolated to backwater, fly-over states or catered board meetings. Conservatives can be found in the Mission District of San Francisco, Williamsburg in New York City, or any other metropolitan area, domestically and internationally. Hiding in plain sight, hipsters.
My saying that hipsters are inherently conservative is likely to bring me a lot negative feedback, but there are qualities that they share with groups that we can all agree are conservative. Fashion is an obvious example. There are an increasing number of people arguing that culture has run out ways to reinvent itself, but regardless, fashion has evolved without the hipsters’ participation. Their fashion is no more new than Frankenstein was born. The combination is new, but the elements are not. As much as I enjoyed hearing “Sweet Dreams” by The Eurythmics laid over “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, was this a new song birthed from two disparate parents? I certainly don’t think so. But either way, there is something comforting and familiar about it, and I believe it exists for those reasons.
Comfort is a dwindling resource. The world is changing faster than any commentator or speculator can predict, and it’s moving in directions that get bleaker before they brighter. For many, it’s a shitty time to be young. The industries of today are the relics of tomorrow, and the days are getting shorter. It’s been an American truism that the children of the middle class will find security in a college education that, by only possessing it, will bring them an income that will sustain their lives into the unseen but predicable future. I was told this. My working class girlfriend –who is the only member of her family to go to college– was also told this. Now that we have bought an education, we, like millions of other youth, are finding that prosperity to be more legend that truth. Despite all the talk of “job creation” and the diminishing unemployment rate, even economists can’t say for sure what why the rate is dropping. The unknown variable is the discouraged worker. Nobody knows how many people have just stopped looking for a job. Here on the ground, the situation hasn’t started looking any brighter. So what does this have to do with hipsters being conservative or mysterious brunettes puling shots of coffee? Maladjustment.
If there is a quality universal to conservatives it’s maladjustment. The world has changed beyond our ability to adapt, and this is terrifying. Pessimism is quantifiable, and hope always contains a degree of irrational faith. The educated tend to be secular, agnostic, or atheist, and within something a faith to rest their troubles on, hipsters are left on with the cold facts of logic. Logic, unfortunately, relies on a learned set of tools by which to make sense of the world. For many of us, we were taught to use tools that were useful in a time that has now passed. We were told to get an education, which would get us a job, that would secure us an income, that would bring us a great life or at least stave off the terror that comes from teetering on the edge of poverty. I’m not the only one trying to make my way in the world, and finding that I am completely unprepared for it. Nobody every taught me how to pay my bills when there isn’t a job to be found for my skill-set.
I have felt disdain towards hipsters that, at moments, has bordered on disgust. There is something about the culture that is both impersonal and familiar. That dissonance frustrates me. Walking through the Mission I see someone with my father’s mustache, my grandfather’s shirt, the mothers brooch, or my grandmother’s sundress. Across the street is someone in Kurt Cobane’s jeans, along with Burt Reynold’s aviators, and Michael Jordan’s sweatbands. He is walking with a girl in Patty Smith’s leather jacket, Daisy Duke’s shorts, Audrey Hepburn’s flats, with that haircut of the barista that made my latte in 1992. They are on the way to eat my mother’s macaroni and cheese from a food truck, to then wash it down with the Pabst Blue Ribbon I stole from my father in high school. The iconography of this youth culture is familiar and comforting because it keeps my attachments to a time when my future was still a guarantee. There was a time when my parents and teachers told me I could do anything, be anything, go anywhere, and live any life I could imagine. Despite the efforts my efforts, and the efforts of millions of others –who are trying to survive, while maintaining our sense of dignity– we are painfully unprepared for the situation we are in. We’re lost. These cultural mementos are the only things that we have left.
