I’M GOING TO SEE IF I can offer possible definitions, based on what I read, and hear, and have seen. Maybe these can form a starting place for discussion. The key thing will be, where these definitions are wrong, to correct them.
Periodization. When we talk about the contemporary hipster, we’re talking about a kind of cross-subcultural figure who emerges by 1999 and enjoys a fairly narrow but robust first phase of existence from 1999 to 2003. At which point the category of hipster seemed about to dissipate and return to the primor-dial subcultural soup, for something else to take over. Instead what we witnessed was an increasing spread and durability of the term, in an ongoing second phase from 2003 to the present.
Genesis. The matrix from which the contemporary hipster emerged included that 1990s culture which the sociologist Richard Lloyd called “neo-bohemia” in his ethnography of Wicker Park in Chicago — that is, a culture of artists who primarily work in bars and coffee shops and rock clubs, while providing an unintentional milieu for “late capitalist” commerce in design, marketing, web development, and the so-called “experience economy” — and also the ’90s culture called “indie” or “indie rock.”
From about 1980 forward, we possess a strong sense, I think, of how a sequence of new subcultures emerged as alternatives to the successful “subculturation” of consumer capitalism. This sequence began in the diffusion of an ethos associated with punk and DIY. It produced a music of “post-punk,” freighted with ideas of the “alternative” and “independent,” as separately existing fields of personal and economic activity, culminating in 1991. 1991 is remembered, because of a famous documentary, as “the year punk broke” — which was to say both that it broke into the mainstream, as the most successful post-punk bands moved to corporate labels, and that its spirit was broken on the shoals of mass commercialism. This was encapsulated in the short heyday of “grunge,” originally the most local of local scenes, until its overhyped representative figure, Kurt Cobain, finally killed himself from some of these contradictions in 1994.
So the contemporary hipster seems to emerge out of a thwarted tradition of youth subcultures, subcultures which had tried to remain independent of consumer culture, alternative to it, and been integrated, humiliated, and destroyed.
There is also a question of overt politics. Where hipsterdom is taken to be anti-political, it seems that the watershed moments it particularly jeers at, and may have been shaped and periodized by, were two major episodes of ultimately failed political action, which stand out in the political sensibility of this generation: the 1999 protests at the WTO Ministerial conference in Seattle — hence the hipsters’ sometime mockery, sometimes embrace, of global labor concern and environmentalism — and the ignored 2003 protests against the promised invasion of Iraq. Barack Obama’s election in 2008 then seems to have represented a reunification of the apathetic and the committed around disgust with the previous presidency — no one liked George W. Bush.
Localization. It’s characteristic of the post-1999 “hipster” moment that it’s strongly associated with neighborhoods in cities across the United States that represented either new zones of white recolonization of ethnic neighborhoods or subcolonies of established bohemian neighborhoods. In New York, you only have to say “the Lower East Side” or “Williamsburg” to conjure post-1999 hipsterism, where the residents who were displaced were Hispanic and Jewish. As of 2009, Bushwick seems to be the active locale.
Robert Lanham’s 2003 The Hipster Handbook describes the North American system in that year: the Plateau in Montreal, College and Clinton in Toronto, Jamaica Plain in Boston, Capitol Hill in Seattle, Whittier in Minneapolis, Echo Park and Silverlake in LA, the Inner Mission in San Francisco, and so forth.
Differentiae. The question becomes: what was it about the turn-of-the-century moment that made this character emerge specifically, and why was it so clear — as I think it was clear — that the character had to have this name, the hipster, which was so freighted with historical meaning? Subculture has never had a problem with neologism or exploitation of slang: from emo to punk to hippie. But the hipster was someone else already. Specifically, the hipster was a black subcultural figure of the late 1940s, best anatomized in an essay by Anatole Broyard in 1948 (in the period before Broyard began passing for white). This hipster also figures crucially in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Then the hipster was a white subcultural figure of the 1950s, explicitly defined by the desire of a white avant-garde to disaffiliate from whiteness, and achieve the “cool” knowledge and exoticized energy, and lust, and violence, of black Americans. The clichéd reference here is to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” of 1957.
The hipster, both in black and white incarnations, in his essence had been about superior knowledge — what Broyard, in his article, called a priorism. Broyard insisted that black hipsterism was developed from a sense that black people in America were subject to decisions made about their lives by conspiracies of power which held a monopoly on information and knowledge that they could never possibly know. The “hip” reaction was to insist, purely symbolically, on forms of knowledge which you, the black knower, possessed before anyone else, and in fact before the creation of positive knowledge — a priori. Broyard focused on the password language of hip slang. So this symbolic knowledge functioned either as self-assertion or as compensation.
Why would “hipster,” this archaic term of the ’50s, be on everyone’s lips at the turn of the 21st century? To answer this, I’d like to introduce my three possible definitions of the contemporary hipster, in his or her emergence and persistence. All three have this quality of a priorism built in. (I should preface this with a reminder that when “hipster” is used in a contemporary frame, it is always pejorative. This is not a term people apply to themselves. But neither is it an all-purpose put-down: its contours are very specific.) If subcultures have always known snobs, and collectors, and connoisseurs, the character of the hipster’s claim to knowledge may be somehow different.
I think the reason the attribution of hipsterness is always pejorative is that “hipster” is actually identifying today a subculture of people who are already dominant. The hipster is that person, overlapping with declassing or disaffiliating groupings — the starving artist, the starving graduate student, the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skate punk, the would-be blue-collar or post-racial individual — who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.
DEFINITIONS
Definition 1. This is the originating hipster as “the white hipster.” This is by far the most limited definition, and it really applies to what captured me as different in the Lower East Side of 1999. Let me enunciate a string of keywords: trucker hats; undershirts called “wifebeaters,” worn as outwear; the aesthetic of basement rec-room pornography, flash-lit Polaroids, fake wood paneling; Pabst Blue Ribbon; “porno” or “pedophile” mustaches; aviator glasses; Americana T-shirts for church socials, et cetera; tube socks; the late albums of Johnny Cash, produced by Rick Rubin; and tattoos. Vice magazine, which moved to New York from Montreal in 1999; the hipster branding-consultancy-cum-sneaker store called Alife, which started in 1999; American Apparel, the socially conscious, jersey-knit-pajamas-as-clothing, basement-pornographic boutique chain that also started in 1999. These were the most visible emblems of a small and surprising subculture, where the source of a priori knowledge seemed to be an only partly nostalgic suburban whiteness, the 1970s culture of white flight from the cities to the suburbs, of the so-called “unmeltable ethnics,” Irish, Italian, Polish, and so forth, but now with the ethnicities scrubbed off — recolonizing urban neighborhoods with a new aesthetic. As the “White Negro” had once fetishized blackness, the “white hipster” fetishized the violence, instinctiveness, and rebelliousness of lower-middle-class suburban or country whites.
Definition 2. The second possible definition, though, for modern hipsterism: that which belongs to “hipster culture.” In the realm of the traditional arts, what would this be? The most commonly offered options seem to be, in literature, the early Dave Eggers, of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the early Believer. In cinema, the films of Wes Anderson, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. I realize these get quite controversial.
“Hipster” culture on this definition seems to speak primarily to works of art where the tensions of the work revolve around the very old dyad of knowingness and naïveté, adulthood and a child-centered world — but with a radical or vertiginous alternation between the two. Formally, there is a radicalization and aestheticization of the mode of pastiche, which Frederic Jameson identified in the early ’80s as a characteristic mode of postmodern narrative. Here, however, “blank irony” has given way to a reconstruction of past aesthetics and techniques more perfect than the originals, in an irony without sarcasm, without bitterness or critique; reflexivity is used purely to get back to emotion, especially in the drive toward childhood.
In pop music, it gets quite difficult to say whether there is music of any significance made by hipsters, and it’s tempting, especially looking from New York, to pick out something like the quickly self-demolishing band the Strokes — who would belong more to hipster definition #1. Dave Eggers briefly tried to ally himself with the Flaming Lips as the right musical companion to McSweeney’s — hipster definition #2. But if you believe the logic of definition #2, in the perfect pastiche as a mode of recovering the deep feelings of childhood, then the major progenitor band would probably be Belle and Sebastian, even though, Scottish and unconflicted as they are, their origins seem totally outside this system. I’m worried you’re going to drop me right there, but, you know, it’s a thought.
I should also add that n+1 has on occasion been called a hipster publication. The reasons remain obscure.
Definition 3, and the one with which I think I might get the most traction. The “hipster” is the name for what we might call the “hip consumer” or what Tom Frank used to call the “rebel consumer.” The hipster is by definition the person who does not create real art. If he or she produced real art, he could no longer be a hipster. It has long been noticed that the majority of people who frequent bohemia are what are sometimes called hangers-on or poseurs, art aficionados rather than art producers. The hipster is the cultural figure of the person, very possibly, who now understands consumer purchases within the familiar categories of mass consumption (but still restricted from others) — like the right vintage T-shirt, the right jeans, the right foods for that matter — to be a form of art.
What else might mark such a person off from the old and immemorial line of snobs and slummers is the puzzling part. I take it that “hipster” as a name points to the fact that something has become even more drastic, or set apart, again, about these people’s status as possessors of knowledge; and that, if we believe there is something essential about 1999 that lasts to the present, it is that the acquisition and display of taste before anyone else has also been radicalized, by the new forms of online capitalism; so that it is increasingly hard to possess, for example, popular music that everyone else can’t also immediately possess after widespread internet use. The 2009 hipster becomes the name for that person who is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of consumer distinction and who can afford to live in the remaining enclaves where such styles are picked up on the street rather than, or as well as, online.
I suspect those definitions are wrong, but I offer them for what they’re worth. I hope they will form a basis for conversation.