I JUST GOT BACK from a month of touring, a week of which I spent in Mexico City working on a live soundtrack to a new film by Jem Cohen. They were having a retrospective of his work, and he invited Guy Piccioto from Fugazi, T. Griffin, Andy Moor from The Ex, and me to create a live audio counterpart for the film. So basically Jem invited me, but it was the hipsters who invited Jem.
The main guy was quite sweet and efficient, he liked slim-fitting jeans and flannel shirts, knew all the good food spots and had a sense of humor that moved between dry and arid. But after meeting him the thing that lingered in everyone’s mind was his mustache. A fantastic thick Mexican mustache which he wore like a tie, facial hair to make Burt Reynolds envious. After a few days there I realized that a handful of the Mexican hipsters were wearing similarly impressive anachronistic mustaches — these batches of hair that seemed straight out of the 1970s, retro-cool. In America, a lot of these guys would read as gay. But in DF, they were modulating the hipster-historical-irony thing with some of the same markers and some radically different ones. Anyhow, I was talking to him about the city where he lived. And he told me, “My neighborhood is too . . . hipstery. So I’m moving to La Roma.” Hipsterism — and its immediate byproduct, hipster antipathy — is now a global phenomenon.
The most adamantly anti-hipster person I ever met was from Lima, Peru. Let’s call him “Carlos.” I was in Lima last December doing a few gigs, and he was telling me about the hipsters there. Peruvian hipsters are a new phenomenon, less than two years old. Carlos credited the music website Pitchfork as contributing in large part to the birth of the Limeño hipster.
Peruvian hipsterism meant that the middle-class kids who looked down on cumbia music all their lives were suddenly throwing parties and dancing to it — all because of a compilation called “Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru.” “Roots of Chicha” was released on a French-run Brooklyn label called Barbès. The cool New York label allowed these kids to see this old music in a new light; it wasn’t simple recontexualization, it was an awareness that this poorly dressed and deeply unhip aspect of their Peruvian-ness had entered into a global conversation — involving guitars, drugs, wacky ’70s fashions, tragic plane wrecks, retro chic. Nowadays the marketing term invented by Barbès — “cumbias psicodélicas” has entered into the Limeño hipster lexicon. I was asked to bring a stack of the “Roots of Chicha” CDs to Lima with me, since import prices are so expensive there. Thing is, you can still get a lot of the original cumbias on the Barbès compilation — and tons more like them — in secondhand shops around the city. Prices have risen, but it’s still far more affordable than the compilation.
The ungenerous reading is that Peru’s hipsters have too much money and neocolonized brains. These poor rich kids only value local culture when repackaged by other, cooler countries. Carlos subscribed to this, and took it a step further by being obsessed with the teenage daughter of a drug lord in the jungle city of Iquitos — for him, it didn’t get any realer than her. This girl he’d met in the summer was authenticity and experience embodied — although he kept falling asleep as he waited for her to appear online so they could chat via AIM. Even dangerous sexy jungle realness requires some intense mediation. Point is, one person’s projection of the hipster births another’s phantom of its opposite. Things can get surreal very quickly, making one long for the good old ironic hipster stance.
Anyhow, I see the Limeño hipsters differently — once they hear that a slice of Peruvian music has entered into a global stage, it transforms from being a lower-class, uncool, overly localized thing into something open, current, cosmopolitan. Even if you subscribe to the ungenerous reading, the fact is, chicha cumbia bands now have a slightly wider audience. The door is cracked open. One can try to keep pushing and open it up even wider. Because of a cool Brooklyn compilation, a discursive space of sonic if not social possibility has opened up in Lima’s richer neighborhoods. You can’t hate on that.
Another thing I see illustrated in the anti-hipster worldview is that the rise of the hipster is intrinsically linked to widespread internet use, and the dwindling time in which a fashion moves from an expression of individual style to something photographed, blogged, reported on, turned into a trend, marketed, and sold. The emergence of each global city’s hipster can probably be correlated to internet penetration there — the Limeño hipster is new, because internet remains slow and expensive there.
The figure of the hipster is a by-product of increasing digitally mediated self-awareness — the hipster’s birth simply registers that we’ve all gotten a little pan-optic. You see it in full effect at social networking sites like Facebook and places like LastNightsParty.com, and you see it at the top-down corporate level — although there isn’t much distinction between the two, and that’s partly why the hipster exists.
A Chilean friend runs a popular website which features daily street fashion photographs. She’s sponsored by a global sneaker brand. This is normal. Other brands probably pay her extra to plant “street” photos modeling their latest gear. Most hipster discussion seems to express nostalgia for a time when there was a substantive difference between underground culture and mainstream culture.
Anyhow, hipsters do look different depending where you are. I have to admit, it was a little bit hard to spot the vampiric Limeño hipsters. They weren’t as cool as you kids are, and they don’t have a fraction of your purchasing power. In places like North Europe or Dubai the image of the hipster is much closer to something New Yorkers would recognize. Dubai kids are always in London or LA or New York or Tokyo, and the Scandinavians are genetically predisposed for great design sensibility.
I had a strange moment DJing in Graz, Austria a few months ago. The backstage area felt like Bedford Ave — nearly everyone was wearing tight pants, fancy sneakers, colorful T-shirts and hoodies, trucker caps, everything.
And it wasn’t just Austrian kids either; there were some friends from Croatia and Slovakia as well. But nothing ever truly flattens — among the nonhipsters in Graz, there were a dozen or so dreadlocked white dudes (without Rastafarian signifiers), and other tragically unhip European subculture types. If you’ve visited Spain in the past decade, particularly Barcelona, you probably scored a false-positive hipster ID when you saw kids rocking mullets. The Spanish mul-lets are non-ironic; people have been wearing them, unfashionably, for decades now, well before Vice España started up a year ago.
One of the things I wonder most about the figure of the hipster is this: What are we not talking about when we’re talking about the hipster? For example, criticizing the hipster is often a way of discussing gentrification and neighborhood change — while exempting oneself from the process. Figured as scapegoats, hipsters ruin neighborhoods by driving up rents with their parental subsidies, while the non-hipsters just . . . live there. Neutral and pleasant. Which is a totally ridiculous conceit.
Of course, a strong anti-hipster stance is an uncool approach, so, as Christian just demonstrated, the question of the hipster is more frequently answered with tongue-in-cheek jokes or irony — which also prevent a useful conversation from emerging. Especially in the gentrification debate. Artists, not hipsters are gentrification’s shock troops. And in many cases, before the artists think to move in, the children of a neigh-borhood’s original residents are the ones who first start tinkering with buying houses there and opening up things to a new market, a new income bracket, a new set of amenities. By the time the hipster appears in a neighborhood, the gentrification process is well underway. If anything, the presence of cool independent coffee shops staffed by white waiters with tattoos they can easily cover for a job interview signifies that a neighborhood will soon reach its coolness peak.
I imagine that folks moving to Bushwick open their closets and think “I’m not a hipster, my parents don’t pay my rent, I listen to classic country music without a trace of irony,” and go on being the same arrogant overprivileged people they were, with a smug satisfaction that it’s only hipsters who destroy neighborhoods, not them or their friends. I’m saying talking about hipsters in terms of class isn’t enough — the larger, more important narrative is class mobility, or lack of it. Just because you’re interning at some magazine for peanuts and trying to live cheaply doesn’t make you working class. But the figure of the hipster seems to confuse the realization that we’re all complicit in making or ruining civic spaces, by pinning the blame on a straw man in skinny jeans.