MARK GREIF: We now move on to the discussion portion of the program. Editor-at-large Allison Lorentzen of n+1 is going to ask people to speak, and cut them off if they act crazy.
LEAH MELTZER: Mark, you kind of talked earlier about class mobility, and I think you said “a romanticization of the lower-middle class.” I was wondering if you could talk more about what that’s about.
GREIF: What I had in mind — I was thinking about the oddity of the Norman Mailer moment, when Mailer hates mainstream society, he hates square society, but also he wants a kind of personal energy. In fact, it turns out, he explains, he wants the energy of the orgasm. But once Reichian therapy was out, as an option, it seemed he could only re-acquire the energy of the orgasm by seizing on black culture.
What I found interesting in thinking about the white hipster as a figure — when I began asking about these trucker caps and so forth — is that it seemed clear that the people who were part of this first hipster subculture in fact belonged to, I think, originally quite different class positions. People who write about bohemia and about subcultures — such as Robert Lanham, in what I think, even though it’s a comedy book, is the best book we have about hipsters, The Hipster Handbook, and Robert Lanham is one of our special guests this afternoon [Lanham stands up in audience], who will answer your questions, I hope — in his book there’s a case made for the existence of, I think they’re called “WASHes,” I can’t remember, but a category of hipsters, people who —
ROBERT LANHAM: The “Waitstaff And Service Hipster.”
GREIF: — the waitress and service hipster, there’s a case made for them as a standard part of the community: people who are upwardly mobile from the lower-middle class, to an artistic bohemian class, but wind up essentially serving coffee and beers for the people who believe themselves to be downwardly mobile, from the upper middle class. It seems in accounts of bohemia you get these juxtapositions again and again.
Well, what’s striking is that both class groups in the white hipster moment seem to have that Norman Mailer desire, too: How can you get the energy to consume red meat even though you know it’s bad for the environment? How do you get the energy to be tough? And it turns out you do it, perhaps, by going back to the imagination of the trailer park, and of Merle Haggard, as somehow embodying the kind of ritual power which you too can have access to — of a lower-class, a white “outlaw” Other.
But the real class mobility question is, ultimately, Jace’s question about those who are fixed and can’t move anywhere, right?
NICK DELANEY: I hope I can keep the ball rolling by mentioning something that occurred to me which has to do with the economic basis for this stuff. I think when we first think about hipsters in the 1960s or 1950s, when the term originated, and then continuing through the ’70s and ’80s, it was quite possible to drop out of bourgeois society and get a job at the post office or something like that, and then live a bohemian existence, even in New York City. Now, of course, that’s not possible. So I wonder if some of the romanticization of the redneck and all that stuff is a nostalgia for a time when you could drop out of college and say, “Screw that rat race, I’m gonna go be a mail carrier,” but being a mail carrier was a job that was easy to get and actually paid pretty well in terms of the purchasing power of those dollars. Whereas I guess I’m making a point that nowadays, if you drop out of bourgeois society, your purchasing power is going to be like one fifth of a yuppie’s with elite university credentials. Whereas back then you could drop out and have like two-thirds of the standard of living of a sort of organization man. I wanted to raise those issues.
GREIF: Seems right. This could be a counter-account of white hipster nostalgia: as you said, as a nostalgia for a time when in fact the income distribution was flatter, and the people with whom you were living were of the same social class as you.
ANDREW LEVINE: My question is a response to the earlier part of Jace’s discourse, when he gave an account of some of his travels in Latin America. I suppose I should get to the question, first, and then an explanation of what brought it to my mind. The question is: To what extent do you think hipsterism, in both postcolonial powers and former colonized nations, is a way for young people to grapple with the questions raised by postcolonialism?
What brought this up for me was that in my own experiences, folks in countries like France and also former French colonies, in West Africa chiefly, also the Caribbean, “hipsters” — or as they call themselves in French, branchés — tend to use artifacts of the colonial era, such as old advertisements from the 1950s made by French companies for broadcast, or for printing in colonial nations, in the same way that American hipsters may focus on things like country music and certain artifacts of suburban living. Or they like going to restaurants which have colonial themes. I’m not sure if anyone has seen this in their own experiences and travels. But: To what extent do you think hipsterism in certain countries is a way for people — young people — to deal with postcolonial issues?
JACE CLAYTON: From my experiences in Latin America, which have been fairly extensive over the past year or fifteen months: not at all, actually. And I think the criticism of hipsters there is that they are American-centric, or very Europhilic. The classic claim about Buenos Aires is that the city has always been the hipster city of Latin America, which is looking to Paris for ideas, to London for ideas. For the folks I was talking with, specifically in Lima, there was all this amazing music — you know, you hear it passing on the micro-buses, you hear it on every street — that was cumbia, but the only moment at which it was actually brought to their attention and sort of entered into their cultural radar was when it was imported, repackaged with a nice booklet written in English, with very colorful photos of people who were national figures thirty years earlier in Peru. So a lot of people see Latin American hipsterism as actually a failure to engage with postcoloniality, and what its possibilities are.
GREIF: What about when you’re in France?
CLAYTON: Oh, in France?
GREIF: Yeah, France is weird, right? I remember being in Paris in 1999 and someone . . . what is the French word again for hipster?
LEVINE: They call themselves branchés.* Some of them just use the English word and say ’eepstair. They copy a lot of English and American slang words, but the native word they use the most is branché, for hipster.
* Editor’s Note: Subsequent research indicates that the French only seem to say hipster, drawing the word directly from American English, and still suggesting an imported phenomenon. Branché is an older and more general term, closer to our words “trendy,” connected, in the know, etc. A hipper term for branché seems to be branchouille, representing a recent mutation of pronunciation. The more strictly derogatory French term, approximating our “hipster,” is bobo: a bobo acts cool but has money, pretends to make art but buys shoes, pretends to be radical but hangs on to privilege. This is drawn from an American coinage by the sinister David Brooks, who supports this hollowing-out of radicalism, contracting the words “bourgeois bohemians” — both, of course, French terms imported in the 19th century into English. Thanks to readers Elizabeth Stark and Cédric Duroux for help with this correction.
GREIF: I remember someone said to me, “Oh we’ll take you to the cool bar,” and the cool bar’s motif, essentially, seemed to be “colonialism in French Indochina,” so we would sit in a rickshaw and be served drinks by costumed “Oriental” waiters.
CLAYTON: I don’t go to those places. It’s true there is a sort of a postcolonial chic — a nostalgia for the days when we were less enlightened.
LEVINE: I think I’ve actually gone to that bar that Mark is talking about! I was taken to it —
GREIF: Great, there’s only one bar like that in all of Europe . . .
LEVINE: That’s exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. And they played songs from the 1950s, bad French pop songs romanticizing life in Vietnam or in West Africa or something like that. That’s the sort of thing they tack onto there. And I didn’t know if it was specific to France, or if it was also specific to Spain or former colonies of Spain or Portugal and such.
CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN: Mark, this reminds me of something from the Norman Mailer “White Negro” essay that you didn’t mention, this part of it at the end, as I recall, when he drives toward the concept of miscegenation, while Jim Crow is still in effect, and calls that the great white fear of the time. Do you think that that hope for miscegenation bears any similarity to this idea of postcolonialism?
greif: Well . . . Mailer and others, the fancy-pants intellectuals, not that I want to make fun of fancy-pants intellectuals, often have this idea that miscegenation is the one thing that “the evil white people” — as opposed to “me” — are afraid of. Yet from the 1840s on, there’s been a very lively fantasy that miscegenation is the only solution to America’s racial problem, in part out of a kind of nobility, but often out of, perhaps, the fact that the alternative would be some kind of justice or reparation. Now, the hipsters. Do we believe that, for example, the white hipster — in taking up the trucker cap, belt buckle, and mustache — is steering back toward a culture which would be, in fact, not as class-bound as the increasingly stratified culture, post ’70s and ’80s? Which would be, as it were, class-miscegenated? This would go very much more toward the earlier conclusion. I don’t know. It would be a much more optimistic reading . . .
ALLISON LORENTZEN: Before you guys ask each other any more questions I think we should go back to the gentleman standing by the microphone.
ANDREW PINA: Recently I read a kind of funny Onion article with a headline that said something like, “Group of Hipsters Realize Longtime Friend Is Actually Homeless Person,” and it went on to say they shopped at the same thrift stores and drank the same beers. . . . It was pretty good. I was wondering what you see as hipsters’ or so-called hipsters’ relation to actual poor and lower-class people, and how hipsters or anybody are trying to mobilize and help that class of people.
GREIF: [To audience] Does anyone have a feeling about this?
DAVE CLOONEY: It seems that both hipster movements (the 1950s and the 1990s) come expressly at a time of, maybe not equally distributed wealth, but of advancing wealth. In the ’50s and the early ’60s you have the post-war era. Our industrial competitors were destroyed, and that was the first big push of international oil. Tom Wolfe wrote a book called The Pump House Gang, where he did a series of essays on a number of different young people, disaffected youth in their twenties, who had more money and less artificial constraints on what they needed to do, and so they were able to do different things like go surfing, go to the Noonday Underground, join the Mod movement in London.
Then once again you have this economic boom, and again it wasn’t necessarily evenly distributed, but you have massive amounts of consumer credit that are made available to disaffected twentysomethings, who once again don’t have a lot of external constraints — they don’t necessarily need to go to a farm, or go to factory work — so it’s a consumer movement. There’s money to be spent and nothing else really that’s being demanded of the mass of youth, for them to do something specific, so they cannibalize older authentic culture to fuel consumerism. It just seems like a natural path at certain points in capitalism. And so the idea that hipsters have anything specific to do with homelessness, or actual social problems, or an actual critique of class issues — it’s actually the alternative: to engage in an argument, an endless argument about aesthetics and taste, as opposed to an actual argument about politics and classism.
SAMUEL DWYER: The question I have is, I think that at the core of hipsterism is a certain intellectualism, and if that’s true and if n+1 is a hipster publication, isn’t hipsterism, like, the best thing that’s happened at the end of the Bush years?
C. LORENTZEN: I would dispute that at the core of hipsterism there is intellectualism. I say this from my living in Williamsburg for two years.
I have found that, whereas often when I lived in other places and I saw someone who seemed like a hipster, they tended to be well read, when I was in Williamsburg, where everyone looked like that, most people didn’t, or a lot of people didn’t, know a damn thing.
A. LORENTZEN: Can you name the other places where you lived where people were well read?
C. LORENTZEN: Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Cambridge, Somerville, not necessarily Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
DWYER: But aren’t they chasing the same thing?
C. LORENTZEN: No, they were chasing . . . These often were people who worked in the fashion industry.
A. LORENTZEN: When did you live in Williamsburg?
C. LORENTZEN: I moved in in 2005 and left in 2007. There was this incident where I got home around dawn and I tried to open my door but the door handle fell off, then I tried to climb up into my bathroom window, which I had done before by piling up trash cans, and I was somewhat inebriated, so it didn’t work very well, and then some of the residents — I lived in this house behind this other house — some of the residents in front, who I either woke up or they were already awake, called the landlord, and he let me in, but after that I was embarrassed, so I figured it would be a good idea to move.
MAUREEN “MOE” TKACIK: I was going to just attempt to draw a greater link between the economic realities of the age and what hipsterism really means. My thinking is that hipsterism — the growth of it, and then the growth of the hipster antipathy movement — essentially, on some level, happened in order to convey to our generation the fallacy or the flaws in deregulation. It was the deregulation of culture.
I think that everyone here, most people in my generation, grew up when our great need, our shortage, the vital commodity that we were missing out on, was not food or, like, energy or minerals, we had all those things, but we really, a lot of us — this is the suburban thing — were missing out on culture.
At that point, and I’m talking about the ’90s, there were a lot of barriers to entry, there was a lot of red tape involved, in entering a subculture. It was a slow process. It was bureaucracy-ridden. You had to figure out what zines were, and then find The Face magazine — that was a really big step — but if you didn’t have that going for you, it was kind of a mystery, and there were all sorts of things you had to figure out.
Then 1999 came along, and subculture was deregulated by the internet, and at first that seemed so awesome, right? Before, if you would enter some sort of subculture, say punk or rockabilly or twee or something like that, there were all sorts of controls on whether or not you could get out of it, there were just limitations, and then suddenly we had this huge throbbing thing that was a little bit nebulous and you didn’t really know how to identify anyone except for whether they were wearing American Apparel — and that’s sort of another deregulation, because the easy access to credit allowed American Apparel to open like 200 stores in two years, which was really unprecedented in retail.
So my sense is that this was our generation before we actually grew up and a lot of us witnessed the massive intragenerational income gap that occurred because we were like, “Who the fuck needs a three-million-dollar bonus? That’s just gratuitous.”
And so while it was always a struggle to survive, during 2001 to 2007 or 2008, in New York or Philadelphia or Chicago or wherever, it was definitely feasible. I mean in Philadelphia, everyone started buying houses, and then they could use them as ATMs, as you used to be able to do, I guess. Here, there was always some sort of cool-hunter job that would hire you to do some copywriting that was completely banal. And none of it seemed like any sort of malevolent force. But then, as we found out, allowing that intragenerational income gap to widen all those years, funded by the Chinese — that wasn’t a good idea.
And now we know, kind of on a visceral level, what we wouldn’t have before — if we hadn’t seen hipsters go from people who maybe intimidated us a little bit, maybe because they were cooler, to people who were just completely retarded and too young.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What was funded by the Chinese, just for clarification?
GREIF: Our debt.
TKACIK: The kind of continued growth of the American economy and accompanying inequality. The dramatic expansion of our financial services sector, to the detriment of every other industry except maybe healthcare.
GREIF: So —
TKACIK: So my question is, would you agree with that?
[Audience laughter]
ROB OAKLEY: I have a question about the future of whatever hipsterism was, or hipsterism is now, in relation to America, specifically because I’ve read Richard Florida’s book and everything else about the rise and the flood of the creative class. And kind of like what Jace Clayton said about — I really liked this, what was it? — “Artists are shock troops for gentrification” — so now, after this whole mortgage crisis, are hipsters going to stop being an urban phenomenon and be like squatting in suburbs?
Is it going to be like Omaha and Austin, because everyone has broadband now? Because it’s also an issue of access to information, so if the Obama administration is saying we’re going to be putting up the new version of the Great Depression grid — everyone’s going to have broadband in America — is the future hipster going to be urban, or does that even matter anymore?
CLAYTON: It’s a provocative question. I actually like this idea of hipster flight from the city, so suddenly everyone’s going to be drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and wearing detachable belt buckles.
OAKLEY: Everyone will just go back to Milwaukee or wherever they’re from.
GREIF: Jace, in his piece in n+1 Number 7, talks a good bit — partly through music but also through culture and economics — about squats across Europe. It’s something that I think many of us have wondered about: are artists’ squats or squatted communities emerging in the United States, in, for example, Stockton, California, where it seems as if, if you were just a little bit motivated, you could go and set up shop at a newly built house and —
A. LORENTZEN: Stockton, California is the home of Pavement, right?
GREIF: The home of Pavement originally, thus making it all the more appropriate, and also the fore-closure capital of the country, I think, or certainly of California. Are there artists who are setting up entire housing developments as squats? Does anybody know? Are foreclosed houses being squatted by broadband-accessible hipsters? Or artists, I should say?
CLAYTON: It’s funny . . . We’re talking about artists and doers as the vanguard that hipsters will follow. It’s really interesting that one of America’s most successful anarchist publishing brands, Crimethinc — you can get their books at the Bowery Poetry Club, their books are franchised at certain coffee shops around the country — they work and live out of a house, sort of a McMansion, somewhere between Oregon and California. They’ve been there for a couple years, so if they’re leaving, presumably soon, if not already, hipsters will follow.
JOSH STANLEY: My question’s going to be kind of speculative. Being a hipster is being treated in the questions and responses as a specific phenomenon, even a specific response to capitalism, or to the particular era we’re living in, and interesting because particular. What I wanted to ask is whether there’s nothing interesting about it, whether it is only one of the necessities of capitalism, as a homogenizing impulse as capitalism expands. I don’t think that capitalism past is just one of the ways capitalism can go, I think that this is what capitalism demands, and that the sort of denial of class differences and the denial of registering of particular national or class consciousnesses — which are different — is the evil of capitalism as is. I think I’ve raised a question, so . . .
GREIF: There are at least two relevant accounts running in these questions and from the presentations. One: hipsterism as the mechanism of the assertion of distinction. Where everyone is trying to distinguish themselves from other people in increasingly trivial ways, thus taking their eye off of essential matters. Two: hipsterdom as homogenizing force, creating a kind of overall “rebel” consumer culture, to which one can belong by saying “I’m opting out,” when in fact you’re opting in.
STANLEY: The way of perhaps bringing those two together is to say that capitalism converts what are otherwise recognized as qualitative distinctions into quantitative distinctions.
PADDY JOHNSON: The question I had has to do with the use of the term “nostalgia,” which has been thrown around a lot today with regard — specifically with regard to cultural consumption. And I’m just wondering, do you guys think nostalgia is the right term for that? Because to me it implies that we would have stopped talking about Charles in Charge, but I’m not sure that that conversation ever stopped.
GREIF: Why would nostalgia make you stop talking about Charles in Charge?
JOHNSON: I mean isn’t there an implication there that you’re sort of wishing — there’s something in the past that you liked that is no more?
GREIF: Wouldn’t that be Charles in Charge?
JOHNSON: But it’s still around, right? We’re still having these conversations. We never really stopped.
C. LORENTZEN: I used to hang out with a guy who would always bring up the sitcom Gimme a Break! Eventually I started to avoid him.
GREIF: I don’t think that answered the question. I can feel there’s like an invisible barrier between us and the questioner — we’re totally missing the force of your question. Can someone else answer? Because I feel we’re being obtuse.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, is this like the difference between bohemia and neo-bohemia? Everyone keeps saying 1999, and I don’t remember what happened then except I graduated high school, but —
GREIF: That’s what happened, you graduated from high school.
A. LORENTZEN: That’s when I graduated from high school.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: — is that your question [to Johnson], where does something stop being irony and become nostalgia?
GREIF: Is that your question? That nostalgia is in fact this long-term, permanent condition . . .
JOHNSON: Yeah, I think that was closer to what I was getting at.
GREIF: I don’t know if this will go toward an answer, but a lot of people have noticed the fact that early-phase hipsterism, if we believe there’s an early phase, seemed to center on a recollection of the 1970s, and potentially on the styles and dress of Mommy and Daddy when you were born, so that if you say that this thing centered on 1999 and you subtract twenty-five years, then somehow the imagination of 1974, when we came into the world and saw admirable figures who were wearing leisure suits or whatever . . . that moment seems to have provided the style and consciousness of early-phase hipsterism.
Present-day hipsterism, at least as I observe it, seems to be just a recollection of the 1980s, that is, the moment when you were — you’re now 25 so Mommy and Daddy were wearing leggings, or leg warmers I guess they’re called, and oversized T-shirts and all this kind of stuff.
The worry in that is that when we talk about hipsterism as if it were a quite sophisticated phenomenon, or indeed about “nostalgia,” as about things you remember in some quite substantive way — so you remember Charles in Charge and . . . was the star of Charles in Charge Scott Baio?
WHOLE AUDIENCE: YES!!
GREIF: — You remember Scott Baio and your longing for Scott Baio and your Tiger Beat posters on the wall — this all seems like a quite substantive nostalgia, whereas the worry in this movement of hipsterdom, if it should survive, is that in fact it represents a style culture which will only be a longing — decade or half-decade by decade or half-decade, therefore micro-generation by micro-generation, because this seems to be the style that time is measured in now — the longing will just be for whatever the moment of your origination was. Whatever Mommy and Daddy wore because they were real adults when you were tiny.
You find that threatening, right? That’s troubling. It’s very worrisome to me. This would point toward what we are imagining as “hipsterdom” — as something having substantive commitments to the past — as really just being a kind of infantile desire for the recovery of the identity of former people who were recognizable as strong adults. While we are still weak children. Did that have anything to do with your question?
JOHNSON: I think that answered it.
MANOAH FINSTON: I totally agree with what you just said, and I think that there’s a relationship, a curious one, between authenticity and hipsterdom. I think that, for me, there’s a certain ambivalence about memory. Every generation, our attention span gets shorter, our memories are shorter in view, and so when you talk about the moment of origination, that people in their twenties are nostalgic for the ’80s, sure, because that’s what people remember.
But in a way, you could argue then that hipster culture is doing a great service to world culture at large, because people are safeguarding the authenticity of the generation before their own, or the moment before their own.
There’s a sense that to be a hipster is to be permanently and obsessively committed to being “for real” — that hipsters are the “real” people and their lives are authentic and that the experiences they’re having are meaningful, so if you live in Bushwick in the McKibbin lofts you’re “for real” because you have bedbugs and it sucks.
And I’m wondering if this commitment to protecting the authenticity of experiences from a generation before — like the Tiger Beat posters and Scott Baio and all this stuff — isn’t useful and productive. And I want to argue that it goes against what I think is the usual stigma of hipster culture, which is that it’s completely nihilistic — that there’s no value except pleasure, that there’s no use, that hipsters don’t believe in anything, they don’t do anything.
So maybe if you look at hipster culture as this positive protective force of our cultural moment, then maybe that is the ultimate merit of hipster culture. So I ask you and anyone else in the room, do you think that therein lies the sort of positive structure and dynamic of hipster culture?
[Silence from the panel]
A. LORENTZEN: Do you guys want to respond to the question?
GREIF: I would put that to the audience. Surely there’s a positive account. . . . I mean that’s a very compelling positive account for the virtue of hipsterism.
BRIAN GALLAGHER: Yeah, but why? It’s crap that’s being remembered. Does it matter if the memory of Charles in Charge is protected? And if you try to protect things that are actually worthwhile — like it would be much more square to insist on how great Nirvana was, because they’re actually a good band, than it would to insist on how great Debbie Gibson was. That would be more of a hipster thing. So you’re necessarily protecting things that are worthless.
C. LORENTZEN: It reminds me of the time I was invited to go see Air Supply at a concert in upstate New York.
I think that a lot of what’s done in the preservation of culture, as we see it among the hipsters, of things like Charles in Charge, is a stripping of their context, a sort of momentary leering that we do, and then we throw away Charles in Charge and move on to Air Supply. And I don’t think that it serves a higher purpose.
GREIF: One thing we haven’t spoken about is that for people who were politically hopeful at the end of the 1990s, the movement in youth subculture which was occurring simultaneously with this hipster emergence, if you believe me, was the anti-capitalist, anti-globalization movement which everyone remembers. What year is the WTO Ministerial Conference . . . the Battle in Seattle? [Forgetting own presentation]
SEVERAL PEOPLE: 1999.
GREIF: 1999! See? Everything happened in 1999! One question which I find very hard to face down, especially when people talk about hipster vegetarians, hipster vegans, is whether there remains a connection between hipsterdom and the long hope for . . . environmentalism as youth subculture, anti-capitalism as youth subculture. Certainly these things have always been woven into the popular music subcultures we think of, with riot grrrl, and what I’m now told are called “crust punks.” That’s what the young tell me. Jace was actually explaining to me the other day about crust’s relation to European teknivals. Do you have a sense of this? Do we believe an attachment remains — a genuine attachment — between hipster culture and anti-capitalist, environmentalist —
A. LORENTZEN: Feminist.
GREIF: — feminist, thank you — feminist, progressive culture?
CLAYTON: And this when our discussion is taking place at the New School, where all those students were arrested yesterday for protesting, occupying 65 Fifth Avenue, right?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: One of the reasons it seems like the linkages aren’t clear is that . . . What I liked about your talk is that you looked at the aesthetics of hipsterism, to try to understand it on its own terms. You tried to say, is there some deeper meaning to the particular signifiers of this movement? But maybe take a step back, and just start with the presumption that it’s just random — like, it’s just a group of people that chose a couple of common elements that they could use to create an in-group language, right? If that’s the case, then grasping for these other linkages, it — it underscores why it doesn’t make sense, because there isn’t actually a politics to it, it’s just a community of people who are in the same place.
One thing I want to throw out there is, if this is your reading, here’s some weak evidence in support of it. We have to remember other things that are happening in America generally at this time. I can’t really document this, all I can say is that I saw it happen in my family: middle of the country, by the 1970s and ’80s, people lose their white ethnicity, it just gets obliterated. Betty Crocker cookbooks everywhere, right? It’s just processed American stuff. But then in the ’90s, especially in the early 2000s, you get this revival of what your grandparents were. Like, “My grandparents came here, and I’m Irish, and I have Irish stuff in my window and on my car.” And I can’t prove that those things didn’t exist before I was alive, but I really don’t think anyone embraced their inner Irishness until a certain point in the mid-’90s.
If your reading is a purely structural one — people looking for a language that bands them together as something, right? — then maybe the particular signifiers don’t matter.
MICHELLE ANGEL MARTINEZ: I’m curious what you guys think about the child as hipster accessory.
Since we’ve talked so much about the innate desire of hipsters to be childlike or maintain a certain naiveté, I’m wondering about the hipsters who now have children, and strollers developed by NASA, and them bringing them to shows and to bars — how the child plays into continuing to develop as a hipster into later life.
C. LORENTZEN: You’re talking about the critique that says that these people have children and then sort of use their children as conspicuous displays of their own taste, right? I mean, that’s valid, that happens all the time.
It’s disgusting. Totally revolting. It’s really annoying when they bring their kids to parties and expect you to like their kids as much as you like their dogs. It works against having a good time, but it’s one of the things that make people feel better about themselves, like they’re a real person.
It reminds of — Mark had pointed to this sort of horse that gets beaten a lot in n+1 discourse, which was Eggers and McSweeney’s — but if you look at the first issue of McSweeney’s, it says “This one’s for the children.” And in that context it’s obviously a joke, but then a few years later all the people associated with McSweeney’s — or a lot of them, probably — start having children, and they set up a charitable organization called 826, which certainly does a lot of good work, I’m not going to deny that . . . but one time I was walking down the street with a friend of mine who, granted, is now just a successful novelist who lives in France, but at the time he was volunteering or he had gotten some kind of grant and was working on literacy issues in Harlem, and we were walking by 826 in Park Slope and he’s like, “Yeah, go set up your, you know, tutor center in the whitest neighborhood in town, that’s going to do a lot of good.”
This I think also relates to the issue of, “are hipsters progressive?” Whenever I see sort of conspicuous progressivism or conspicuous do-gooderism among hipsters, my first, instinctual reaction is suspicion.
A. LORENTZEN: I’d just like to make one clarification on Christian’s point, where —
C. LORENTZEN: [To the audience] — She’s my sister.
A. LORENTZEN: — If you read A Heartbreaking Work, Dave Eggers essentially already had a child, he had his younger brother, who he was raising —
C. LORENTZEN: Right, I’m not disputing that —
A. LORENTZEN: Can I speak! Whether or not McSweeney’s issue one was a joke — maybe the rest of the McSweeney’s crew started having babies, but he had a child from the beginning.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: But nothing with them was ever just like a joke. It was always playing both ways.
C. LORENTZEN: Yeah. Sure.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Like the faux sincerity was never really faux.
C. LORENTZEN: Alright, but then later on you have the “child of the issue” in The Believer . . . I mean I don’t think this is a controversial point I’m making.
CHARLES PETERSEN: I’m so glad we could have Christian here so we could have an example of a hipster. And I think that one thing —
C. LORENTZEN: A second-rate hipster. I think in your book [speaking to Robert Lanham] I would be a “pol-lit.”
A. LORENTZEN: What does that mean?
LANHAM: It’s a hipster that’s obsessed with politics and literature and academia. Generally has a beard.
C. LORENTZEN: [Strokes his beard] In the picture in your book I think he has longer hair but I’ve unfortunately started to go bald.
PETERSEN: I’d like to present an alternative narrative of the hipster. I think one problem is that this discussion is premised on the death of the hipster, which “happened” in 2003, and I just think that the hipster is continually dying and being reborn. This is kind of a superficially Trotskyist view of the hipster as a continual revolution. I think that basically, when I think back to when I first heard of hipsters — because I’m from the middle of nowhere — it was in 2003 or 2002, when I first started reading Pitchfork, and at the time it seemed like such a great phenomenon. They were reacting against emo, which was the one thing in the world that needed to be destroyed in 2003, or against twee music, all these things that I really didn’t like. So the first time that I heard something like Losing My Edge, which I think of as the ultimate hipster moment of the early part of this decade, it seemed great. And I think something like — um, I was 7 in 1991 — but I think that Slanted and Enchanted had roughly the same effect. I think that in 1966, ’67, the Velvet Underground had a very similar effect. The hipsters are constantly destroying things. And we’ve been talking about “hipsterism” in this very broad way, which is how, say, New York magazine is using it right now, which I don’t think is how we should be using it. It seems to me so many people who are described now as hipsters are clearly not hip; the thing about the hipster, as Mark said, is it’s this — I forget which of the definitions it was, I think it was 3 — this a priori sense of absolute unimpeachable hipness . . . which I think we saw when Christian gave his speech. It was something that you cannot stand up against.
C. LORENTZEN: Don’t try to.
PETERSEN: So at the moment that we’re pronouncing the death of the hipster, that in itself is somewhat of a hipster moment. I think it goes along with what we were saying earlier about n+1 being accused of being a hipster magazine, which is true, but not in the sense that “hipster” has come to mean now. It’s hipster because it’s destroying the current moment, in the same way that hipsters were hipsters because they were destroying things in 2003 and in 1991. I think that we were asking, why does this specific term “hipster” happen in 1999? Why do we go back to the 1950s, 1940s? I think the vast of majority of people who were using it in 2001, 1999 had no idea of any of those connotations. By that time it had been completely deracinated, and had just become a word with no history. And if you look at the word “hipster,” it just simply means the hippest person in the room — the person who you can’t stand up to. So I guess I just think that all this discussion has been useful in the sense of, “What is the massive subculture of youth today?” which is something that needs to be discussed — or, “What is our place as gentrifiers?” But these are all other discussions.
The question of the hipster is specifically one of, how do you accomplish revolution within subculture? I think that people keep saying, “Well, there are all these negative sides to the fact that there are subcultures, there are all these positive sides to the fact that there are subcultures.” I think that in New York it’s heightened because living within a subculture here you’re much more intertwined with capitalism. If you live in Minneapolis, if you live even in a place like Seattle, you can still live ten minutes out of downtown for $300 a month. I mean, in New York it’s absurd. I think this reveals a certain amount of provincialism in the discussion, because bohemianism in the rest of the country, at least in most of the rest of the country, is still really easy. You don’t even have to work that hard. You don’t have to have bedbugs. Bedbugs are a very New York phenomenon. You don’t hear about them in other places. You can live on nothing. And I think that’s also true in much of the rest of the world. In Western Europe, you have to live in Berlin — but there is at least somewhere to go.
So when talking about the hipster, I think that it’s useful to ask, what’s the best way to destroy things in order to produce new things? Which I think, if you look at something like — I mean the odd thing about Pavement is that there’s Slanted and Enchanted, which is to me a completely destructive album that I love, and then you have Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain two or three years later, and to my mind they become a completely different band that I still really like — by turning things down, they actually produce something good. So I think in the same way that when you talk about revolution you need to ask how do you destroy things and yet start over.
GREIF: It would not be the worst thing if everyone were to come out of here having found that “the hipster” and “hipsterism” had lost its magic and we were no longer in thrall to this piece of terminology, which I certainly use, and I think many of us use, to pick people out.
I had anticipated a defense of the West Coast from Charles’s remarks, because as far as New York– centric things go, certainly if you start looking at the creative material — “Definition #2” of the hipster, the hipster artist — often it seems hipster artists are not centered in New York at all. In fact, New York has had a pretty lousy track record, especially when it comes to music . . . but in California —
CORWYN LIGHT-WILLIAMS: Well, there was hip-hop.
GREIF: I mean just hipster music.
PETERSEN: Or Olympia, Washington, or Portland.
GREIF: Or Olympia, or Portland, or Seattle, San Francisco, et cetera.
LIGHT-WILLIAMS: All those people moved there from other places anyway, so I think it’s kind of pointless to evaluate tax regions for their creative value.
GREIF: Pavement didn’t move to Stockton, did they?
LIGHT-WILLIAMS: They’re from Stockton, but they didn’t record Slanted and Enchanted in Stockton because it was Stockton, but because someone’s garage was there.
C. LORENTZEN: Well, certain of them had gone to UVA, and then they spent some time in New York and then they went back to California. I think Stephen Malkmus once remarked that they had actually sold out with Slanted and Enchanted, which was a betrayal of their earlier singles.
GREIF: I just wonder does someone — is there someone from the West Coast who wishes to speak for the West Coast and declare that in fact the hipster culture of the West Coast is different, significantly?
LIGHT-WILLIAMS: I’m actually from Portland, I’m visiting this weekend, and I have a friend who refers to Portland as the spiritual home of white men with glasses. So I think it’s really interesting for me to be here and hear a very New York-centric — to my mind at least — point of view.
It’s not the case that you can — I just want to clarify — get an apartment for $300 ten minutes from downtown Seattle.
PETERSEN: In the Central District, you can. I’ve lived there.
LIGHT-WILLIAMS: Kind of, but then you have bedbugs so maybe it’s the same thing.
I want to say, I guess I’ve also been around the world and seen a lot of places that are just hipster-proof. And I think it was Jace who said you get a false positive going to some of these places, and I think that there is a really different culture on the West Coast because everything is smaller.
A lot of people go to Portland because it’s sort of like the opposite of New York — where people say if you make it there you can make it anywhere — but Portland is like, if you didn’t make it anywhere else, then you move to Portland. But I think that’s why a lot of people are successful from a place like Portland; you can be a really big fish in a small pond and start succeeding and start getting traction, whereas if I were a musician and wanted to come to New York, I have no idea what I would do. I guess you could try desperately to play shows. But in Portland you can pretty quickly start getting into the big venues.
So I think that’s the reason things come out of — I also lived in Olympia, Washington, for a while, and Seattle, so I’ve kind of had the full range of West Coast hipster experiences. I’ve been to a lot of big cities, but I get here and it does seem so hipster, but it also seems so entrenched, and there isn’t anything as entrenched in Portland or Seattle. Those places seem to change really rapidly. Portland is really a great place as a sort of metaphor, I guess — it has a really great restaurant scene, and the reason is no restaurant lasts more than three months. I kind of feel like music’s the same way. Stuff gets popular and it’s really popular with everyone for a brief period and then utterly dies, or gets really successful and comes to New York. I do think the West Coast is different, but is there a specific question that you want me to comment on or is this good enough?
GREIF: [Noticing that two hours have elapsed] I feel like we’re getting to that point — this happens on every panel — where we’re clearly reaching the fatigue point, which I never believe is necessarily a reason to stop, although it makes sense to, and politeness usually requires it. We do have refreshments. But the question is, do people want to keep going? How much time do we actually have?
A. LORENTZEN: Chad’s telling us to cut it off. We should take maybe two more questions.
GREIF: People can certainly hang out. Over cookies or whatever we have for refreshments. Crack cocaine.
LANHAM: It seems like there’s been a lot of discussion about the death of the hipster that peaked in 2003– 2004. But I do recall, when I was researching and writing my book in 2000–2001, one of the recurring jokes I was starting to write about and that ended up in the book was that . . . there’s always a sense of a little bit of self-loathing with hipsters. So one of the recurring jokes in the book is any time I ask someone if they’re a hipster, immediately the answer is “no.” And I think we’re continuing to see that, because I constantly hear that the hipster is a late ’90s, early turn-of-the-century phenomenon, but then I turn on the television and I see Flight of the Conchords, which seems to me to have the kind of quintessential hipster aesthetic, hipster humor, hipster irony. Demetri Martin’s another example, it seems. Sufjan Stevens, if you want to talk about the music world — you know, his back-up band dresses like Girl Scouts. And just looking around the room I could point out that this person looks like a hipster, this person looks like a hipster, you know, the dress is still there, the accoutrements. I think the ironic sensibility hasn’t really faded. So I guess my question is, has the death arrived? I mean certainly there’s backlash, and I think the backlash has grown, but if anything it seems to be thriving still.
C. LORENTZEN: I think it’s funny — obviously television and the mainstream mass culture are always sort of behind the game, so I think you’re right that a lot of that stuff has broken through. A lot of those guys, especially Demetri and the Flight of the Conchords people . . . and you start seeing villains in Batman movies that look like hipsters and you’re like “whoa.” Yeah. But I think that one thing that’s happened, and you might be able to speak to this as well as I can, is that people have stopped calling me up and asking me to write articles with the H-word in it. Although there was that “hipster hookers” piece that came out in Radar toward the end, and it was funny because the author of that piece had started pitching me, as an editor, and when it came out — she was the writer on it, she was just pitching me ideas — she said, “This wasn’t supposed to be about hipster hookers, they just put that word on it.” It was just about, you know, young people who were hookers, in her mind. But it sounds much better doesn’t it, “hipster hookers”? I always thought of them as “hooksters.” I think that we’ve reached a point of fatigue among us in New York in chattering about it, you know. Which maybe started with your book party at the Knitting Factory, which I snuck into, and then went on to hipster hookers. One cycle of magazine articles is over, but now we have TV shows and bestselling records.
LANHAM: I think the backlash is there, and there is hipster fatigue. But I guess the argument I’m trying to make is, if the hipster has died, what has replaced it? I think perhaps we are on the cusp of something else, but for all intents and purposes it seems like what I was satirizing in my book in the first place was that the first tenet of being a hipster is you deny being a hipster. I think there’s a fatigue but it’s just a perpetuation of the denial of being a hipster in the first place that I was satirizing in the book.
GREIF: I do want to clarify that rather than argue for the death of the hipster per se, I want to argue for a hipster Stage 1, and a hipster Stage 2 . . . like a rocket. It continues to change. Because we have this problem now of the hipster as global brand, right? Peruvian hipster haters, and Peruvian hipsters.
Are there structural things which would give a kind of long-term global life to the hipster? Jace, can you imagine that five years from now you could show up to play somewhere overseas, and everyone would be wearing skinny jeans?
CLAYTON: I think a lot of it has to do with just fashions synchronizing faster because of all the internet gossip sites — Facebook, Myspace, all this — so that people can see what the cool kids are doing in other cities. And kids are traveling more between cities. I mean, not in Peru — but there’s a much greater awareness which is only going to continue as the internet goes deeper and deeper, so suddenly you’ll get Moroccan hipsters and so on and so forth. I think there are a lot of tunnels and bridges toward a specific level of sameness.
GR EIF: You think it’s still coming from the metropole.
CLAYTON: I think it’s still coming from the metropole, but no longer New York — this New York-centricity is kind of fading away, some of it, so as soon as the Austrian kids get their cameras on, they’ll be blasting images of their parties . . . In terms of talking about the “global hipster” as a brand. The thing is, companies latch onto that, as soon as there’s a subculture they say, “Hey, we can market that,” which just reinforces it.
KYLE STURGEON: I have a minor hypothesis about one branch of the future hipster, based on some observations I’ve made, coming from Louisville, Kentucky to New York recently. This can incorporate some of what Jace and Mark have said. Mark, your third definition of the hipster I think incorporates what William Gibson calls “pattern recognition,” which is the ability to spot trends. I think one of those trends has been the hipster’s new political philosopher: Slavoj Žižek. And I think Jace could sponsor this, because I know that one of the biggest cumbia clubs is called Žižek. And so it’s funny, when you talk about the political future of the hipster, if you actually follow the precepts of Žižek — who tells you to do nothing in the face of economic tragedy, so on and so forth — it seems like maybe one reason why pattern recognition led to Žižek is because of the way he treats contemporary media and the films that he has, but also because he tells you literally: “Don’t do anything. You don’t have to do anything.” It’s like the opposite of Rorty’s campaign: “There’s nothing to do.” But I think there’s a danger for n+1. Recently, William Deresiewicz called you guys a hipster journal in the Nation. I wasn’t all that surprised to read that, especially coming from him. But isn’t there a danger, Mark, that n+1 . . . My inclination, my guess, would be that most of the editors at n+1 don’t care too much for Slavoj Žižek, that’s just a guess. But isn’t there a danger that — as hipsters co-opt this weird Marxism or post-Marxism — that you will be misidentified with this political philosophy which says do nothing, which I think is not what you want people to do? And maybe that’s why you were called a hipster journal. That’s a question.
JAMES POGUE: Very quickly: I think that speaks to something, but if you want to look at political activism à la the hipster as it has developed especially in New York and San Francisco, it’s much closer to what you’re talking about with Crimethinc, where a lot of these people grew up reading that, and reading Akhasic Books and stuff, and they’re not hitchhiking anymore, but they’re dropping out. And I don’t think it’s a very Žižekian “do nothing,” it’s: “be an activist by not participating.” I think that is, to a certain extent, one of the things that’s harder to criticize about the hipster than others. I think that it’s produced some positive things, as easy to make fun of them as they are.
STURGEON: I just met a thousand Žižekians at Barnes and Noble, where they were all buying his book.
TKACIK: I used to work at American Apparel and he was seriously the only intellectual that any of them had heard of.
POGUE: Do you have the sense that, inasmuch as we’re arguing. . . I just feel like hipsters are denuded of political impulses.
STURGEON: They’re not! Like cumbia — like the biggest club of one of the biggest new music styles coming out — a global phenomenon — the club is called Žižek.
POGUE: I know, but what does that matter?
STURGEON: That’s my point. It’s completely vacuous. They’re adopting a political philosophy that is empty.
C. LORENTZEN: I don’t think they know what the political philosophy really is.
POGUE: That’s what I’m saying —
C. LORENTZEN: I mean Žižek is a celebrity with a look to him, and his most popular writings are his movie criticism. I mean, I don’t think that —
STURGEON: I agree with you. But let me further my point. So, as in Charles Petersen’s Trotskyist scheme, one of the things that happens with media outlets is that they get really, really popular, usually for a bad reason, and then everybody stops reading them. I guess my question is directly about the health of n+1. I was asking a really specific question of Mark. I’m not saying that these people actually read Žižek. I’m saying, isn’t there a danger that a whole lot of people are about to start “reading” your magazine — just because of Žižek? Isn’t this the symptom of a larger problem?
GREIF: Wow. Um. Is there a danger that enormous numbers of people will begin reading n+1? Um. Well, I fear that there is.
[Audience laughter]
I think your original question seemed to be tilting toward a worry about do-nothingism. I don’t think Žižek will be remembered in fifty years. I don’t view him as a problem.
C. LORENTZEN: I have another question, though, along the same lines. One criticism I heard voiced about n+1 during the last year by some young writers, even ex-interns of n+1, was that n+1 was not doing enough to defeat the Republicans in the election.
GREIF: I do think that, constitutionally and temperamentally, there is something about the editorial staff of n+1 which is occasionally afflicted with do-nothingism.
But this seems — as far as it speaks to the future — to speak to the question of whether in fact we are positioned to “do” something, or do anything. This certainly seems like the right moment after the election to ask. We’ll have to see.
But what are we going to do? Because, really — fatigue has set in. I can see it in everyone’s posture. And yet there are important questions waiting at the microphones. Should we get some cookies, or whatever? I don’t know why I keep saying cookies. It’s infantilizing. It’s clearly what I want.
C. LORENTZEN: I would like a cigarette.
GREIF: Should we at least take a break? People can just come up, and we’ll talk without the microphones?
[Conversation continued informally in the lobby]