AT THE START OF the great blackout of August 14, 2003, radio announcers on every battery-powered transistor in every knot of bystanders in New York City recalled with apprehension the looting that had appalled the nation during the blackout of 1977. Darkness was falling again upon the metropolis — now a post-Disney wonderland which had parlayed the white return and gentrification of the 1990s, plus the harsh policing of “Giuliani Time” and chief cop William Bratton, into a money boom that persisted, with falling crime rates and still-rising real estate valuations, even after the disaster of September 11, 2001. Had the stumbling-block arrived at last? Fourteen hours later, after the sun rose over intact shops, authorities were jubilant. The neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Bushwick, where the worst trouble transpired a quarter-century earlier, had stayed calm. No looting had occurred. Or almost no looting, certainly not enough to matter to anyone, not in Manhattan — really just one set of incidents that newspapers bothered to record, and that was just something that happened to some Lower East Side hipsters.
The chief venue was a store called Alife, pronounced “A-Life,” as if bestowing a superior grade on your existence. It called itself a brand- and design-consultancy, but was known primarily as an unaffordable sneaker store, selling limited edition Nikes or customized Chuck Taylors, improbably expensive — up to $800, at the high end — amidst peculiar decor: trick bikes, motocross jackets, astroturf, graffiti paints. From the day it opened on Orchard Street, an anomaly on the block, it made me uncomfortable to see, in much the way that conservatives who speak of “white culture” make me uncomfortable. After successes, it added a hidden exclusive club, decorated like a Savile Row tailor’s, to vend sneakers to patrons unintimidated by the absence of a phone number, a Tiffany’s-style buzzer, a signless barred steel door, and “members only” stationary. Alife entered a neighborhood that was Puerto Rican, black, and Jewish, on the street traditionally known for bargain leather-goods and clothes — but from 1999 onward it became the western pillar of a swiftly-growing enclave of new people whom I never heard called anything other than “hipsters,” carved out from Orchard via Rivington (where the sneaker “club” opened), east to Clinton, where a celebrated, unaffordable restaurant had opened (59 Clinton Fresh Food),* also serving wealthy patrons who arrived by cabs or town cars and looked bemused when they stepped onto the sidewalk.
A little before 11 pm on the first night of the 2003 blackout, thieves broke open a side trash-area door of the Alife club and a significant crowd began looting the stock. The owner arrived and hit shadowy people with a flashlight to disperse them; the mob struck back with 40 oz. bottles. This is, of course, a sneaker neighborhood. What Alife had pioneered was the up-pricing, super-branding, and remarketing of products more or less on sale right around the corner at the famous discount sneaker shops on Delancey, like Jimmy Jazz and Richie’s, serving a mostly black and Latino clientele — but Alife addressed a non-local or tourist market, trading on the novelty of an impoverished location still within the confines of Manhattan. No trouble was recorded at Jimmy Jazz or Richie’s; a brick was thrown through the window of the Delancey Foot Locker, and another Foot Locker was burglarized in Brooklyn. At rich white people’s sneaker destinations throughout the hipster archipelago in the Lower East Side, however — Alife’s imitators: Nort on Eldridge, Classickicks on Elizabeth across the northern border at Houston, even one shop called Prohibit, as far west as the part of Little Italy rich brokers had recently renamed “Nolita” — attacks, attempts, and thefts were reported, the only notable crimes of the period of darkness.
* Wylie Dufresne, not yet a Food Network celebrity, apparently opened his restaurant here because he had grown up in the neighborhood — a not infrequent reason for the first “pioneers” to merchandise an area to which rich people didn’t previously travel.
MY SENSE AT THE time was that the neighborhood had taken a kind of revenge, pathetic as it was — and all the more shameful, since two of the broken bottles at Alife led to stitches. It was the only revenge, however, or gesture of rejection, I ever knew the neighborhood to take. And how much rejection can there really be, in trying to grab by force the unattainable goods on the other side of glittering windows?
My vantage was unusual, biased in two different directions but well-suited to amateur sociology. My father’s family had been living in apartments near Willett Street, on the east side of the neighborhood, continuously since the turn of the century. My grandmother and father had been spinning stories of those streets for me since I was a kid — overwriting the visible neighborhood, a mix of tenements, workers co-ops, and public housing, with specifics of what had been there formerly. So I was attached to the patterns of settlement. Through the period of the changes taking place on the opposite side of Delancey from my grandmother’s apartment, I visited a few times a year for stays occasionally as long as a month. I gawked in the box of streets that made the epicenter for the new culture, bounded by Houston to the North, Delancey (later Grand, after the expansion) on the South, Clinton to the East, and Orchard (later Allen) to the West. I went there first at an age when I still desperately cared what “the young people” were up to — and nearly all the people I saw were then older than me. I read hipster catalogs and fliers, visited their stores, chatted, and took notes.*
* Though I’ve tried out rival definitions for “hipster” elsewhere, this article uses the term without qualification, to build up the word’s meaning in historical context. Even where this usage seems different from the reader’s own, it may, in the end, become compatible.
The question remains of how the name arose. I’m certain I knew to call the new migrants “hipsters” from the first time I explained to my family the changes happening north of Delancey in the late 1990s, and before hearing anyone else use the word. If true, this means it was possible to read the term off of hipsters’ appearance and behavior. “Hipster” referred, in part, to an air of knowing about exclusive things before anyone else — that they acted, as people said then (and do still), “hipper than thou.” But I think it also must mean that circa 1999 their look was still continuous with the short-lived neo-Beat or ’50s-nostalgic hip moment (with goatees, soul patches, fedoras, and Swingers-style duds) that the Baffler relentlessly documented and attacked as a marketing ploy through the 1990s. You can find the record of it in their anthology Commodify Your Dissent (1997). To summarize the derivation: I think the very earliest new hipsters may have looked enough like the old hipsters of dim mid-century memory to call up the name, reinforced by complaints about hip snobbery that were ubiquitous during the decade (cf. the August 8, 1994 Time cover).
A word on the “old neighborhood” bias: when I was a child visiting in the ’70s and ’80s, I got used to those streets as my grandmother and father experienced them, because of the way “the street” experienced us — as poor Jews, basically Orthodox, among poor Puerto Ricans and poor blacks. It was a flatter distribution, where my family was taken for granted and was embedded. It excited me unduly, and at the same time I found it relaxing, a relief, to escape where I actually came from — I know such emotions are suspect. My father, who had classed our family up by going to college and moving to white-collar jobs, saw me as naïve to like rudeness, dirt, and especially public housing, which since 1965 had been an affront to the family not only for the racial and religious confrontations it brought but because it leveled the tenement in which my grandfather was born.
To enter the hipsterized area to the north in 1999 was to be treated again as what I was in the Boston suburbs where I actually came from, namely, an entitled white person among entitled whites. Our class likes to call itself middle-class, as everybody in America does — but as I kept arguing to my no-longer-working-class father, we were rich just to live in Newton. The income distribution nationwide at that time showed a median family income of about $50,000 (it has stayed at that level, too, in the decade 1999–2009). On the Lower East Side, it was $28,000, with about 30% of families below the poverty line. The hipster whites were like me. It takes a very strong-minded person not to enjoy the restoration of privilege, and I happily went to Rivington Street to read in a new cafe, where, it should also be said, everybody was noticeably better looking than in Boston. At the same time, it would have taken a blind person not to see, as the bars and boutiques proliferated, and friends I knew from college told me they were coming to rent in the neighborhood, that the non-chain stores my grandmother had always depended on (Ratner’s the kosher dairy restaurant, Friedman’s where she bought clothes) continued to disappear, vanishing along with the Puerto Rican cocina frita stop on the corner of Clinton and the other stores affordable to my grand-mother’s Orthodox Jewish neighbors or the residents of the low-income Samuel Gompers Houses facing her building.
I’d never been so close to a neighborhood “in transition.” But I also hadn’t seen a transition quite like this. I knew bohemia. It was very clear to me that the hipster neighborhood was not a bohemian neighborhood; it wasn’t artists. Artists were occasionally there — drinking coffee — but they were unusually thin on the ground. Instead of doing art, people everywhere were “doing” products. They displayed overpriced guitars, overpriced painted-upon sneakers, lots of overpriced foods, and a huge quantity of overpriced clothes. These products were often displayed amidst the decor and signifiers of art galleries or designer’s hidden ateliers, but artistic production and artists’ folkways were gone. I kept walking into stores that I thought were thrift shops or Goodwill, which turned out to be curated or repurposed stores for vintage clothes priced higher than the brand new dress shirts I got twice a year at Filene’s. Priced high enough, in fact, that it suggested I was in the presence of a much higher social class than mine, which was surprising because people lacked other clear markers of wealth. (Later I understood that the class that kept up appearances at street level might be funded by credit card debt and living paycheck-to-paycheck.)
Another crucial thing: hipster youth also wasn’t punk, crunchy, DIY, rockabilly, ska, mod, or hardcore, which meant it wasn’t in line with youth subculture as I knew it everywhere else. If the twin strands of US youth oppositional subculture run through punk and DIY on one side, and an environmental, anti-authoritarian tradition of stoners and jam bands and dreadlocks and vegans and, basically, hippies on the other side, and both these lines have cross-pollinated endlessly — all of it was missing. Then there were the offenses against taste that those other subcultures would never have undertaken, which made me wish somebody would put a rock through these windows. Traditionally the Jewish streets in the neighborhood had sold discount garments, hosiery, haberdashery, wholesale cloth, trimmings. Hipster boutiques liked to keep the old, now ironic signage with Jewish names — as hipster restaurants kept signage from replaced Puerto Rican and Dominican restaurants in Spanish. I found this obscurely enraging, like setting up a lemonade stand on someone’s grave. Worse, hipsters developed a trend of not putting names on their restaurants or bars at all, giving everything an exclusive and unwelcoming aspect; as if an average passerby was not invited to come in and have a beer.
This subculture was pro-consumer, pro-consumption, amoral, pro-lifestyle. It credentialed itself as resistant because its pleasures were supposedly violent and transgressive (I knew this from Vice magazine, a free fashion-boutique publication) and also what was then foolishly called “politically incorrect,” such that the hipster’s primary means of self-authentication were white hetero masculinity, gross high school pranks, and, primarily, pornography. What pretentious erotica had been to ’60s liberals, pretentious porn was to ’00s hipsters. Oh, and tattoos! Everybody claimed to have a background in punk/skateboarding/ graffiti to justify why they were now in retail sportswear and marketing. Drugs were authenticating, too, but drugs of course are the one thing that almost every American youth subculture loves, from hipsters to hippies to jocks, not excluding gamers and wenches at the Renaissance Fair. The big publication of the early hipster moment was called Vice precisely because that was the hipster shtick, to lump consumer and Gothic into the same category of transgression: We will show you how to buy pleasures which some liberal prude of our fantasies considers immoral; thus our publication will be a chance for naughty boys to have their own Redbook and look at one another in fashion spreads. Its most famous department was a Dos and Don’ts. If the hipster then spent $1000 on clothes, or a painted skateboard, or Johnny Walker Blue Label — it seemed like rebellion.
Friends told me to visit Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was the true center of hipster development at that time, and maybe more bohemian-friendly. I made two treks there on foot across the Williamsburg Bridge around 1999–2000, passing through the notyet-changed southlands to reach Bedford Avenue. I found Bedford incredibly unnerving, a zombie-village of people like me, more conspicuous where the buildings are so much smaller and sparser than in Manhattan. It was as if the hipsters had taken over Gopher Prairie.
ABOVE ALL, THE THING I chafed at, mentally, was that the hipsters manifested in these neighborhoods not like a subculture, but like an ethnicity. It’s hard to explain. Their structure of behavior, what one can only call their “clannishness,” plus the Lower East Side’s hands-off treatment of the new hipsters — as individual blocks and then whole streets “turned” — seemed like consequences of new ethnic arrival. The hipsters’ secrecy contributed, too. If they didn’t label their stores in Yiddish or Spanish, they telegraphed their distinction by a kind of rich-people’s invisible ink. Hipsters had no obvious exchange with the groups around them, entirely unlike the way artists I had seen elsewhere liked to join into neighborhoods of racial others — whether to integrate or “slum,” exploit or make nice. I learned to give directions in a new way to people near my grandmother’s house, looking for Chinatown: “First you go through the Puerto Rican part, then the hipster part, then the Jewish part, and then it’s Chinatown.”
The markers of hipster ethnicity were straightforward. They were coded “suburban white.” In those key early years, the hipster aesthetic drew from 1970s suburbia (the decade, importantly, that had turned its back on both the city and the counterculture ’60s, as well as the decade in which these hipsters had been kids) and 1970s amateur porn (the secret rebellion supposedly going on underneath the suburbs). Bars dug up white Americana, as at the pioneering Welcome to the Johnsons (1999) on Rivington Street — its conceit was that you were drinking in a family’s 1970s middle-American living room. “Trucker hats,” the gimme caps distributed as freebies at auto shows and worn throughout the country, occasionally worn through the punk years as signs of downward-mobil-ity or just the towns bands came from, were newly discovered for fashion. (One landed on Paris Hilton’s head.) Belt-buckles got Southern and big. “Wifebeaters” — the same athletic tank top undershirts worn by Puerto Ricans and Dominicans on nearby streets, but not with that name — became chic. The open secret of the equally famous “ironic” T-shirts, printed with mottos from community pig roasts, church softball leagues, and Midwestern car dealerships, was that these shirts often came from people’s own childhood bureaus, especially among the middle-class young people who had moved to New York from Tennessee, Colorado, or Wisconsin (by way of college) to tend bar on the Lower East Side while trying out art or work. The rich were buying these shirts for $30 down the street, and you already had them in your closet for free. Thus middle-class whites helped to re-import a white “opposite” culture to city living, “ironically,” with an equivocal meaning. As did the Fruit of the Loom undershirts when they represented a fantasy about one’s own tough white-ethnic grandfather, in the suburbs after white flight, his simulated pissed-off ethos now brought back to the city.
What did this early hipster aesthetic mean? I was stunned when I read the conclusions drawn by John Leland in his massive history, Hip, in 2004. “[T]here’s a broader, more interesting context for the emergence of Caucasian kitsch,” he wrote (broader, that is, than continuity with the long history of ’40s and ’50s hipsters) because, Leland explained, it came along with “the most diverse, multicultural, middle-class, and ethnic-marketed generation in American history,” when “one in five Americans is now either an immigrant or has a foreign-born parent”:
In this spirit, the trucker hat and other post-hip accessories play with the meaning of whiteness in a multicultural world. They make white visible. Without the black/white dichotomy to anchor it, and without numerical dominance to give it weight, whiteness is up for grabs. Especially in cities that are now ‘majority-minority,’ or less than half non-Hispanic white, whiteness is no longer the baseline, something taken for granted; it’s something to be explored, turned sideways, debated for its currency. . . . Caucasian kitsch — which includes redneck rock, wife-beater tank tops, homey Little League t-shirts, corn dogs, drag racing, demolition derby and Vice magazine — packages whiteness as a fashion commodity that can be donned or doffed according to one’s dating needs. Post-hip treats whiteness the way fashion and entertainment have historically treated blackness. It swaths white identity not in race pride but in quotation marks. Whiteness doesn’t define you, you define it — and you don’t have to be white to wear it.
This feels to me like America as known to someone who doesn’t leave the house. “[Y]ou don’t have to be white to wear it?” That was true, but just about everyone I ever saw wearing these accessories on the Lower East Side was Caucasian, with the exception of a few Asian hipsters. Many of the latter, however, were actually from Asia . They were the ultra-rich young of Japan and Korea buying hipster brands. The few African-Americans I saw outfitted in Caucasian kitsch were mostly either celebrities on TV or models in clothing catalogs.
THE DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT that concerns me more was the return of rich whites to big cities in the ’90s and ’00s and, with it, the suburbanization of poverty. When you think of the post-World War II decades, you think of suburbanization, “urban renewal,” and “white flight,” and its consequent defunding of the inner city. A common explanation for the looting and violence in 1977 in New York, indeed, is the fact that in 1975 the city had nearly gone bankrupt and economic opportunity and social services had been stretched too thin in the neighborhoods that rioted. The reverse phenomenon in our own times — after decades in which upward mobility for the middle classes, including the black and minority middle classes, had looked like it meant heading out to the suburbs — is that capital flowed back into the center, especially the finance capital of neoliberal upward redistribution and the 1990s and 2000s Wall Street bubbles. Little people were pushed outward to suburban housing, then hit particularly by the collapse of the real-estate-lending bubble that had generated the huge finance profits (with no penalty for the financiers; the US government bailed them out). The somewhat astonishing fact, for those who’ve watched the “rebirth” of the cities or their representations on TV, is that US poverty has been rising since 2000, according to US government statistics. The total number of the impoverished in suburbs now surpasses the numbers in the cities those suburbs serve, as well as housing the majority of the nation’s poor overall.*
* This development was widely reported in 2010, but the turning point seems actually to have occurred slightly earlier in the decade. See Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr, The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2010).
Especially in global cities (New York, Paris, Mumbai, London, Beijing), districts which previously had historically not ever been of interest to the rich — because on the periphery of the city center (Lower East Side), or on the leading edges of the boroughs or commuting districts (Williamsburg, Dumbo), where these places were needed to house waves of servants, workers, clerks, small tradespeople, and immigrants — came into focus as sites for capital, valued as new leisure, entertainment, and to a lesser extent residential zones for the rich (wherever “luxury condos” could be installed and small dwellings broken into much larger spaces). Industrial and proletarian architectural detail, not accidentally, came to seem superbly charming, with the collusion of intellectuals sympathetic to and nostalgic for a working class. Whenever the richest didn’t displace the poorer classes personally, too, they pushed what the sociologist Jean-Pierre Garnier terms the “inferior fringes of the intellectual petite bourgeoisie” out to poor neighborhoods — publicists and media hacks, teachers and professors, social workers, writers, all overeducated and with a psychic investment in hipness to compensate for their inferior real capital. This middling class of the educated classes accomplished the displacement of the working classes whose tenement façades they could lovingly restore.
The uncanny thing about the early-period white hipsters is that symbolically, in their clothes, styles, and music and attitudes, they seemed to announce that whiteness was flowing back in. Unconsciously, they wore what they were in structural terms — because for reasons mysterious to the participants, those things suddenly seemed cool. And by taking up the markers or feeling of a white ethnicity, they made it feel natural to engage in a subcultural separation, or de-integration, rather than bohemian integration, as they colonized neighborhoods that were, in one way or another, really ethnic — even when the people they put pressure on, as in the northern reaches of Williamsburg, were Polish.
IN AN EARLIER contribution, I mentioned what I think is the best anatomization of post-World War II hipsters, a 1948 article about black hipsters by Anatole Broyard.* The article is occasionally cited by historians but not widely enough known. Broyard saw hipster style, consciousness, and even snobbery, as the creation of a fictitious, independent base of power to rival white domination. The black hipster made pretense of a special superior truth that no one else could equal even had he possessed the same facts or abstract knowledge —an a priori knowledge comparable to the positive knowledge that whites held. You can see how this whole mood could attach itself to be-bop in the ’40s, which was a true art and skill that was too fast, too complex, and too subcultural for whites yet to steal (as whites had taken over “hot” jazz and then big band and swing, while originators of those musical forms couldn’t even perform as equals in many Jim Crow-era venues). Even the black hipster’s now-forgotten early style cues seemed to evince a power to drag white knowledge into blackness, to see the white world, as it were, darkly. Recounted Broyard: “[The hipster] affected a white streak, made with powder, in his hair. This was the outer sign of a significant, prophetic mutation. And he always wore dark glasses, because normal light offended his eyes.” Yet Broyard, a high-cultural re-appropriator or demander of white knowledge, on the model of Ralph Ellison, despaired of the power of style cues alone. If outsiders couldn’t understand the black hipster, Broyard saw clearly enough, they would just move in to entrap and exhibit him: “He was bought and placed in the zoo,” Broyard declared flatly. The only solution was true Promethean theft, stealing back the culture from whites that, in fact, African-Americans had helped create.
* See “Positions,” in this volume.
Of course, by 1957 Norman Mailer could publish his embarrassing declaration in “The White Negro” of the white hipster freeing himself from white squareness by Negro sexiness, spontaneity, naturalness, etc. Enough has been written about that odd essay not to expend more words on it here. What I’ve never seen noted anywhere is the extended letter to the editor that ran in Partisan Review, protesting Broyard’s article from the point of view of a white hipster, three months after the article appeared in 1948. This letter-writer claims that Broyard is a joykill to be so serious and over-intellectual about a phenomenon that’s basically for kicks, and is already a hipster scene for whites, who come to the jazz clubs and join in the knowing fun. This is true co-optation: to make every development “white” from the first, and to insist that everything is style and style is meaningless. “You find many hip studs, a great many Jewish boys again,” he says. “The white streak [in African-American hair] is a purely theatrical gesture and is matched up by the blue side-hair of various blond hipsters.”*
* I’ve wondered if it could be a joke, connected to the odd signature, “Miles Templar.” But it would have to a very, very sarcastic and unusual joke on the white hipsters, not hinted at by other extra-textual cues.
Whenever a phenomenon like the hipster is read for meaning, someone will deny it that meaning — the white letter-writer to Partisan Review, and some hostile readers, I imagine, of this essay. Those who do are often the ones who have an investment in these actions not meaning anything — because evacuation of meaning allows one to pursue the course without scrutiny or self-reflection. If I read in too much significance to the white hipster moment of trucker hats, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and belt buckles, I do expect objections of this kind — that it’s a question of over-reading, not documentation. That’s why it seems worth raising again the tasteless but factual issue of the connection between elements at the core of the 1999–2003 hipster moment and right-wing attitudes.
It was the New York Times that finally reported in 2003 the persistent connection of Vice magazine, and particularly its most voluble editor, Gavin McInnes, to unlikeable attitudes about race. The magazine had always made hostile jokes and used epithets about feminists and gays. Vanessa Grigoriadas for the Times dug into the reality of the attitudes, and concluded that they were real. She quoted McInnes: “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. . . . I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”
Grigoriadas then pointed out to readers an essay McInnes had published earlier that year in Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative on how Vice was helping to confirm young people in the turn away from ’60s liberal follies. Was this a prank? But it followed an even odder article Vice had published on their own ethos, which they called “The New Conservatives,” combining it with a fashion spread no different from any other in the magazine. Whatever was true of Vice’s attitudes, you can feel their essential confusion and error in an interview from the previous year’s New York Press with two of Vice’s three editors, McInnes and Suroosh Alvi, that seems more or less sincere:
[Interviewer:] Vice’s approach to homosexuality and race isn’t traditionally punk rock.
GM: The punk rock-ness of that is just plain honesty. We seem really racist and homophobic because we hang around with fags and niggers so much. It just becomes part of our vernacular.
SA: Also, in ’94, when these magazines were coming out, the political correctness in North America was overwhelming. Especially in the academic settings we’d just come out of. So we were reacting against that.
GM: I think we got pissed off only after we wrote what came naturally to us and it offended people. We were determined to leave it in. It was just the way we talked. It’s surprising how brainwashed by hippies most of our generation is. Pro-love, pro-diversity, pro-tolerance– that’s the hippies’ bag. You want to hear people talk about niggers, try hanging around with black people. They are harsh. You want to hear anti-Semitism, go hang around with some Jews. You should hear Suroosh talk about fucking Pakis. It’s ear-burning. I’d argue that racists like the KKK don’t really have anything to say about niggers and fags because they don’t know any. They don’t go, “I am so sick of fucking drag queens. They are so self-indulgent. Fashion this, fashion that. Can’t you talk about politics for one second, you fucking transsexual?” They don’t know. We’re in the thick of it.
You see the mistake: being “in the thick of ” industries tolerant of gays and Jews doesn’t justify you thinking of them as fags and greedy Jew bastards. Only later in the interview does the line appear for which McInnes was ultimately criticized — when asked how Vice could bear keeping their offices in Williamsburg where there were so many post-collegiate wannabes, he replied: “Well, at least they’re not fucking niggers or Puerto Ricans. At least they’re white.” I find it vaguely plausible, as McInnes protested to the gossip website Gawker.com, that aspects of each of these episodes were jokes and publicity stunts, and particularly that he wanted to scandalize the New York Times, which he counted on Gawker to hate along with him.
The thing about jokes, though, is that they do let you see where people’s minds characteristically go, what it is they play with, when they reach the borders of social familiarity. For Norman Mailer, a self-proclaimed sexual ideologue and a leftist of varying types (sometimes a radical, sometimes a “left conservative” opposed to over-hygienic technocracy, but a man always alive to democracy of an essentially sensual, corporeal, Whitmanian kind), any effort at scandal took his mind toward miscegenation. He wanted, at least, to exalt something other than himself, combine, and disaffiliate from the whiteness he was bored by.* If Mailer was foolish when he wrote “The White Negro” — and he implied a decade later in The Armies of the Night that his black friends had told him, after the essay, that he was a fool — at least he was a fool who clumsily championed the violation of racial and class boundaries. In contrast, something in the “white hipster” imagination moved inexorably toward justifying rich whites in not having to be anything but white. Hipsters rationalized white colonization and separation by unconsciously forming an ethnicity for themselves (not connected, either, to the national-linguistic European ethnicities that lie behind Swedish Day or St. Patrick’s Day or the Feast of San Gennaro). Hipsters worked this magic to keep themselves from feeling compromised, where compromise would have meant being obligated or connected to anyone among whom they might settle, Puerto Ricans or blacks or Jews or Poles or just people without money.
* Mailer was also Jewish, at a time when being Jewish did not make one fully white, and yet he had experienced a class rise, from ghetto Brooklyn to Harvard to old-boy literary life, which was unusual and just newly becoming available to Jews. In his mature career, he went out of his way to embrace the obscene and the “vital.” Mailer thus offers an interesting test case for the contradictory class and racial positions available from mid-century to the present, and he, too, happens to have been viewing much of it from the (then predominantly Jewish) Lower East Side — he lived on Pitt Street in 1952.
I KNOW THAT THIS EARLY hipster culture, in its aspect of an aggressive fetishization of whiteness, ceased to exist. You could feel it coming to an end in 2003 — the sneaker-shop looting is a convenient symbol, but it really felt more like a loss of creative energy on the Lower East Side than a reaction from neighbors, like a tire draining of air. Hipsters clearly persisted and regrouped, though, with different markers and habits, in similar neighborhoods, and then in wider circles mediated by television and the internet.
The trouble is, I personally don’t really know what hipsters 2004–2009 were like. The reason for my ignorance is aging. I mean: I got old. I turned 30, which seems as good a marker as any for a kind of electrified fence, running through the life-course, which can keep you out of subculture. Thirty is the age above which the ’60s suggested nobody should be trusted. I did keep walking the same streets of the Lower East Side, and I could identify hipsters. I just couldn’t see them with the same level of detail, nor did I understand the new fashions.
The reason isn’t hard to guess, though it’s not flattering for me. It must have been that I, like other people my age, was losing the compensatory benefits that an investment in hipsterism confers. If I didn’t gain from knowing the codes, it’s natural I would cease to see them or invest in understanding them.
Think about the ages at which subculture begins and ends for people. The essence of subculture is distinction. It can give a positive profile to unavoidable experiences of difference; you may join subculture when you are philosophically or ideologically out of step with the mainstream, or in some way handicapped in the dominant mainstream social competition. One easily understands why such forms of distinction take hold in high school, from ages fourteen to eighteen, and are valuable there. Your deficit becomes advantageous, if for nothing else than as a grounds for group solidarity. The loser who failed to make the football team becomes a skater; the nerd becomes a gamer; the leftist becomes a punk. In all sorts of frightening total institutions ruled by arbitrary authority, inmates will form groups for mutual defense and esteem, and then engage in inter-group rivalry and hierarchy. They persist to a greater or lesser extent in college depending on the specific structures of each institution.*
* Students at smaller institutions of higher education are more likely to reflect, already, a single coherent class stratum (in background or aspiration) attached to a high social status with shared goals, and thus to experience slighter differentiation by subcultures. Larger institutions with wider class spread will encourage more persistent subcultures, except where the task of sub-grouping is taken up by an organized mainstream structure like the Greek system.
At age 22, however, when ambitious post-collegians travel to central metropolises, subculture can take on a new role. Many experience a sudden declassing in cities relative to college and even high school. The young graduate comes from a high status position but is suddenly without income and has no place in a city indifferent to college hierarchies. He or she still possesses enormous reserves of what Pierre Bourdieu termed cultural capital, waiting to be activated — a degree, the training of the university for learning tiny distinctions and histories, for the discovery and navigation of cultural codes — but he or she has temporarily lost the real capital and background dominance belonging to his class. Certain kinds of subculture allow cultural capital to be re-mobilized among peers and then within the fabric of the “poorer” city, to gain distinction and resist declassing.
Hence the meaning of the (not literally true) assumption that “all hipsters are rich”: the truth it speaks to is the knowledge that, income-poor though they may be temporarily, young people who choose and can afford to pursue this form of status competition often have, at the least, been recipients of significant educational investment (leading to the college degree) and are likely to have possessed some safety from their previous, parental class status (a reliably middle-class backstop). Soon enough they are likely to ascend out of the poorer, low-rent neighborhoods in which they temporarily live. As for those ambitious people who move to the city from lower-middle-class backgrounds, the hipster mode equally provides worthwhile distinction in a cultural effort at classing up; you blend in and gain a new taste of future superiority. Superiority over other classes than your peers, too: you may be tending bar, but if you are tending bar in hip clothes and you’re in a band at night, you’ll always possess higher status in culture (if not in income) than the bond-trader losers ordering vodka tonics in button-downs.
The significance of age 30? A large percentage of those urban post-collegians, interning at some non-profit at 22 or 23 (or still planning to produce art or literature), by their experience of loss of status learn the superior economic rationality of trying to recover their earlier class positions by reentering conventional white collar work. Thus every micro-generation will be surprised by the number of its members who have been secretly preparing law-school applications while making fun of rich people who wear suits. Once these peers have a law degree and enter a firm — or, say, more generally, once many postgraduates have risen a bit, over five or eight years, within other chosen professions with middle- or upper-class remuneration (maybe they worked at these jobs all along, but dressed modishly) — they will have gained the means to compete and exploit the benefits of the metropolis on traditional grounds of income and class dominance. They take up more expensive and higher-class mainstream cultural distinctions (European-made cars, four-star restaurants, home mortgages). They fall out of subculture and fall upward into the mainstream.
When I look, in my blind way, at the hipsters of 2004–2009, a few things do stand out. The return of music — and a particular pattern of significance in the hipster music — crops up. I’ve said that early “white hipsters” were painfully unmusical, but the bands they did create pastiched previous white rock. This included bands like the White Stripes and The Strokes.* The music that hipsters listen to post–2004 seems to have a different mood, and here are the names of some significant bands: Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, Deerhunter, Fleet Foxes, Department of Eagles, Wolf Parade, Band of Horses, and, behind and above them, Animal Collective. I watch their videos and enjoy a certain atmosphere of pleasant orgy, with traces of psychadelia; hear animal sounds, and lovely Beach Boys harmonies; see unlocalizable rural redoubts, on wild beaches and in forests, in a loving, spacious, and manageable nature. And so many of the bands seem to dress up in masks or plush animal suits.
* One is tempted to say: The White Stripes! Jack “White!” This aesthetic of Classic Rock-friendly blues was being produced in indie circles at the same time by a band calling itself The Black Keys, and both were pleasing in the way good cross-racial pastiche is agreeable when the original will never return again (cf. Winehouse, Amy). The moralistic question, as always, is whether the outcome of that racial crossover is cooperation or annexation. I prefer the former. (Thus I feel better about Amy Winehouse and her mostly black American or black English collaborators than about Jack White.) Also, imitating the “difference principle” in John Rawls’s theory of distributive justice, we might ask whether the crossover pastiche benefits black musicians and music first, by producing renewed access to the culture of the dominant, before it benefits additional white pasticheurs. But such questions are notoriously difficult to judge and many find them offensive.
This would have been just a blip of pop culture — but then, in dress, post–2004, one saw flannel return, both for men and women; women took up cowboy boots, then dark-green rubber Wellingtons, like country squiresses off to visit the stables and the gamekeeper. Scarves proliferated unnecessarily, somehow conjuring a cold woodland night (if wool) or a desert encampment (the keffiyeh). Then scarves were worn as bandanas, as when Mary-Kate Olsen sported one, like a cannibal Pocahontas, starved enough to eat your arm. Hunting jackets in red-and-black check came back briefly.
It thus looks from the outside, both in music and in style, as if the post–2004 hipster turn has included an embrace of animal primitivism. Maybe also, in other clues, a kind of technological reduction. The youngest subcultures seem to know that the internet is convenient and also that the internet is a nuisance. In defiance of those graduates of the earlier hipster generation who, aging, retooled themselves as messianic internet-fetishistic prophets and publicists (“it’ll change everything!”), children born as the ’80s advanced seem to have seen their birthright in perspective. The ability to take the internet for granted, with its now complete penetration of life, led to compensatory reductions elsewhere. The most advanced hipster youth suddenly even deprived their bikes of gears. As CDs declined, LP records gained sales for the first time in two decades — seemingly purchased by the same kids who had 3,000 downloaded songs on their hard drives. The fixed-gear bike now ranks as the most visible urban marker of hip besides the skinny jean, and not the least of its satisfactions is its simple mechanism, and repairing it.
We’ll have to wait and see whether the animals and fixies represent the spirit of a way out of a world of endless consumption and waste, resource depletion, environmental disaster, and the idiocy of internet messianism. Those we disparage as hipsters may represent just the least conscious, most consumerist tip of subcultures that may have richer philosophies and folkways — I hope so. I wish I knew the history of how Williamsburg after 2004, which felt like it had degenerated into a land of yuppie ex-hipsters having babies, got re-peopled with new 23- and 24-year-old bike-fixing hipsters who, to their credit, partly exiled the mombots and old, tattooed dads to the quieter precincts of Brooklyn Heights, Clinton Hill, or Park Slope.
What happened to the Lower East Side, meanwhile, I can attest: bigger capital moved in. The core hipster area very quickly entered capitalism’s replica phase, in the pattern of postmodern development whereby originals are destroyed or priced out of an area beloved for its authenticity, so that mainstream pastiches can be installed with wider appeal, higher prices, and greater profitability. Thus, once kosher Ratner’s closed in 2002 after nearly a century in business, the restaurant producer Keith McNally installed Schiller’s (2003) one block north, replicating the look of an imaginary antique establishment from the neighborhood, but serving nachos. Coinciding with this was the arrival of high-rises and luxury residences: the out-of-place Blue building (2006), then the gigantic and numbing Hotel on Rivington (2005; beds for $820 per night) and Ludlow luxury apartment complex (2008). This was the phase of classic destructive gentrification, coming after hipster colonization. The hipster-coded kids I talk to now in cafes on the Lower East Side inform me they commute in from Bushwick or Bed-Stuy, to visit or jerk coffee in “their favorite place” that still reminds them of what they thought New York was going to be like when they arrived.
My hope is that amidst whatever sources of energy outside him- or herself the hipster no doubt continues to draw upon and advance, the self-satisfaction with whiteness, at least, will have somehow diminished — even if the Other whose blood hipsters suck isn’t a trucker, but an imagined wild animal or an off-the-grid monkeywrenching hermit. If this consumerist culture of the hipster does survive and change, in the hopeful age of Obama, then even if it’s still buying something, maybe it will buy something better.