ALL DESCRIPTIONS OF hipsters are doomed to disappoint, because they will not be the hipsters you know. Yet someday when hipsters no longer walk the earth, and subcultures have changed, and new aesthetics have evolved, with new terms of disapprobation and praise, the hipster of the period 1999–2010 will remain of historic interest — and investigators at a later date will be at the mercy of whether or not we chose to record our impressions today.
I am reminded of a liberty a friend once took with me. “Have you ever heard of Ali G?” he asked. “No,” I answered. “Great, just listen to me do his routines — my impression of him’s perfect.”
Those of you who have encountered hipsters in real life, in other words, may surely complain of the characterizations in this book. But to those of you who are reading this in 2050, I can only say: Everything in this book is true, and its impressions are perfect.
THE PURPOSE OF What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation is to find out if it is possible to analyze a subcultural formation while it is still happening, from the testimony of people who are close to it. We used the collective knowledge of a very idiosyncratic group of people: readers of and writers for the journal n+1, plus interested strangers, at a panel held at the New School; then, after the event, journalists and other critics to whom we gave the early transcripts, so they could challenge our approach and disagree.
Participants were welcome to exploit their own immediate experience and knowledge, their scholarly and analytic inclinations, and whatever bad motives and resentments they no doubt harbored toward ex-neighbors, rivals, or people who dress better or more expensively, to add to a record of a single stereotype and bogeyman — the modern hipster — who has environed us all for more than ten years, at the precise instant that this figure may be changing.
The metamorphosis of the “hipster” — if it is real — involves a word that has been used for insult and abuse gaining a neutral or even positive estimation in the culture. It accompanies the sense that hipster fashion has entered the mainstream as a set of style accessories repackaged for purchase in shopping malls across America, but also that the deeper social impulses that helped create the hipster — as well as the vitally necessary impulses to impugn hipsters — have gone global, mushrooming in Europe and Latin America, too.
It is not possible to say that the hipster is dead — perhaps you know some, perhaps you’ve seen them eat and sleep — but the fact that one begins to hear visitors to cafes in Williamsburg or on the Lower East Side describe themselves or their friends as “sort of hipsters, you know,” suggests it may be time to round up the original target’s early history, and the word’s original hostile meanings, before it is too late.
“HIPPIE” — A TERM of abuse invented by hipsters or beatniks of the postwar generation for “little hipsters,” who just liked to dance and smoke pot but knew nothing about jazz or politics or poetry — became available to mass media in the mid-1960s, thus attracting new, young converts to the lifestyle, until the different sorts of younger people now correctly called “hippies” (who had known themselves as “freaks,” or “heads,” or possessed no name) accepted it, too, and even found it useful as an identifier (“You dig, it’s like a hippie shirt.”).*
* This, anyway, is the story familiarly told. See Charles Perry, The HaightAshbury: A History (New York: Random House, 1984), 5-6, a pop account based on an impressive wealth of interviews with key protagonists. One additional description from Perry of early, pre-1965 “hippie” derogation and style may be notable because of its surprising echoes with the charges against modern hipsters: “Another grievance was that while Beats were always down and out, the hippies seemed to have money. . . . What was unique to hippies was their attitude — an expansive, theatrical attitude of being cool enough to have fun. They called themselves dudes and ladies rather than cats and chicks. Unlike Beats in their existential black and folkies in their homespun and denim, they wore flashy Mod clothes. . . . Hippies were scattered around in other places in the country, too [besides San Francisco, their birthplace], mostly near college campuses.” This certainly sounds a lot like present-day hipsters, and it clearly precedes the later identification of hippiedom with the politics of the anti-war and peace movements.
Could we be at a point with the hipster as significant as that one? Presumably not. Surely a subcultural moniker can’t be of immense importance twice. The word hipster comes out of the distant American past, as the name for a previous, truly significant subculture. A main line of our investigation into contemporary hipsters takes up the central concern of that earlier figure, the 1940s and 1950s-era hipster — namely, race, as blackness and whiteness, source of knowledge and ground of resistance, from before the Civil Rights era through our supposedly post-racial era — and asks how the old name came to be taken up again.
Hipsterism as an identifiable phenomenon also very clearly has to do with particular fashions, and fashion micro-trends, which are notoriously hard to explain. The question of which exterior markers are essential to the hipster, and where they came from and what they mean, clearly drives people most to distraction in these pages. Yet one begins to get hints, thereby, of what is at stake in matters of distinction, and self-love, and superiority around such differences — and, maybe more importantly, how supposedly inexplicable fashion details (like the trucker hat or “ironic” T-shirt), at their origins, actually signified very obvious, precise, and near-articulate things about who one fantasized oneself to be, or apologized for, or envied — especially as these fashions duplicated elements of the past, allowing forms of communication and reinforcement of ideology. Thus fashion details may be more explicable than they seem. One begins to wonder if, more generally, the claim of their arbitrariness is a matter of mystification, and a refusal to trace them to their first wearers or proponents.
We proceeded in our investigations as follows. On a Saturday afternoon in spring 2009, an initial symposium and discussion took place, announced in advance and advertised to the public, at the New School in Manhattan. This book reprints the original papers offered for discussion — though the centerpiece of this book is clearly the lengthy floor debate and discussion that followed. We have resisted the impulse to correct mistakes by the panelists (though a few factual errors are annotated).
Two of the more extensive reportorial accounts of the event follow, in a section called “Dossier,” giving a feeling for how the effort was initially received. In the months after the panel, the editors sent transcripts to commentators who we believed might question or dispute the proceedings so far, opening the topic up in new ways. The section with their remarks is titled “Responses.” At this point, the organized investigation should spill over into the reader’s domain — you, the reader, will have your own sense of where an inquest into the hipster will need to go next, and where you, yourself, disagree. A final section of “Essays,” however, offers more considered and detailed articles on particular sub-topics of the field, or expansions into the hipster’s contact with the world beyond him — taking up the hipster Other (a.k.a. the “douchebag”), hipster race, hipster gender, hipster aesthetics, and the hipster future.
FOR ONCE, HERE is analysis of a cultural phenomenon not learned from TV, or pre-digested. Thank god for that: when one investigates the record of any subculture, one sees how thoroughly past moments get summed up and misrepresented by intellectual annexations, money-making efforts, second-order media replicas, and latecomers. As if hipsters were Norman Mailer, the hippies were Woodstock, punk were the Sex Pistols, or grunge were Kurt Cobain! Yet each of these manufactured phenomena, because of their superior access to wider publicity strategies and capital (and film, crucially, alongside recorded music the most important medium of subcultural transfer), became instrumental in the reproduction of genuine impulses of resistance and hope across generations.
At the same time, neither are the contributors’ accounts purely subjective or “on the scene” — far from it, and anyone implicated in the hipster circles spotlighted here will surely detest these contributors as latecomers, spoilsports, and intellectualizers. I believe, having read the texts carefully, that these contributions do converge on a true accounting of the hipster phenomenon, from a certain remove. They try out definitions based on what we’ve experienced so far, and test historical phases, and mount up possible characteristics — not to mention putting together a king’s ransom of rumors and stories and historical facts (or pseudo-facts) that should go into any time capsule of the hipster moment.
I also see that these accounts converge on areas of common blindness. These gaps, as often as not, reflect social conditions of the hipster phenomenon itself — including the persistent inability, despite the centrality of women in every sphere of fashion, art, and endeavor touched by hipsterism, to place the “hipster feminine,” or to think about hipster women beyond the filter of male domination of the category.
Though these contributions are meant to be diagnostic, each one must be acknowledged as symptomatic, too, reflecting unconscious attitudes, flaws, vanities, and errors, which can add to the picture of what it once meant to speak of hipsters, in a climate of constant criticism and secret identification. When people sound like asses, we’ve pretty much allowed them to do so, and you will hear in these pages a certain amount of braying.
The authorities missing in this account, I regret to say, are professional social scientists. The study of the hipster, as opposed to the punk, hippie, raver, goth, cyber-utopian, or b-boy, has not yet drawn its scholars — or else they’re in the long and thankless stage of dissertation fieldwork, rather than on faculties where they can be easily located. Naturally, the best thinking that underlies these contributions, though, comes from the written insights of sociologists, anthropologists, urbanists, and geographers, whom literary people must read to understand the world we live in. Thus the slight presumption of the subtitle, A Sociological Investigation.
When I describe this project to people who think hipsters are just fashion victims or something fun, I say its purposes are social-scientific. When I talk to people who are more serious, I sometimes describe it as a parody of academic proceedings. It deliberately lacks the “rigor” (as professors say), or formality, of a university undertaking; but it is meant to let people’s lives in — to show that the ludicrous can be studied, and, equally, that the serious and academic can be ludic, playful, ordinary.
The anti-intellectualism of American pleasure reading (and the formal requirements of quantification and literature reviews for academia) seem to keep social-scientific books off the hip reading lists of friends. The work of sociology just about everyone discussed in these pages ought to read and experience, as a kind of required generational exercise in self-criticism, is Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979). For strategic and professional reasons, Bourdieu targeted that book to high-intellectual cadres in university circles — and the buy-in required for understanding included a quantity of new vocabulary and mental labor usually only encountered in academic philosophy. This little book of ours, on its best reading, will, I hope, send interested parties back to that literature — to Bourdieu, of course, but also to key popular social scientists in our time who have written a crossover literature of wide influence and importance: Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Arlie Russell Hochshild, David Harvey, Juliet Schor, Mike Davis, and others whose names can be found in the bibliography at the back of these pages.
ONE L AST THING. A number of people have sniggered — non-participants and participants both (you’ll hear their teasing in the debate transcript) — at the idea of n+1, “a journal of literature, intellect, and politics” founded in New York in 2004 (and physically produced in the hipster neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and then Dumbo), initiating a highbrow discussion of hipsters. Partly the challenge is that the topic seems too stupid and demeaning. One of our readers emailed us as soon as the panel was announced, to say: “Is this a joke? If it isn’t, that’s very, very sad.” For others, the trouble was that it was too much like us — this challenge is one of what the sociologist would call “inadequate reflexivity.” The charge is that n+1 is itself a hipster journal, and molded by the same social forces. I think the former is false, the latter true. The hipster represents, in a deep way, a tendency we founded the magazine to combat; yet he exists on our ground, in our neighborhood and particular world, and is an intimate enemy — also a danger and temptation.
Having read these proceedings, responses, and essays many times now, I think I’ve learned the following: The hipster represents what can happen to middle class whites, particularly, and to all elites, generally, when they focus on the struggles for their own pleasures and luxuries — seeing these as daring and confrontational — rather than asking what makes their sort of people entitled to them, who else suffers for their pleasures, and where their “rebellion” adjoins social struggles that should obligate anybody who hates authority.
Or, worse: the hipster is the subcultural type generated by neoliberalism, that infamous tendency of our time to privatize public goods and make an upward redistribution of wealth. Hipster values exalt political reaction, masquerading as rebellion, behind the mask of “vice” (a hipster keyword). Hipster art and thought, where they exist, too often champion repetition and childhood, primitivism and plush animal masks. And hipster anti-authoritarianism bespeaks a ruse by which the middle-class young can forgive themselves for abandoning the claims of counterculture — whether punk, anti-capitalist, anarchist, nerdy, or ’60s — while retaining the coolness of subculture. It risks turning future avant-gardes into communities of “early adopters.”
But I see I’m getting ahead of myself — anyway, it’s the universal instinctive hatred of hipsters (even among hipsters!) that makes me believe things will be fine, if we could just see things more clearly — and I may be prejudicing the case.
Enjoy.
– MG