Why do people hate hipsters?
There was a party going on in London E5; a house party in one of the Victorian terraces that line the streets in this modest area of east London. There had been parties on the street before, only on this particular Friday evening two months ago, guests wore Ray-Bans, deep-cut v-neck T-shirts and skinny jeans. They were also, according to one partisan report, in possession of “a sound system louder than the big bang”. Quite an event, yet not everyone in the street appreciated the loud music and louder fashions.
“I only put ‘hate’ in the title of the blog,” explains annoyed neighbour and anonymous author of Hackney Hipster Hate photo-blog, “because, on the night I wrote it, I was watching floods of hipsters arrive in the early hours at a terrace house and having an Ibiza-style party. It drove me insane.”
The partying, which lasted until 4am on Saturday morning was, in the blogger’s opinion, symptomatic “of new arrivals not really getting the measure of where they were living, having no idea about the community there and deciding to have a festival in a back garden at dawn, while people were trying to sleep, because Hackney’s supposedly the centre of cool for the next five minutes.”
Though it began in a moment of sleep-deprived abhorrence, Hackney Hipster Hate now posts images of fashionable east Londoners accompanied by a scornful commentary. The site has become one of an increasing number dedicated to vilifying fashionable twits who appear to care more about the next big thing than the welfare of their fellow man. Got slimline jeans, tattoos, a headband and a fixed-wheel bike? Then perhaps turn away now.
American comedian Joe Mande began his photo-blog, Look At This Fucking Hipster in April 2009. The site also captions shots of the young and pretentious with lines such as: “Hold on, let me check to see if Topshop sells any iPhone purses.” A paperback collection of the best posts was published in March 2010.
In July 2009 US writers and editors Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz began Stuff Hipsters Hate. They’ve also published a paperback collection of posts.
The Unhappy Hipsters photo-blog was inaugurated in January 2010. It satirises the smug, modernist home-owners often seen in the pages of US interiors magazine Dwell.
Hipster Hitler web comic was launched in August 2010. It re-imagines the führer as a cardigan-wearing know-it-all, fond of bicycles, organic cashews and typewriters. Fans can buy American Apparel T-shirts bearing such slogans as “Eva 4 Eva” and “Death Camp For Cutie”.
Early this September, TheGrandSpectacular posted its debut pop video, Being a Dickhead’s Cool, on YouTube. While lacking that crucial H word, the song brutally teases London’s poseurs and the video animates shots taken from Hackney Hipster Hate and latfh.com, among other sources. Since its upload on 8 September, the original clip has had around 3,275,000 views.
In autumn/winter 2010, if there’s one thing more fashionable than being a hipster, it’s laughing at hipsters.
Of course, ridiculing young poseurs isn’t an especially new thing to do. The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker created the character of Nathan Barley, a vacuous media playboy, back in 1999, around the same time the east London fanzine The Shoreditch Twat began published its first edition. Plenty of the jokes in 80s sitcom The Young Ones, or even the 70s comedy Butterflies were at the expense of similarly youthful pretentions.Though these newer, online baiters pick similar targets, it isn’t clear that the term hipster, in its modern usage, is sharply defined enough for truly cutting satire. While all these sites appear to know what they’re talking about, none of them offers a working definition of a hipster.
The OED isn’t much help; it traces the word back to the 1940s and offers “hepcat” as its rough equivalent. Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay The White Negro was subtitled Superficial Reflections on the Hipster and describes an American existentialist who adopts the jazzier trappings of African-American life to free himself (and it usually is a he) from “the squares”. Yet “hipsters” was also used during the 1960s to describe trousers that flared from the hip. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that in August the New York Times has advised its journalists against using the word, citing doubts over “how precise a meaning it conveys”; meanwhile, a public debate held at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently failed to offer a useful description of this latter-day bogeyman.
Read more here at guardian
