HOW MUCH I (HATE) LOVE HIPSTERS

Once, I asked E. what kind of men attract her the most. Hipsters – she said without hesitation. “They are so cool” (it is no longer recommended to use the term “cool” – a Hipster would instead say “deck”). Of course they are. And they know it. 

Every age uses dress and body decoration to signal what is most important at this historical moment. Throughout most of our history that message has been, “I am rich”, or “I am powerful”.
Hipster would say “I am authentic”.
Are you sure?

Early 50s. Thelonious Monk and his fellow band members are standing outside Minton’s Playhouse. All four wear double-breasted suits which are roomy by today’s standards. But check out the accessories. As well as a tie, Monk wears a scarf tied around his neck, really cosmic hi-tech shades and, to top it all off, a black beret. Monk’s proclaim (and he might be right!) “I’m one of a kind” or in the parlance of the day, I’m one hip cat”. 

Thelonius Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge and Teddy Hill outside Minton's Playhouse, Harlem, 1950s.
source: http://royceferguson.blogspot.com/2010/07/thelonious-monk.html

Historically, the term “Hipster” has come to be identified with the 1950s and with bebop, but Cab Calloway wrote and published a Hipster’s Dictionary as far back as 1938. In the early period, Hipster was black (Calloway, Malcolm X), but the late forties he seems to have become “a white negro”. 

Nowadays, we make fun of the idea of the Hipster Handbook: “The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream”. But actually, it comes from the idea that whereas the original Black Hipster had been locked out of mainstream white society by virtue of his color, the White Hipster locked himself out and threw away the key. The hipsterness was a rejection of the “straight” lifestyle. 

 

Postmodern theorists from Frederic Jameson to Jean Baudrillard see the elusiveness of authenticity as the fundamental crisis of our age. But without Hipsters and their eccentricity, operating according to their own rules – outside the system streets would be boring.

However, Dear Hipsters,

Just hanging around, looking sharp, be dressed up doing nothing in particular is not enough. And the idea that you possess so called taste (see: “From Gemstones to Jewellery” Roland Barthes) and you reduce mainstream to kitsch is not a Hipster mythology...

p.s. E. told me that you possess no more than 2% body fat.
Seriously!?