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Too Hip, Gotta Go

Chris Farmer RSS / 29.03.2014. u 16:11

I just found out I am too old to be a hipster. I am just old-fashioned. If I were under 30, then old-fashioned would qualify as hipster. Thus spake the Urban Dictionary.

The hipster has become ubiquitous. They sport my old clothes. They wear my old glasses. They listen to music which either predates me or hasn't yet been invented. In fact, every time that I sorted through my old things and gave them away, I was helping to forge the Hipster.

It is a great responsibility.

The word Hipster seems to derivate directly from Hippie. Hippies in the 1960s and 70s had a sort of agenda: rejection of traditional values, anti-war, free love, freeing themselves from the death-grip of societal restrictions. As a counterculture, they were knocked for a loop one fine morning when they woke to see that (suddenly) they had won. Hippy culture stopped being rejected and was co-opted by the very society that had been the oppressor. Why? Because the hippies grew up and became it.

My parents' generation (and arguably my parents themselves) were genuine hippies.

The house where we lived from 1972-1978 was painted in kaleidoscopic polychromes in the middle of a staunchly conservative Iowa town. They preferred browns, grays, and whites. I remember old farmers chiding my dad for his wild-man beard at a local diner. We wore homemade and second-hand clothes. We ate alfalfa and granola and carob instead of chocolate.

Although I was still a kid, hippie-ness had begun already to transform from rebellion into cool. We all had bell-bottoms. We wore peace signs around our necks. We had aviator sunglasses. We got a little mixed up between being a 70s dude and being a 50s Fonzie, but the course was pretty much steady through the decade.

In the 80s, of course, the winds changed and gradually drifted from the coolness of the post-hippie into the hard-edged Gordon Gekko model of trendy. In the meantime, the intergenerational preppies and yuppies invaded and retreated.

Fast forward (another hipster-friendly term since my old cassette recorder belongs to them now) to yesterday afternoon at about 3:30, and we now have hipsters everywhere. This is not plain old retro style - they seem to want to become a class of humanity. The main difference I see between the hippies and the hipsters lies in the intention. Hippies rejected the outward appearance or external influence on them. Hipsters, on the other hand, are all about the look.

If you examine them carefully, you will detect an attention to detail that is highly developed. Not all glasses frames are accepted: they should be large, black, and Walter Cronkite-like. The colors are not hippie psychedelic but relatively subdued, if mixed eccentrically.

The hipster is proud of being different from the masses crowding his Zeitgeist. He does not notice that the masses around him aspire to being hipsters too. It's just too hip not to be. Jerry Seinfeld, in his "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee", observed the endemic irony of these dare-to-be-differenters. "If they were really hipsters," he said, "how could there be so many of them?"

This is not a counter-culture. This is what we have become. Future historians will look on to this decade and wonder if this was the pivotal point where the human race just ran out of ideas.

In the home, the hipster likes "shabby chic". To a hipster generation generator such as I, this means that all of the old, poorly painted furniture which we threw out of French farmhouses has now become a Recognized Style. The term shabby chic was invented by a writer for the World of Interiors in the 80s but is only now coming into its own. The definition is "a form of interior design where furniture and furnishings are either chosen for their appearance of age and signs of wear and tear or where new items are distressed to achieve the appearance of an antique." The new old is new - but old.

But new. Whatever.

One day, gazing into the future, when I am a guru sitting high atop a mountain in Tibet, young pilgrim hipsters will come to ask the one question which will turn their lives around and give them meaning: "How did you dress in 1984?"

 

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8c_competizione 8c_competizione 12:50 30.03.2014

he he he

have here in Berlin an English chap who would fully agree with you!

will forward him link to your blog immediately

for this piece of text you should win Nobel prize:

Future historians will look on to this decade and wonder if this was the pivotal point where the human race just ran out of ideas.


gotta same feeling!

and it is scary sometimes.
gavrilo gavrilo 21:26 30.03.2014

hip, hip hura

a...hipsteri su danas mainstream, razmisljam da se preselim u sumu dok se sve ovo ne zavrsi
Filip2412 Filip2412 20:06 31.03.2014

...

on the other hand... was there any time in the modern history that older folks were not having the same complaint: We did it all before, just better!

Arhiva

   

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