What's a hipster?

JoeV said:
I agree with the notion that the term "hipster" is frequently used as a put-down. But I admire younger folk who actively seek to find value in the artifacts of older culture. It certainly beats the false pretension of my generation's youth, when everyone had to have long hair and bellbottom denim in order to be "counterculture."

Myself, I have a long beard and like film cameras and manual typewriters. But what keeps me from being a "hipster" is that I can't fit into those skinny jeans!

~Joe
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At the same time I was first introduced to a darkroom in Junior High, I came to school with wire rim glasses, army jacket, and "the little red book". This must have been about 1969-70. LOL

I google imaged "hipster", and it was pretty interesting. I think if I was living in the big city I would chase them around and take pictures with the M9, which if lucky they would mistake for an M6 ;)

Labels and pidgeonholes....a fundamental human shortcut to "understanding".

Being human I see them as sort of yuppie punks.
 
So much hand-wringing over other people's lifestyles. Yeesh. Better than looking in the mirror I suppose.

Also, my user name is a Seinfeld reference, so let me preempt any idea that I am a hipster. Ask any of my friends: I'm a straight-up nerd. Computers, cameras, and cars. A nerd in all of them.

Anyway, I think Rikard said it best earlier in the thread:

Rikard said:
People are generally angry with any type of movement/subculture that goes against the general value system society is built on.

Look at that guy riding a bike. Why don't he get a car like a normal person! Does he think he's better than us ordinary folks?

But really is it so bad to see organic food stalls, micro breweries, and small cafes competing with McDonalds, Budweiser and Starbucks?

Some people might try to hard (with their clothing, hairdos etc). But why anybody else would be bothered by that is beyond me.
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Hipsters are expressing a certain discomfort with 'modernity', and do so with an element of irony - they are reacting to a marketing-based society that traffics in images and artifice, not real stuff. Thus they like things that feel 'real', like film, vacuum tube amps, vinyl, paired down fixie bikes, craft beer and local produce, back alleys instead of suburban lawns. The lumber jack and thrift store looks are explicit responses to a world that puts a premium on image and logo.

They are young and immature kids who are dealing with big cultural and economic transitions, and they are doing an impressive job of creating a lifestyle that is a creative response to the suffocating world the previous generation left them. It is easy to make fun of them, but as I have said elsewhere they deserve our support and understanding.
They help keep film alive! And what dinosaur here has not suddenly felt more relevant when a young kid wants to see their ancient rangefinder?
 
zauhar said:
Hipsters are expressing a certain discomfort with 'modernity', and do so with an element of irony - they are reacting to a marketing-based society that traffics in images and artifice, not real stuff. Thus they like things that feel 'real', like film, vacuum tube amps, vinyl, paired down fixie bikes, craft beer and local produce, back alleys instead of suburban lawns. The lumber jack and thrift store looks are explicit responses to a world that puts a premium on image and logo.

They are young and immature kids who are dealing with big cultural and economic transitions, and they are doing an impressive job of creating a lifestyle that is a creative response to the suffocating world the previous generation left them. It is easy to make fun of them, but as I have said elsewhere they deserve our support and understanding.
They help keep film alive! And what dinosaur here has not suddenly felt more relevant when a young kid wants to see their ancient rangefinder?
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I like this view.
robert
 
For one, I don't really understand the OP's post.

I always associated the term ''hipster'' with this:

[...] Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality". [...] In his essay "The White Negro", Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self". [...] Source...Wikipedia

In that sense, modern hipsterness is very much a continuation of that same school of thought and life style and I don't have a problem with this.
 
jsrockit, nice capture of the bicycle couple.

B-9, "bike crusties" is a term I've not heard. Now I'll be on the look out for them. Getting the feeling genuine hipsters are more of an urban phenomenon. Up here in rural New Hampshire, if your not clothed in LL Bean or Carhart and don't sport a ZZ Top style beard, then you could be considered "hipster" material.
 
Peter Wijninga said:
For one, I don't really understand the OP's post.

I always associated the term ''hipster'' with this:

[...] Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality". [...] In his essay "The White Negro", Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self". [...] Source...Wikipedia

In that sense, modern hipsterness is very much a continuation of that same school of thought and life style and I don't have a problem with this.
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Peter, it is in a sense a continuation, but I do see two important distinctions - Kerouac and company lived in an age which was much freer. Read his descriptions of life in NYC and the west back then and there is a sense of endless possibility. He and is friends were not continually hemmed in by money concerns, by a suffocating sense of responsibility. There was the option of living in a dive, but at least there was a roof over your head. There was no shortage of work, whether in the fields or the railroad if you needed to quickly pick up some real money, and it was enough to keep the dive and buy some booze and weed and some books and records.

The sad fact is that our young hipsters work like dogs. They are line cooks, waiters, baristas, unpaid interns, stereotypical bike messengers (a grueling job by the way), and all the while struggling to keep their creative lives afloat. That is a scenario that I think many of the 'old folks' here can immediately connect with. And they live through this with remarkably good attitudes. I have some hope for the future when I am around them.

The other thing about Kerouac and company - no irony. Kerouac is one of the least ironic writers I know. His heart was completely open. Show me the irony in Ginsberg. In my limited reading of the genre Burroughs feels closest to irony, but even with him it's more a sense of pushing boundaries and taking the view of the outsider (like from another galaxy). There is still a rawness that precludes the controlled detachment of irony.

Randy

(Thanks Paul and Robert for supportive comments)
 
Roger Hicks said:
Who else remembers Young Fogies?
Cheers,

R.
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I was just about to do so! I particularly remember a brilliant cartoon in Private Eye (possibly by Honeysett) which featured a very old man walking with a zimmer frame through college grounds being observed by a couple of students, one of whom is saying to the other "of course Aloysius has always been one of the more extreme Young Fogeys".

The difference with Hipsters is that there were only ever about four people who were Young Fogeys, whereas there are plenty of Hipsters in many places (have you been to Hoxton Square or Peckham Rye recently?)
 
Roger Hicks said:
Who else remembers Young Fogies?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Fogey

and

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features...an-elegy/?SelectedIssueDate=13 September 2003

Cheers,

R.
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Austerby said:
I was just about to do so! I particularly remember a brilliant cartoon in Private Eye (possibly by Honeysett) which featured a very old man walking with a zimmer frame through college grounds being observed by a couple of students, one of whom is saying to the other "of course Aloysius has always been one of the more extreme Young Fogeys".

The difference with Hipsters is that there were only ever about four people who were Young Fogeys, whereas there are plenty of Hipsters in many places (have you been to Hoxton Square or Peckham Rye recently?)
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... it was the schism between Ingrams and Hislop when it became clear that I was, despite being a committed modernist, in fact in the fogey wing of the eye's subscribers, rather than a comrade of Dave Spart.
 
zauhar said:
The sad fact is that our young hipsters work like dogs. They are line cooks, waiters, baristas, unpaid interns, stereotypical bike messengers (a grueling job by the way), and all the while struggling to keep their creative lives afloat. That is a scenario that I think many of the 'old folks' here can immediately connect with. And they live through this with remarkably good attitudes. I have some hope for the future when I am around them.
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+1

...Mike
 
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Seems to me,hipsters do their utmost to appear as much out of fashion as possible. Which makes them sometimes difficult to distinguish from the regular folk who survived being the depraved youth of the 60ties onward.

Myself, I can claim being a hipster before it was cool : I sport a ponytail and facial hair since the eighties, had a nikon f2 photomic around my neck, and I've always liked Frank Zappa.

Ahead of the curve, and nobody noticed...
 
I use my hipster camera:
image_zpsktoeurnn.jpg


To take photos of hipsters (interestingly enough taken in downtown LA in the same area that started this thread):


b03beb42-cd4e-470d-89cd-deff71dcf838_zps7albhg6g.jpg
 
I visited with my family in NYC and had a chance to visit with one of my nephews. I did not really understand the "hipster" definition, but based on what I read in this thread, he definitely qualifies with all the toy camera film shots, his writing and general disdain for my brothers digs near Broadway & 67th LOL!

But now I totally understand what the "hipster" is. Definitely a counterculture person with a definite artistic bend... I think the clothing, hair fashion and all are part of the rejection of the "culture" that others adhere to. I have no criticism of the hipster mode. I was sort of a hipster back in the day...

Anyway, I'm fascinated by alternative cultures and lifestyles. I wish I could delve into them, but I'm too old and have my own idiosyncrasies. I guess in my own way, I'm too hip to fit :).
 
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