So You Realized You're a Hipster

I've recently been in discussions about what it means to be hipster, so I've been thinking a lot about it. There is nothing wrong with hipsters. I have to get that out of the way. Sure, they're easy to make fun of what with their bicycles and their tight jeans and hodgepodge outfits, and their weird bands that only they have heard of (Did I just stereotype a group of people? Does that make me racist?), but when you think about it, isn't it easy to make fun of anything? The thing with hipsters is that when they are made fun of outright, it seems derogatory. For some reason, the term hipster has garnered a negative connotation. Make the insult ironic, however, and you have a TV show. If that wasn't enough irony for you, maybe the target audience is the very demographic you're skewering: Middle class white urban twenty-somethings.

WHO TOLD YOU OUR METHODS?

This TV show exists, and it seems very meta, and it's fun, and it's innocent. Everyone involved, the show, its audience, and the subject matter, it's all done in good taste. It helps that the show is clever and that poop jokes are usually held to a minimum. It largely makes fun of white people, and by golly, we're so ridiculous it would be a waste not to.

This show in question is called Portlandia and it is a hit as far as an Independent Film Channel skit show can be considered a hit. The show tends to reference and satirize indie bands and movies, indie festivals, vegan-ism, bicycles, coffee shops, and other things that white urban twenty-somethings hold dear. And since everything has to have a label, let's call those white urban twenty-somethings hipsters. Although not everything on the show targets hipster culture, the majority happens to include it. And many (I dare say all) urban twenty-somethings are at least a little hipster (I know I'm probably wrong, but no, I'm not wrong). Now, all of that loosely describes a hipster and hipster culture, but it doesn't define it.

Definitions are so mainstream.

What defines a hipster changes so often that I'm not even sure if the above picture depicts how hipsters dress anymore. But the guy on the right looks enough like my friend Phil that it's probably fairly accurate. What can typically be agreed upon is that hipsters are a kind of counterculture.

Hipster culture (or counterculture) holds holy the things that are not in the limelight. If you've heard of the band, it's probably not hipster. If your outfit doesn't include a scarf and/or a fedora, it's probably not hipster. If you wear glasses because you had them prescribed to you by an actual optometrist then they probably aren't hipster. When the obscure becomes mainstream, the hipster trends change, and what we know as hipster culture today didn't really come into being until the early 2000s, and some people think it's already on its way out.

So who is hipster, and who isn't? Is it even possible to tell? I've discovered that that's a very fine line. A line that is defined by your mentality. I realized this when the band fun. became popular, because I liked them a lot up until the very second of that realization. Suddenly I couldn't stand to hear them anymore and the thought of them being nominated for a Grammy makes me want to vomit blood for a year. Hell, the very thought of how awful the Grammys are makes me sick to my stomach, what with all those pop songs and famous people and derivative performances. 

Ask yourself now if that makes me hipster. I'll help you by saying that it's happened to me with other things as well. Did you say "yes?"

Described above is a mentality that has been attached to hipster culture, the idea that something owes it to you to remain obscure. It was designated upon hipsters by people who don't understand hipster culture.  This guy understands hipster culture. He understands it better than you or me. But it doesn't make me hipster. When you assume that a hipster is looking down on you because of your taste, you are mislabeling the person. You're confusing "hipster culture" with "being a jerkstore." The thing that confuses people is that jerks can be hipsters too, but most hipsters could give a crap less what you like. I could give a crap less what other people like, I just don't like the band fun. and I happened to vocalize that dislike. If you do like them, more power to you. It boils down to the insecurity that people feel just because someone doesn't like the same thing as them. 

Or, you know, I'm a giant jerkstore.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T LIKE MINT CHOCOLATE CHIP!!!!????

Hipster culture has brought some more obscure things into the mainstream, and is that really a bad thing? You probably enjoy something right now that you wouldn't know about if it wasn't for some type of counterculture. 

What we need to do is look forward. I'm intrigued about what's coming, especially in music. If the Arcade Fire is mainstream, it won't be long for indie darling Bon Iver to follow. Pretty soon all the obscure bands will have pushed the mainstream ones out of the spotlight. The hipsters will have no choice but to pull the mainstream back into the obscure. Mark my words: In the future, hipsters will replace Monsters of Folk on their iPods with Ke$ha.

I give it five years.