2010

I went to a panel yesterday at my school called Look at this F*cking Panel. Basically it was about the phenomenon of the hipster in modern society. First of all the panel sucked (due, mostly, to this one obnoxious asshole who just continually pulled everything down to a crasser level. One bad apple in the barrel and everything rots). There was no real attempt to answer that eternal question: What is a hipster? And, following, Should we promote hipsterdom? Should hipsters die? What?
(The only question that was satisfyingly answered was, If a 40-year-old man walks onto a panel without a shirt on, does it almost definitely indicate that he is a douchebag?)
I think it's the very act of calling things hipster - the very name itself - that corrupts the whole concept, makes people self-conscious and defensively ironic. There's a certain over-cerebral, pseudo-intellectual quality to hipsters that, to me, is the problem - thinking too much.
Nobody wants to see themselves as a stereotype, and we all have our reasons to support our innate non-hipsterness. Here's mine: I (for the most part, I have to qualify) don't do things for the sake of it. I don't wear certain clothes for the sake of it... I don't listen to 'cool' bands I don't like for the sake of it... If given the choice I usually pick substance over style, true gut feeling above all. More than anything I look to be truly moved by something. That's why I liked Avatar more than 500 Days of Summer. I don't love Radiohead (hah! Is Radiohead still a hipster band, or am I hopelessly outdated?) because I think I should, I love Radiohead because I find their music beautiful and moving on a visceral level. I like to think it goes beyond style, and that I would have loved them if I'd never heard of them, and that I would have loved Hail to the Thief, for example, if I'd been exposed to it in the cradle.
I like to think of my habits and my preferences as organic and completely personal; that I'm doing stuff because I have genuine emotional motivations, instead of blindly assimilating some insidiously pre-designed, manufactured, over-intellectual idea of what I should do. I try not to think or care about what it looks like. In America people are way too quick to label - one of the aspects of American culture I dislike the most, and of course the one I too have picked up on.
Of course I'm sure many hipsters would say the same for themselves. Fuck, ok, from now on I swear never to use that stupid word again.

PS: I realized that what I was talking about has not only already been talked about, it has its own Wiki page: the "New Sincerity". Shit, no matter what I do, I'm still definable by a Wiki page?