🟧 Why did we stop saying “hipster”?

Individuality vs. the internet

Kyle Chayka: Time passes inexorably and suddenly one finds one’s life stretching through multiple eras, discrete periods that begin and end with alarming speed. I entered my 20s firmly in the era of “hipster” culture, and now in my mid-30s I have come to realize that it has receded far enough to have become unrecognizable history, the way millennials can’t operate rotary phones. At one point in time, say the late 2000s, the chief evidence of being a hipster was denying your status as such, it was that vital of a label. Your pro- or anti-hipster opinion constituted an entire worldview. Various trends – craft cocktails, indie rock, American Apparel, vinyl, skinny jeans — were identified with the hipster. There were three options: You were a hipster, you disliked them, or you disliked that you were one. 

fittingly low-res photo from the long-lost craft cocktail bar Dram in Williamsburg, via NYT c. 2011

The hipster ethos was, roughly, that you could claim your authentic individuality by consuming a particular set of aesthetic signifiers that were not mainstream. These were things that were theoretically unpopular, that were avoided by boring people, even as they gradually took their place as the dominant popular culture. Artisanality was a factor, a rebellion against the mass-produced. Denim had to be selvedge, menswear had to be tailored. It was a kind of self-conscious nicheness, formed on the perception that you appreciated things that other people didn’t. To make it personal, I once identified myself with enjoying the music of Sufjan Stevens. Now, the album that helped me feel like less of a loser in high school has become the basis of a Broadway musical. It’s as if I thought I was cool for liking Hamilton.

A few years ago, I realized that no one says “hipster” anymore. Not only has the word lost its status as a cultural movement or subcultural identity, it has lost its semantic meaning. It is no longer useful. New restaurants aren’t hipster; they’re basic or cringe or hyped or cool. New bands aren’t hipster; they’re indie-sleaze, hyperpop, or Spotifycore, slotting into atomized genres that aren’t significant enough for anyone to care about defining. (Mostly they’re not bands at all.) Hipster is over, I think, in part because no one can — or wants to — claim their individuality at this point. It is neither interesting nor logical to separate oneself from the herd. The herd is desirable for safety in the midst of destabilization. The herd must be leveraged as an audience in order to survive as any kind of artist. The influencer is the opposite of, and the successor to, the hipster, because rather than claiming to shun attention or resist fandom they actively court it. Selling out is not an issue when selling out is the sole means of survival.

The prized quality of artisanality means little when everyone has access to everything online, the ease of 2000s piracy translated into every medium, but legally at the push of a button and the payment of $10 per month. Personal taste is paradoxically harder to cultivate when you can listen to any album on Spotify. The New-American burger restaurant is now found in every American city, not to mention every international airport. (First-tier cities have lost their monopoly on the cutting edge now that any trend can be distributed and copied overnight; breakfast tacos are culinary Esperanto.) The replacement for craft cocktails in mason jars are arcane Los Angeles smoothies filled with stem cells and spirulina, for health that we accumulate fruitlessly, and co-branded with celebrities. Attempting to resist vapidity, the culture says, is pointless; we must accelerate it.

---

Nate Gallant: Reading Kyle's take on post-hipsterdom, I am drawn back to our discussion from the first week in March on the difference between the "scene" and the "aesthetic" in the context of subculture. That is, what happens when a term of self-identity for some roiling chaos of young humans, often trying to consciously interact with culture for the first time, becomes ad-speak for a set of infinitely reproducible colorways or online branding? In the case of "hipster," I am in total agreement that the term has gone beyond even "aesthetic," and is now pure insult for the hollowed out remnants and spare parts of millennial culture — if not a mere synonym for gentrification ("hipster" coffee shops) in major American cities. 

Personally, I missed whatever hipsterism was as a moment of self-identification, both out of my personal social media Luddism and not having moved to New York before 2019. There were young adults around me in my teens who identified with the scene, but the term is pure retrospect for me, and it does not inspire any particular nostalgia. Window-dressing for, say, the boys Ottessa Moshfegh's protagonist hates in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which placed the birth of Asics and baggy cargo-pants on the streets of Brooklyn way back in the late 90s. Or even my delirious viewing of High Maintenance, several years too late, while recovering from my first COVID vaccine, where I was shocked to discover that everything I thought defined the cultures I was then encountering in New York was already ripe for satire in 2014. As Kyle said, it's always already too late for culture. 

Still, the impossibility of representing any alternative cultural signifiers online these days asks a question, which I know has been theorized to death at this point, but I don't think has a definitive answer: is the effect of over-exposure on social media the result of speed or affordance? Does social media mediate the cultural markers of difference in identity by making it the object of all of our collective gazes faster than before, or in a fundamentally different way? The long-tail of hipsterdom, from the object of divisive ridicule to simple adjective for a generic coffee shop, which somehow exists alongside a very, very popular resurgence in aesthetic markers from late 90s and early 2000s, offers a curious case study in continuity, rupture, and inevitable, dumb returns.