Hipsters In Popular Culture

In St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Tina Gianoulis wrote “hipsters have espoused tolerance and openness, sometimes engaging in bisexual relationships and wearing gender-bending styles” (675). For decades hipsters lived on the edge of society. They see themselves as the superior group in the category of being “cool”. They don't live out their lives to societies standards, nor do they follow the ideals and trends, but make their own. There is no concrete version of the hipster, just mostly stereotypes that may or may not be true. This group of people changed urban fashion and supported anything that was considered “cool” at that particular time. Once it was deemed too mainstream, they would move on. Mark Grief gives a sense of style
of the white hipster in his article titled “What Was the Hipster?” writing that, “the style that suddenly emerged in 1999 – inverted Broyard's model to particularly unpleasant effect. Let me recall a string of keywords: trucker hats; undershirts called wife beaters worn alone; aviator glasses; tube socks; tattoos” (4). Grief shows some of what hipsters wore and that society would have found it to be rebellious. They were rejecting the “norm” of the clothing in society. Later in the article, Grief says “Over the past decade, hipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anti-capitalist communities” (4). This relates to the idea that nobody really knew what a hipster truly was, because they also existed within other communities. It gives the notion that hipsters could have gotten most of their characteristics from their countercultures such as these stated above. People can argue it's hard to define what “hipster” really means or what one looks like.
In Mark Grief's article “What Was the Hipster?” in New York Magazine asserts that “Through both phases of the contemporary hipster, and no matter where he identifies himself on the knowingness spectrum, there exists a common element essential to his identity, and that is relationship to consumption” (7). Hipsters are known for clinging to anything considered new and cool. Every hipster is different, but they all agree that anything mainstream is not cool anymore. Mark quotes the social critic Thomas Frank, saying he called this type of hipster the ”the rebel consumer” and later on defined it as, “the person who, adopting the rhetoric but not the politics of the counterculture, convinces himself that buying the right mass products individualizes him as transgressive. Purchasing the products of authority is thus reimagined as a defiance of authority” (7). Hipsters would very often violated the norms of what was socially acceptable in society. They would often engage in sex, drugs, and violence. According to James Panero in the article “Hail to the Hipsters,” hipsters are “classical capitalists” that are opposed to both big business and big government. They want to make their own rules because it's not considered “cool” to follow what somebody else
does. Hipsters created a world of their own by defining what was “cool” and not following mainstream clothing, music, or ideas. James Panero says “Hipsters know things the rest of us don't, and they want us to know that they know it, too. They are cooler than you or I. They were cool before it was cool. Or maybe they are ironically cool, cool after it was cool” (1). Hipsters are the people that find a band that hasn't hit mainstream and then once they do, they move on to the next band. Something is cool to them if no one knows about it. According to Gianoulis, she says that “Hipsters, in their postmodern incarnation, are anything from a trendy youth subculture to a lucrative advertising demographic to privileged poseurs laying claim to a bohemian, counterculture identity” (675). She also later states that “midcentury hipsters were subversives, artists, and radicals who lived on society's fringes” (Gianoulis 675). This section of the book shows a more descriptive definition of who hipsters where. They were an outcast group in a sense, living on the edge of society. Hipsters were on the outside looking in, they weren't just a young group of kids following fashion trends; that was just a stereotype. Many hipsters were artistic and creative, seeking out the different ways they could be “cool” until it was too cool and identify or express their own self. In the book “The Hipster as Artist,” the author William S. Burroughs quotes an essay by Norman Mailer in his essay “The White Negro”. In the essay, Mailer says: The hipster rejects not only the rules of behavior and the corresponding system of beliefs that the state imposes upon it's members, but also the very self that this society shapes within the individual. The hipster seeks to create a new self that is free from external conditioning by living the economic life of a “marginal man” and by obeying his inner, nonrational impulses. He returns to infantile sexual and aggressive drives and the infantile wish for self and to make a new self free from social controls (qtd. in Burroughs 7).
Mailer's definition of a hipster is slightly different than today's hipster. They do want to create a sense of self, mostly expressing themselves with the clothing they wear. Hipsters are not as rebellious as they used to be and they still want to be “cool”. The word “hipster” has become more of a fashion statement instead of individualizing you as a certain group or subculture that has faded away. If there are still true hipsters, they won't define themselves as hipsters because it would be too mainstream. James Panero states, “Hipsters may appropriate the styles of earlier youth movements – the beatniks, hippies, punks and slackers – but they strip away the antisocial and anticapitalist qualities of these groups and replace them with entrepreneurial drive” (2). The hipster today adopted the styles of the “old hipster” but not the actions. The old hipster was seen as lazy and that all they wanted to do was have sex, do drugs, and be violent. The hipster today has replaced those “bad” qualities for what society might view as “good” qualities, such as having a job or owning businesses. Jason Singer writes in his article “What is a Hipster?” that “'You cannot define define a Hipster' claimed Nietzsche, 'For this itself would be classifying them into a certain category, which goes against their inherent dislike for being categorized.'” There is almost a sense that the hipster used to exist and that it no longer does as a subculture. They started from a subculture that involved sex, violence, and drugs then turned into a label that represents a certain style of clothing. Hipsters don't want to be defined because everyone would know about it and then it wouldn't be “cool” to be a hipster anymore.