A Revised Portrait of the Hipster

This semester’s mass-class, Professor Menand’s Art and Thought of the Cold War, included Anatole Broyard’s 1948 article “A Portrait of the Hipster,” the title of which conveys the gist of the remaining six pages. Examination, dissection, analysis, and historicization of cultural movements is hard to do, as they are unfolding and moving from individual to collective manifestations. Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” however, is the most popular cultural text by which we can begin a discourse on the portrait of the modern Hipster.

The modern Hipster has no set definition, consistent with its legitimacy as an active cultural trend. The one near-universal symptom of Hipsterdom is the scorn with which it is treated by those most associated with it—be they the NYU-educated bakers and bike-messengers of Brooklyn (non-locals), or the documentarians of the scene itself, bloggers, journalists, musicians, and other productive agents. The refusal to self-identify is almost as crucial a feature as this: The singular societal entity that does not loath the Hipster as a manifestation of narcissistic pretention is the multi-national corporation.

A good way to establish a working definition of the contemporary Hipster is through comparison to past social movements that we now identify as counter-cultural, because that is how Hipsterdom understands itself and how it is marketed. The genealogical basis of today’s Hipster is in the Beat Generation. The Beat-Hipster’s legitimizing counter-cultural features were the unconventionality of their semi-nomadic lifestyle, the sexual openness, and commitment to expression freed from formal technique. The music, appropriated from Black Americans, was bebop. Most importantly the Beat-Hipsters were sincere.

The contemporary Hipster has a definite spatial prerogative involving dependable access to amenities required for a comfortable, relevant existence. The outplay of this has been a new wave of gentrification in American cities. There is gender and sexual flexibility in the metropolitan Hipster scene, but this comes with the relative safety of increased mainstream and corporate acceptance of queer identities, which the Beats did not have. The music of Hipsters is the mash-up, which rather than putting forth an original and challenging new style of music, plays off the popularity of different mainstream elements that produces something new, but not original.

The cultural output and its form of expression, though, are key. The contemporary Hipster is acutely self-conscious, and this is why Lady Gaga and what blogger Douglas Haddow has termed Gaga-ism are connected. The Hipster is a product of post-modernity unwinding in general culture to the point of constant self-awareness. The Beat-Hipsters were certainly self-obsessed, but they bore an earnestness and sincerity that is impossible if one’s mental energy is overly devoted to fretting over anticipated acceptance of an ironic costume bobble. Life and public existence as a creative endeavor rather than the eventual outplay of internal development involves active consideration of one’s perception (we all do this), and the contribution of today’s Hipster is this to a new degree, an advanced, unrelenting stage.

The popular treatment of Hipsters involves disdain and pejorative connotations that distort any honest examination. The aforementioned Haddow wrote what is the finest portrayal of the Hipster for an AdBusters article in 2008, but the title alone, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization,” leaves no doubts about the decided standpoint of the examiner. Too much is lost, however, by relegating Hipsterdom to bitter derision and resignation. It is also, I would argue, impossible to engage modern culture, popular and ‘counter,’ without recognizing prominent ideological and descriptive features marking the modern Hipster.

Bringing us to Gaga’s “Telephone,” which in its first week up had more than 20 million views on YouTube. The relevance of Gaga doesn’t need to be restated here. The “Telephone” video, like Hipsterdom’s underlying ideology, is self-conscious to the point of stylizing that awareness. The video is a celebration of celebrity qua celebrity, as well as an amalgamation of different cultural allusions, the familiarity of which render the viewer comfortable. ‘Telephone’ is pop music with the sizeable development of its use of brands like Miracle Whip, Virgin Mobile and Diet Coke in the video medium. The pieces of corporate sponsorship are not snuck-in and normalized, but focal points. Similarly, the self-awareness of multi-lingual subtitles and the reference to rumors of Gaga’s male genitalia are post-modernity’s most glamorous public manifestation in their use of the discourse around the text being part of the end product. And like the prevalence of Urban Outfitters and American Apparel as purveyors of the Hipster v-neck t-shirt, the video and celebrity are the beneficiaries of corporate acceptance. The pan-sexuality of Gaga is ‘counter-cultural’ to the extent that her work maintains corporate sponsorship, the same way that grungy-looking Hipster flannel is the outcome of either time spent thrifting or money, not neglect and use.

Whatever the feelings toward a cultural trend noteworthy because of its appropriation of other cultural outputs may be, the Hipster needs to be legitimized in mainstream discourse, if for no other reason than for a better understanding of where we are as a society.

Zachariah P. Hughes ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House.