Hipster Obsessions

My new acquaintance/friend (the friend I was introduced to at the free McCarren Pool party on Sunday) summed it up rather well. Hailing from the UWS, he remarked on how he felt he just wasn't able to pull off hipster trends and felt out of place in his khaki and plaid (but these, if worn ironically, are hipster... Plaid, actually, is quite the hipster trend). He ruminated, "You know, I just can't pull off that cap to the side look with the big sticker on the rim." Then he told my other friend and me a story: "You know, I ask them where they buy their hats sideways and popped out like that, cos I see them in the store, and they only sell them straight forward. They tell me, 'Easy, man, you just gotta turn the cap to the side and pop the rim.' " [pause to smirk] "They didn't even get that I was making fun of them," he said. "No....!?!" my friend and I simultaneously responded, both flabbergasted and skeptical. People didn't really take that "how do you get your hat sideways ...?" kinda question seriously... did they? That's the thing about us young urban folk, hipsters or not: when to take any of us seriously?

And when to tell when someone is or isn't a hipster?...

I stumbled upon another blog the other day, "Stuff Hipsters Don't Like," in which the writer flat-out admits that while writing from an uber-critical perspective of hipsterdom (particularly Williamsburg hipsterdom), she may be one herself. Noting that a qualifying facet of being a hipster is not admitting that you are one, she dedicates her blog to insights and analyses of hipster life and culture. The blog explores the stereotypes of hipsters as people who eschew corporate jobs, don't smile, and try to refrain from making meaningful protests. Yet it seems by her obsession that possibly she is trying to be a hipster, or at least understand what she supposedly "is" because she loosely appears to be one. (Fine, I sympathize with this.) Similarly, Youtube hosts a plethora of hipster-focused videos, from the famous "Hipster Olympics"
and other satires to interviews exploring the definition of hipster.

I am ready for people to start throwing out some new terms, or being more in-depth with their labels. Within the "hipster" label are a plethora of others: the scenesters, the emo kids, the indie kids, the art kids, the fashionistas... In college (I graduated '02), the term 'hipster' wasnt yet in wide circulation, at least not yet in Oberlin, and the term we used for the kids with the skinny jeans and black-rimmed glasses were the "po-mo's," meaning the postmodern kids. These were the students seen as self-consciously intellectual; they were the chain-smokers and the music kids, and a lot of them, I believe, hailed from... you guessed it... NYC. But really, can we start differentiating with labels here?