"Hipster" as pejorative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5dIzY7yvRA

Related question: has anyone (other than a certain ex of mine) sincerely referred to him/herself as a "hipster"? The word seems always to be applied to other people or things. ("I used to enjoy [X], but it's just not the same since hipsters took it up.")

God all these youtube videos are fucking shit.

xpost. No. See also "middlebrow". It's one of those terms that people only use about other people.

especially if they are those people themselves.

A phrase that gets used a lot around here but which I love and sums it up to me: the narcissism of small differences.

i'm pretty comfortable with the fact that I'm a hipster and most people on this site (especially deej) should learn to embrace it a little more

Which doesn't mean there aren't huge swaths of people i can derisively call hipsters

also in general can we cut all the side-stepping around the word "hipster" like it's some ugly "other." I'm so goddamn tired of everyone on ILX being like "I'm fat/old school/unfashionable/nerdy so I'm not a hipster." Jesus christ, we all post on a message board where people deconstruct the meaning of the word "balearic" and transcribe gucci mane lyrics and call Dirty Projectors "boring normal indie" and brag about the blues 78s they found at estate sales. Enough with the posturing already, ffs

― my adrian langs a ton (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, December 11, 2009 3:33 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You appear to have "hipster" and "ridiculous music nerd" mixed up.

ned raggett is not a hipster

(would be a rad t-shirt)

I mean, unless we're calling the fat guy from the Camden Record & Tape Exchange a hipster these days, in which case we might as well include Comic Book Guy.

I thought hipsters were the people who like Dirty Projectors. Like me.

Some fatty who focuses his attention on Gong reissues and colored vinyl and knows who Japanther are is technically more of a "hipster" than a 19-year-old sitting in the parking lot of the gas station sniffing glue and listening to his one Pantera tape.

The point is that there's no ONE hipster. There's varying degrees. A kid in a hoodie who likes Neko Case and goes to Stereogum once a week is a LOW-LEVEL hipster. Someone in shuttershades and pink neon at a MSTRKRFT gig snorting coke of a car key is a HIGH LEVEL hipster

Pantera kid would derisively call record snob a hipster; Stereogum kid would derisively call MSTRKRFT kid a hipster

It's important to know your place on that scale.

yeah but then your previous example of the Gucci Mane hermeneuticist is nowhere in that continuum, so we have to have various qualitative groupings that are then internally distinguished quantitatively.

And now is the time to do it.

xp But that type of high-level hipster you describe I don't necessarily see as being geeky about music any more than he is about fashion and drugs and art and "the scene."

Merdeyeux, i think ILX Gucci Mane dork who posts about rap minituae all day and reads pitchfork and knows about the most recent dealings Animal Collective and Fuck Buttons is probably a hipster to someone, but continue to split hairs and play babe-in-the-woods, dogg

also, jaymc, the fashion and scene aspects are what make him more of a hipster, obv.

Gucci Mane hermeneuticist

oh man

My friend's dad is 50 years old and owns Animal Collective and Pantha Du Prince CDs and lives in a village with his kids in the middle of Scotland and has probably never set foot inside a club, what level of hipster does that make him?

The kind with disposable income?

I am all for the democracy of the hipster but I kinda thought it was supposed to mean something, besides just being a word that can be applied to anyone with any engagement with music by someone with either more or less engagement with music than they have.

Please, the term is "hermenaut":

http://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/b1ea/books_bookshelf-1423.jpeg

Some fatty who focuses his attention on Gong reissues and colored vinyl and knows who Japanther are is technically more of a "hipster" than a 19-year-old sitting in the parking lot of the gas station sniffing glue and listening to his one Pantera tape.

OK but neither of those strawpeople have anything to do with the term as it is popularly deployed (ie alluding to shallowness or fashion-chasing) so why even try and work out the 'scale' in this way ffs

I dunno what Hermenaut is but that's certainly a diverse list of names.

(Hipster pluralism?)

Mencap, if you don't think record store geeks chase ridiculous trends on the daily, I don't know what magical place you shop for records

...like if you want it to just mean 'person who engages with popular/alternative culture' without being any more specific then best of luck and all but that is not really anyone else's definition as far as I can see

Love your taxonomy of hipsterdom, Whiney. We need a diagram.

I am all for the democracy of the hipster but I kinda thought it was supposed to mean something, besides just being a word that can be applied to anyone with any engagement with music by someone with either more or less engagement with music than they have.

― Merdeyeux, Tuesday, August 3, 2010 10:03 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I mean also replace music with "fashion" or "nightlife" or "drugs" or "trends" and various combinations thereof and you've pretty much got the essence of what is essentially a useless word that continues to rile people up

Love your taxonomy of hipsterdom, Whiney. We need a diagram.

― Haunted Clocks For Sale (Dorianlynskey), Tuesday, August 3, 2010 10:07 AM (50 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I actually was thinking about pitching a Gawker/Awl piece where I break it down. I have a scale I've been trying to implement. I consider myself a "high 3"

I know that there are micro-trends and shifting focuses and what have you within every lil pocket of music nerdery, sure - I'm pretty sure there are with stamp collectors too y'know

"sockless boat shoes" as pejorative.

This taxonomy doesn't really take into account the inherent fascism of hipsterdom, there are way too many fat or ugly people involved.

Mencap if you don't think some dudes playing ookie-cookie with whatever new Sublime Frequencies or Mexican Summer 12" comes into a store makes someone closer to a stamp collector than a "hipster" than wake up and smell the Four Loko

Mencap if you don't think....

Whiney this is yr sermon on the mount man

"no, seriously! posting on ILX isn't some hipster thing!"

MIA

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i love how much this matters to you

well he does have something invested in it! not even a joke anymore

if there were a list of people in the world who are benefiting most from the word 'hipster' existing, whiney would literally be on that list

OK well of ppl who buy and consume that sort of stuff lots of em are probably quite shallow and hipstery about it and lots of em probably aren't - my point is that being blanket dismissive of folks' interests on the basis of the (imagined) first group is baby/bathwater stuff as well as just really boring

anyway we went from Gong reissues to Mexican Summer pretty quick there

Mencap if you don't think some dudes playing ookie-cookie with whatever new Sublime Frequencies or Mexican Summer 12" comes into a store makes someone closer to a stamp collector than a "hipster" than wake up and smell the Four Loko

First bit of the flowchart needs to be 'How many times have you left your bedroom this week?', second bit needs to be 'How many times have you gone to places other than the record store?'. I admire your attempts to be charitable to a load of obsessive techno shut-ins with no friends but this is nonsense.

There has to be a broader cultural dimension (choice of clothes, bars, movies, etc) - if it's just about obsessing over obscure music then I know some profoundly unhip hipsters.

of course

Part and parcel of being a hipster is that other hipsters want to hang out/go drinking/have sex with them from time to time, not just sit on the internet and talk about Panda Bear.

the idea of hipsterdom is essentially chimeric

Now I don't know who I'm meant to be disagreeing with.

I just think of a hipster (pejoratively) as someone who likes a lot of the same things I like, but for the "wrong" reasons, which is a subjective judgement and fundamentally bogus, which is why I try to avoid the word.

xposts

Whiney OTM. It's such a lame, overused term that could mean so much or so little to different people. I've only really heard it used on the internet and it's generally used to describe young white urban people with an interest in music and fashion, which I struggle to understand as a problem. Obviously there are certain levels of hipsterdom, and some young white people with an interest in music and fashion do act like arseholes (Nathan Barley types?), but I'd rather just call them an arsehole than a hipster.