Archive for February 2009

From Wikipedia’s article on Hipsters: (found via a search for how to type the heart symbol; the Wikipedia article noted: “The widespread use of this expression has inspired many parodies. Originally pronounced “I love”, hipsters have taken to facetiously verbalizing it as ‘I heart’, in expressions such as ‘I heart you!’.”)

In the past week I’ve noticed the keffiyeh wearing, and recognized it as both an act of solidarity and bad fashion sense.

Posted here as rare document of Wikipedia getting it totally right:

In the late 1990s, the term became a blanket description for middle class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local beer (or even brewing their own), listening to public radio, riding fixed-gear bicycles, and reading magazines like Vice and Clash and websites like Pitchfork vogue .^[1] Robert Lanham‘s satirical The Hipster Handbook described hipsters as young people with “… mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes,… strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags.”^[5] Hipsters are considered apathetic, pretentious, and self-entitled by other, often marginalized sectors of society they live amongst, including previous generations of bohemian and/or “counter-culture” artists and thinkers as well as poor neighborhoods of color.^[1]

In 2005, Slate writer Brandon Stosuy noted that “Heavy metal has recently conquered a new frontier, making an unexpected crossover into the realm of hipsterdom.” He argues that the “current revival seems to be a natural mutation from the hipster fascination with post-punk, noise, and no wave,” which allowed even the “nerdiest indie kids to dip their toes into jagged, autistic sounds.” He argues that a “byproduct” of this development was an “… investigation of a musical culture that many had previously feared or fetishized from afar.”^[6]

In 2008, Utne Reader magazine writer Jake Mohan described “hipster rap,” “as loosely defined by the Chicago Reader, consists of the most recent crop of MCs and DJs who flout conventional hip-hop fashions, eschewing baggy clothes and gold chains for tight jeans, big sunglasses, the occasional keffiyeh, and other trappings of the hipster lifestyle.” He notes that the “old-school hip-hop website Unkut, and Jersey City rapper Mazzi” have criticized mainstream rappers who they deem to be poseurs or “… fags for copping the metrosexual appearances of hipster fashion.”^[7] Prefix Mag writer Ethan Stanislawski argues that there are racial elements to the rise of hipster rap. He claims that there “…have been a slew of angry retorts to the rise of hipster rap,” which he says can be summed up as “white kids want the funky otherness of hip-hop… without all the scary black people.”^[8]

The hipster aesthetic of irony extends to the appropriation of elements of lowbrow or working class identity in an ironic fashion, such as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. As well, hipsters wear the multicoloured keffiyeh scarf “initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians”; however, with hipsters, the “…keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory”.^[1]