Sam Kriss claims that we killed the hipster. He writes: There are mass graves, still, just outside the major cities, places we don’t really want to think about: heaped thousands of hipster skeletons, each still wearing the tufts of its big lumberjack beard, sealed forever in artisanal wax. We lashed the hipsters to their fixies and herded them off a cliff.
As someone acutely aware of and often disgusted by human status signaling, I confirm that the hipster never went away. They just mutated into other forms of taste-based social signalling.
Proust shows that taste-based signalling existed in early-20th century France: to be a true sophisticated you couldn't 'like' the common, repertoire pieces of Beethoven or Brahms. You had to rave about one of their obscure sonatas or concerts, which was even more a signal of distinction back then, before widely available recorded music, because it meant you either played music yourself or had the wealth to have musicians play in your house. It became more important as rising wealth reduced the material disparities between the aristocratic and merchant classes. When (not really but to you it seems like) everyone can attend the opera, or go see the paintings in the Louvre, or vacation in Marseilles, you have to use your residual social capital to move the goalposts for sophistication.
Hipsters and emo were the last music subcultures to appear. The last decade spawn no new ones. Of course the older ones still exist but I find it interesting that no new youth subcultures were born in at least a decade.
I wonder if it has more to do with other trends impacting teenagers in the last decade like helicopter parenting, wokeness, social media addiction and poorer self-reported mental health.
I feel like there was a real 'the hipster died' moment in the last decade, though, in the rise of p4k-adjacent poptimists whose signalling involved, approximately, showing off how popular and mainstream their taste was while still being sophisticated. And I mean, they were right on a lot - CRJ is fantastic! But it was still signalling, just a strange kind of counter-signal. I think their effect was that the decline of 2000s hipsterism came to seem much more sudden than it would have if it were merely slow cultural shift; the poptimists just seemed so radically different that it was difficult to see how they filled the same cultural niche as hipsters. It's only now that poptimism has itself been thoroughly incorporated into the mainstream that we can see it clearly as a phenomenon.
Anyway I spent this period of time on /mu/ so I can't fucking talk
Yes. If not (just) wokeness, I suspect the other causes relate to, e.g.,
- Bernie's loss and the changes in perspective and priority that engendered in his supporters,
- the decline and fall of the dirtbag left - related more to #MeToo than to the more typically "woke" racial protests of summer 2020, this was a less discussed but prevalent part of hipster identity - their politics, and the nighttime activities they partook in.
Those activities - and specifically structuring your life to be able to engage in them a lot - came to be frowned upon, then uncool, then problematic, and finally condemned as morally outrageous (more than one media hipster found themselves the target of activists' calls for cancellation for long ago flings, for behavior accepted, and even celebrated and praised by their mates, at the time, and now could not be pursued, deemed flatly inconsistent with and unacceptable under a cool urban leftist lifestyle.
This is often overlooked because the topic makes folks uncomfortable (and can quickly give rise to outrage...) but the nightlife and ability to live like that for so long was a main attractor and benefit of the lifestyle - a reason it was worth it and worthwhile to be a hipster - for many.
As someone acutely aware of and often disgusted by human status signaling, I confirm that the hipster never went away. They just mutated into other forms of taste-based social signalling.
Proust shows that taste-based signalling existed in early-20th century France: to be a true sophisticated you couldn't 'like' the common, repertoire pieces of Beethoven or Brahms. You had to rave about one of their obscure sonatas or concerts, which was even more a signal of distinction back then, before widely available recorded music, because it meant you either played music yourself or had the wealth to have musicians play in your house. It became more important as rising wealth reduced the material disparities between the aristocratic and merchant classes. When (not really but to you it seems like) everyone can attend the opera, or go see the paintings in the Louvre, or vacation in Marseilles, you have to use your residual social capital to move the goalposts for sophistication.
contra kriss; so hot right now
contra kriss is too mainstream now
Who else do you recommend to follow, for a Substack novice, for more Krišs, Justin E smith, and Sam-like reads?
From Cat & Girl: https://catandgirl.com/tall-tales/
Hipsters and emo were the last music subcultures to appear. The last decade spawn no new ones. Of course the older ones still exist but I find it interesting that no new youth subcultures were born in at least a decade.
I wonder if it has more to do with other trends impacting teenagers in the last decade like helicopter parenting, wokeness, social media addiction and poorer self-reported mental health.
I feel like there was a real 'the hipster died' moment in the last decade, though, in the rise of p4k-adjacent poptimists whose signalling involved, approximately, showing off how popular and mainstream their taste was while still being sophisticated. And I mean, they were right on a lot - CRJ is fantastic! But it was still signalling, just a strange kind of counter-signal. I think their effect was that the decline of 2000s hipsterism came to seem much more sudden than it would have if it were merely slow cultural shift; the poptimists just seemed so radically different that it was difficult to see how they filled the same cultural niche as hipsters. It's only now that poptimism has itself been thoroughly incorporated into the mainstream that we can see it clearly as a phenomenon.
Anyway I spent this period of time on /mu/ so I can't fucking talk
Yes. If not (just) wokeness, I suspect the other causes relate to, e.g.,
- Bernie's loss and the changes in perspective and priority that engendered in his supporters,
- the decline and fall of the dirtbag left - related more to #MeToo than to the more typically "woke" racial protests of summer 2020, this was a less discussed but prevalent part of hipster identity - their politics, and the nighttime activities they partook in.
Those activities - and specifically structuring your life to be able to engage in them a lot - came to be frowned upon, then uncool, then problematic, and finally condemned as morally outrageous (more than one media hipster found themselves the target of activists' calls for cancellation for long ago flings, for behavior accepted, and even celebrated and praised by their mates, at the time, and now could not be pursued, deemed flatly inconsistent with and unacceptable under a cool urban leftist lifestyle.
This is often overlooked because the topic makes folks uncomfortable (and can quickly give rise to outrage...) but the nightlife and ability to live like that for so long was a main attractor and benefit of the lifestyle - a reason it was worth it and worthwhile to be a hipster - for many.