Exercise 2. Exercise 3. What are your thoughts on the changing meaning of the word "hipster"? Do you know anyone you'd describe as a hipster? If so, please share what this person is like. Is there a word similar to "hipster" in your language? Please explain your answer. Are you a fan of jazz music? Why not? Who's the most fashionable person you know?
Please describe them. Exercise 4. He certainly could have objected that it made for lazy headline copy, or that a derogatory term was being misused as praise. We do know what hipster means—or at least we should. The term has always possessed adequately lucid definitions; they just happen to be multiple. If we refuse to enunciate them, it may be because everyone affiliated with the term has a stake in keeping it murky.
Hipster accusation has been, for a decade, the outflanking maneuver par excellence for competitors within a common field of cool. The longer we go without an attempt to explain the term simply and clearly, the longer we are at the mercy of its underlying magic.
In the interest of disenchantment, let me trace a history and offer some definitions. The matrix from which the hipster emerged included the dimension of nineties youth culture, often called alternative or indie, that defined itself by its rejection of consumerism. Lloyd showed how a culture of aspiring artists who worked day jobs in bars and coffee shops could unintentionally provide a milieu for new, late-capitalist commerce in design, marketing, and web development.
The neo-bohemian neighborhoods, near to the explosion of new wealth in city financial centers, became amusement districts for a new class of rich young people. The indie bohemians denigrated as slackers encountered the flannel-clad proto-businessmen and dot-com paper millionaires denigrated as yuppies , and something unanticipated came of this friction.
Over the years, there developed such a thing as a hipster style and range of art and finally, by extension, something like a characteristic attitude and Weltanschauung. Fundamentally, however, the hipster continues to be defined by the same tension faced by those early colonizers of Wicker Park. The hipster is that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual—the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.
The question arises: What was it about the turn-of-the-century moment that made it so clear—as it was immediately clear—that the character had to have this name, the hipster, which was so fraught with historical meaning?
Subculture has never had a problem with neologism or exploitation of slang, from emo to punk to hippie. The hipster, however, was someone else already. The hip reaction was to insist, purely symbolically, on forms of knowledge that they possessed before anyone else, indeed before the creation of positive knowledge—a priori. Broyard focused on the password language of hip slang.
The return of the term after reframed the knowledge question. Hipster, in its revival, referred to an air of knowing about exclusive things before anyone else. But these hipsters were white, and singularly unmoved by race and racial integration.
These were the most visible emblems of a small and surprising subculture, where the source of a priori knowledge seemed to be nostalgia for suburban whiteness. This recalled the seventies culture of white flight to the suburbs, and the most uncanny thing about the turn-of-the-millennium white hipsters is that symbolically, in their styles and attitudes, they seemed to announce that whiteness and capital were flowing back into the formerly impoverished city.
And rather than an indie or bohemian subculture, it felt like an ethnicity—with its clannishness, its claiming of microneighborhoods from other, older migrants Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Orthodox Jews , and its total uninterest in integrating into the local populations. It would be too limited, however, to understand the contemporary hipster as simply someone concerned with a priori knowledge as a means of social dominance. Consider hipster art. In the s, hippy or hippie took on a somewhat derisive tone when applied to those who posed as hipsters but were not in fact the genuine article.
Still using beatnik in the headline, Fallon used hippies , heads , and beatniks interchangeably in the body of the article. The word hip-hop , like many of its slang giant peers, has several claimed parents, but no solid evidence supporting any of the claims.
Out of the scat context, the earliest usage is from the 24 February New Pittsburgh Courier , which reported that D. Almost a century into its journey through American slang, hip had at least one more life up its sleeve in the form of the new hipster movement, referring to relatively affluent young Bohemians living in gentrifying neighborhoods. It is an opaque term, and one which is generally not used by anyone considered by others to be a hipster.
Two profiles of Williamsburg, Brooklyn—ground zero of the contemporary hipster movement—appeared in , and neither used the term hipster. Some big stars are coming to live, too: actors Lena Dunham and Sarah Jessica Parker now call Brooklyn home, with luxury apartments to suit their status. Hipster culture has become a global commercial and social phenomenon , and some western cities are now living by its rules. He is a former British government adviser. In his book, The Flat White Economy , McWilliams sees the phenomenon of the hip young entrepreneur as a central element of the new world economy, whether it be in Shoreditch or Pigalle, Tel Aviv or Lisbon.
This quest for fine-tuned individuality has often been the subject of mockery in the cities where it occurs. In , the New York Times ran an article, How hipsters ruined Paris , condemning a now- global phenomenon that threatens to lay waste to real neighbourhood cultures.