The Misterio Tremendum

While I kinda’ love the idea of Adbusters (generally speaking, a non-profit group dedicated to upending the pervasive consumer culture of our times), their execution continues to miss the mark and leave me completely baffled. I think of them of the Hamlets of activists. They have decided “to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them”; everything is in order, the knife in hand, they lunge, and whoops, have killed the wrong person.

Remember the Jewish list (Adbusters: Why wont anyone say they are Jewish?)? What a STUPID idea. Instead of having a discussion about the influence of Israeli foreign policy on the US’s decision to go to war with Iraq, they publish a list of neo-cons and put marks next to those who are Jewish… Ill let that sink in for a moment… … … ok.

Their most recent foray into stupidity, while not nearly as serious is just as pandering. In their recent article Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization they make the same mistake of casting their journalistic net far too wide when trying to define the ‘bad guys’ of modern day youth culture and as a result just look silly and misinformed. Honestly, the whole thing is difficult to take seriously and it reads like one big anti-’hipster’ cliche, layered upon stupider anti-’hipster’ cliches. Take for instance a typical sentence:

Loosely associated with some form of creative output, [hipsters] attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties.

“Nouveau disco-coke parties”? This is too good. Did this come from The Onion?

And being a magazine-head I think the sentence following this one really gets to the article’s main issue:

The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper.

The flippant nature of such a statement tries to mask the fact that this author really has no idea what he is talking about. I guess Vice is stereotypically understood to be a kind of hipster staple (whatever that really means), but Another Magazine is a high-end lux/culture mag, and Wallpaper is more traditionally thought of as design porn for yuppie city dwellers (and that’s not being derogatory, I like Wallpaper).

And this is the issue; the term Hipster, while it has its derogatory stereotypes (which this article very successfully articulates), is way too loose for someone to speak about with such definitive authority. I am a few years out of college now and fall pretty directly in the middle of the ‘hipster demographic’, but first hearing the term I few years ago I was so confused that it existed at all. I had bike courier friends were considered ‘hipsters’. My artist friends were hipsters. My craft/DIY friends were hipsters. My fellow English-major friends were hipsters. I had pre-Med and bio-major friends who were hipsters. You’ve got street-wear kids, scenesters, nerdy book types, vegans. People who get out dancing every night, and those that don’t. Some are into hip-hop, some jazz, some blues, some indie rock, some pop, some obscure, some electronica, some 90s acoustic and grunge, and some all/none of the above. I guess there are very loose threads of meaning that run through all of these groups, perhaps an appreciation for art, but perhaps not, maybe a desire to live in the city, but maybe not. Tight pants? ha. I don’t know… Really these are just quasi-bohemian 20-somethings in American cities and the author doesn’t understand that this is a much more textured group than he would like to believe.

For a magazine that prides itself on understanding/criticizing cultural trends, one has to wonder how useful they are when they get an entire generation of city-dwellers so wrong.

Fortunately for Adbusters they have gotten 750+ comments on the article since it was published, and that might have been the point all along.

UPDATE: After sitting on this thing for a few days (and realizing that Haddow is the same guy that authors The Publics (a blog I’ve always liked, btw)), I am more and more inclined to think that we are simply talking about different groups of people here. I mean I would totally peg this guy as a hipster in Philly. It sounds like the adbusters article is more going after the self-obsessed, coke off the iPhone, scenester type (which is still a bit unfair as I am sure even these people aren’t as one dimensional at this article paints them). Though, it does go to show that throwing around such a general and region-specific term like ‘hipster’, and using it to so definitively describe a group of people might not be the best idea - especially in a widely-circulated magazine that ‘hipsters’ read.