I am deeply triggered by something you said on the TrueAnon ep, Max. You said the Honda Fit is a, "Cuck" car. This is absolutely false. The Honda Fit is actually a, "Chad" car. Please issue an apology.
A key part of being a hipster was denying you were a hipster. It was an insult. At least it was treated that way in what I can now admit were my decidedly hipster circles in 00s Chicago.
That’s really funny, the 2010s gold-panning hipster look *was* a kind of effete grotesque of 19th century machismo — beard oil, whiskey, hard wearing denim, henleys — in a way where the kind of trad recuperation sentiment you’re seeing in the qts is unlikely, goofy and ahistorical but also makes a certain kind of sense
Tangential to your last few paragraphs but it just feels like the right wing culture war goalpost moving is on hyperspeed right now. From tradwifing and Rome to public mammary fetishization to…hipsters weren’t bad? I’m very deplugged from social media these days: some toe dips in a Twitter account I squat in for my soccer fan community and story browsing the same people on Instagram. But I feel like every time I log in, there’s always some sort of bizarre thing they’re either trying to reclaim or rebuff. I’ve made it a point not to fall down the Why Trump 2024 election hole but is there just a general mass anxiety from those folks, as well as their compatriots on the RFK-Aaron Rodgers wing of contrarian libertarians? Feels like everyone is losing their shit more consistently than usual. Maybe w/o Trump to foreground culture war grievances, they feel lost. But I don’t know.
Great post! It’s always weird seeing what culturally illiterate people mistake as “hipster” that isn’t the prototypical thing that was goofed on all the way back in 2003 in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hipster_Handbook .
I still remember sitting in a library and listening to the 2080/Sunrise single for the first time. I for sure thought we had the next Radiohead on our hands
Just want to note that the confusion / misappropriation of what a "hipster" is or isn't was surely accelerated by "Look At This Fucking Hipster" being popularized as a meme back post-2009...at the time, it was always jarring at the time to see what people passingly familiar with the meme (though not the Tumblr site) considered to be associated with being a "hipster" ....
We should ban all social media. It's true that social media, or "algorithms," etc, isn't the ultimate cause of our woes, but the same could be said about any number of harmful and pernicious things that are prohibited or regulated for the benefit of the public welfare. Guns come to mind. On one level the Second Amendment nuts are entirely right when they say violence isn't really about the guns but about a broken society, mental health, a fallen world, whatever. But that's also a dumb argument, for obvious reasons: Given that society is broken and people do crazy things, it's a bad idea to give everyone open access to high-caliber tools that allow them to do exponentially more damage and harm should they choose to do so.
Same with social media. Of *course* it's developed in the twisted way that it has, given this poisoned cultural soil of ours from which it sprang. And of course pulling the plug wouldn't be a panacea any more than getting rid of guns would put a stop to violence. But both need to happen, even if both are impossible to imagine. (Facebook doesn't spiritually immiserate people; *people* spiritually immiserate people!)
Well I could've used this deep dive on hipsters before I slung it around in my most recent post, but ou live and you learn. Anyway, I follow a few people of every political side etc. on instagram, just to see what everyone is up to, and the whole right wing trad wives thing seems to go nicely with this Stomp clap hey hipster, I'd say.
I think there's also something to be said for the fact that the allegedly "recession"-era hipster set is a lot of really fucking expensive shit--which is also probably why rightwing weirdos value it, since I don't think those twits can even conceive of a value to signal other than, well, value--while actual recession (and pre-recession, really) hipster-ism was grody as hell because the people who had money didn't want the people who didn't to know that (because then they would be judged and/or have to buy everyone's drugs).
A few months ago a clip from Glee came across my tiktok feed (the mean cheerleading coach was making fun of one of the gay characters) and there were a bunch of comments saying things like “you couldnt say something like that nowadays, people are too sensitive” and I was thinking, if conservatives are claiming Glee as a conservative show, then the whole culture war has lost the plot.
If they are claiming hipsters as a symbol of masculinity, then we have entered a whole new dimension of strangeness.
I am deeply triggered by something you said on the TrueAnon ep, Max. You said the Honda Fit is a, "Cuck" car. This is absolutely false. The Honda Fit is actually a, "Chad" car. Please issue an apology.
A key part of being a hipster was denying you were a hipster. It was an insult. At least it was treated that way in what I can now admit were my decidedly hipster circles in 00s Chicago.
That’s really funny, the 2010s gold-panning hipster look *was* a kind of effete grotesque of 19th century machismo — beard oil, whiskey, hard wearing denim, henleys — in a way where the kind of trad recuperation sentiment you’re seeing in the qts is unlikely, goofy and ahistorical but also makes a certain kind of sense
Tangential to your last few paragraphs but it just feels like the right wing culture war goalpost moving is on hyperspeed right now. From tradwifing and Rome to public mammary fetishization to…hipsters weren’t bad? I’m very deplugged from social media these days: some toe dips in a Twitter account I squat in for my soccer fan community and story browsing the same people on Instagram. But I feel like every time I log in, there’s always some sort of bizarre thing they’re either trying to reclaim or rebuff. I’ve made it a point not to fall down the Why Trump 2024 election hole but is there just a general mass anxiety from those folks, as well as their compatriots on the RFK-Aaron Rodgers wing of contrarian libertarians? Feels like everyone is losing their shit more consistently than usual. Maybe w/o Trump to foreground culture war grievances, they feel lost. But I don’t know.
Great post! It’s always weird seeing what culturally illiterate people mistake as “hipster” that isn’t the prototypical thing that was goofed on all the way back in 2003 in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hipster_Handbook .
I still remember sitting in a library and listening to the 2080/Sunrise single for the first time. I for sure thought we had the next Radiohead on our hands
Max that was an awesome chat on TrueAnon, that episode is now legitimately one of my favorite episodes of TA *ever*. Thank you!!
Makes sense that the idea of hipster started to lose all coherence after the death of Vice's Dos and Don'ts.
Just want to note that the confusion / misappropriation of what a "hipster" is or isn't was surely accelerated by "Look At This Fucking Hipster" being popularized as a meme back post-2009...at the time, it was always jarring at the time to see what people passingly familiar with the meme (though not the Tumblr site) considered to be associated with being a "hipster" ....
We should ban all social media. It's true that social media, or "algorithms," etc, isn't the ultimate cause of our woes, but the same could be said about any number of harmful and pernicious things that are prohibited or regulated for the benefit of the public welfare. Guns come to mind. On one level the Second Amendment nuts are entirely right when they say violence isn't really about the guns but about a broken society, mental health, a fallen world, whatever. But that's also a dumb argument, for obvious reasons: Given that society is broken and people do crazy things, it's a bad idea to give everyone open access to high-caliber tools that allow them to do exponentially more damage and harm should they choose to do so.
Same with social media. Of *course* it's developed in the twisted way that it has, given this poisoned cultural soil of ours from which it sprang. And of course pulling the plug wouldn't be a panacea any more than getting rid of guns would put a stop to violence. But both need to happen, even if both are impossible to imagine. (Facebook doesn't spiritually immiserate people; *people* spiritually immiserate people!)
Portlandia would like a word with the machismo-infused revisionism about hipsters.
Why is "Recession" in scare quotes? Forget nostalgia for 2010s aesthetics, are we seeing nostalgia for the 2010s economy?!
Well I could've used this deep dive on hipsters before I slung it around in my most recent post, but ou live and you learn. Anyway, I follow a few people of every political side etc. on instagram, just to see what everyone is up to, and the whole right wing trad wives thing seems to go nicely with this Stomp clap hey hipster, I'd say.
I think there's also something to be said for the fact that the allegedly "recession"-era hipster set is a lot of really fucking expensive shit--which is also probably why rightwing weirdos value it, since I don't think those twits can even conceive of a value to signal other than, well, value--while actual recession (and pre-recession, really) hipster-ism was grody as hell because the people who had money didn't want the people who didn't to know that (because then they would be judged and/or have to buy everyone's drugs).
A few months ago a clip from Glee came across my tiktok feed (the mean cheerleading coach was making fun of one of the gay characters) and there were a bunch of comments saying things like “you couldnt say something like that nowadays, people are too sensitive” and I was thinking, if conservatives are claiming Glee as a conservative show, then the whole culture war has lost the plot.
If they are claiming hipsters as a symbol of masculinity, then we have entered a whole new dimension of strangeness.
Would you say this meme is a more or less accurate depiction of the hipster subculture? https://64.media.tumblr.com/901949e13c7d9bc4f4f10a0922811a4e/abf2198a3eee4136-7a/s640x960/764b335acb2d69841eacbff2c181d4d6b4200845.jpg