Are You One?

by Kate McCoy

You’ve seen them. You know them. Hell, you might even be one. But if you actually were, you wouldn’t admit to it, because then you would lose your credibility as one. If you did admit to being one, then you are certainly not one. And right about now you are definitely asking yourself what in the world am I talking about. Well the answer to this riddle is hipsters, an enigma that is one of my favorite points of pondering.

Now what exactly is a hipster? Good old Webster’s dictionary defines one as “a person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns” in culture. The word hipster dates back to the jazz era, when simply put, a hipster was one who was hip. But like many words it’s meaning has morphed into something else. So for a more up-to-date definition, let’s look to urbandictionary.com. That source defines a hipster as “one who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool.” But let’s get one thing straight. Hipsters would never say cool.

According to Robert Lanham, author of The Hipster Handbook, “the hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream.” For anyone who’s still wondering if they’ve grasped the concept yet, a hipster can be easily identified by vintage or thrift-store bought clothing, a taste for obscure and underground music, a penchant for irony and an elitist attitude. Being in a big city and on a liberal college campus, I see hipsters in their natural environment all the time.

Although Washington, D.C. sports a large population of hipsters, Williamsburg, Brooklyn is the Mecca of hipster America. “The Burg”, an Internet original series (a type of video blog or v-blog), is a parody of this place where “trust fund kids pretend to be starving artists, starving artists pretend to be able to live completely off of credit cards, and everybody pretends not to notice,” according to its producers. But in reality, mockumentaries like “The Burg” are made by hipsters, for hipsters. Yet they rely on making fun of hipsters. Ironic? Indeed.

On a final note, a hipster friend of mine contributes a very telling joke about her kind. She asked, “How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?” To which I replied, “I don’t know.” In true hipster fashion, she answered, “What? You don’t know?” There’s the difference between hipsters and us mere mortals. Hipsters know and they know they know. Or do they? It would seem to me that they don’t. A hipster’s love of irony actually makes them victims of traditional irony, as “The Burg” shows. Which is ironic. Well, I guess the joke is on the hipsters then.

(Photo and video are both courtesy of "The Burg." To play a game of Hip or Dangerous, with the cast of "The Burg" see the video below.)



Blogging
Culture
Entertainment
vblog
Internet
Add to Technorati Favorites