My Cultural Death

Oh I hate using this thing to express opinions and I seem to have done it twice recently. But it's nice when my opinions are backed up by journalists and hard fact. (By the way this isn't JUST a dig, it's also research for my dissertation on how basically no-one my age seems to have any political awareness.) 

"An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society."

"Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they 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... usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper"

"With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of “hipsterdom” is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture."

"In many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger’s snapshots no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night’s debauchery. Red-eyed and bleary, they sit hunched over their laptops, wading through a sea of similarity to find their own (momentarily) thrilling instant of perfected hipster-ness.

What they may or may not know is that “cool-hunters” will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood."

"But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance."

"The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new."

From: "Hipster: The Dead End Of Western Civilization", Adbusters, (July 2008)

"Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates."

That's just a little bit from this Time Out New York issue which is full of articles discussing how hipsters may be destroying culture. 

And if you can get yourself a copy of this book; The Rise of The Creative Classes by Richard Florida  which looks at whether 'hipsterdom' (as the US seem to call it) gives any actual creative input into culture at all or whether it is a consumer of it, creating a downward spiral of pointless activity.