Creative Class

Brian Frank writes:

Well, almost. Norman Mailer’s infamous “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” was originally published in 1957 in Dissent.

Nearly a decade earlier, in 1948, Anatole Broyard published “A Portrait of the Hipster” in Partisan Review. I can’t find an online version, but here’s how one writer describes it:

Broyard attempted an analysis and a definition of a new type then appearing around Greenwich Village who had, in his view, been welcomed by intellectuals who “ransacking everything for meaning, admiring insurgence… attributed every heroism to the hipster.,,.”

But Broyard was less enthusiastic about these supposed new rebels … In Broyard’s words: “The hipster promptly became in his own eyes, a poet, a seer, a hero.” And he added that the hipster life-style “grew more rigid than the Institutions it had set out to defy. It became a boring routine. The hipster – once an unregenerate Individualist, an underground poet, a guerrilla – had become a pretentious poet laureate.”

Of course, what Broyard was doing, as well as attacking the hipsters, was criticising his fellow-intellectuals for failing to accept that the hipster rebellion was a sham.

Hmmmmmm…

What is a hipster? Being a DJ in the contemporary North American urban nightlife scene, it’s a question that I get to ponder a lot.

Last month, on their cover, Adbusters ran a story called Hipster: The dead end of Western civilization characterizing them as:

one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior [coming] to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” 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 being more than slightly polemical toward the end, the author’s point holds water. Hipsters are very slippery when looking to conventional modes of definition.

In the 1940s, it referred mainly to white youths adopting black urban culture vis a vis jazz music – the precursors to the beatniks in the 60s who extended the culture into its more suburban/hippie incarnation. These days the word has come to mean something very different, but in many ways still related – mostly through space. Despite the fact that Hipsters have taken a lot of flack recently for their eclectic dress, dance, and style there is something about the hipster that seems to have remained true throughout the ages. Their participation is fundamentally urban.

In the original hipster era, participating in urban life was synonymous with participating in black life, and so jazz music, black modes of speech, and cultural leanings on a white person made them easy to mark as a hipster. As the city hurtles toward design-intensivity, the definition of a hipster seems as mercurial as the definition of cool – as the city becomes the main nodes for the absorption of trends, hipsters seem to be the most eager people within the city to express them. Far from being a race discourse as it was in the past, this is a style discourse that seems to be engaging youth culture in all facets. Coincidentally (?) XXL magazine ran a feature that discussed the Hipster-effect on Hip hop in the same month that Adbusters ran their Hipster cover.

How is style in the city becoming a commodity? Is the common culture that it’s bringing us toward as banal as the Adbusters article would have us believe?

And now, as always, some music.