The Sophian

Issue date: 12/4/08 Section: Arts

To clarify, when I say hipster, I don't necessarily mean the 70 percent or so of Smith students who have an affinity for the aforementioned look. I too sport American Apparel. I mean people who truly subscribe to the subculture as a full-on lifestyle. And while Haddow sometimes reads like a conspiracy theorist, he points to yet another problem with the hipster culture. Hipsters aren't just a subculture, they're a consumer group, and as such are at the mercy of capitalism. In fact, those supporters of the Man - marketers - often infiltrate hipster parties and hotspots in order to track hipster trends, and then simply repackage them and sell them back to the subculture from whence they were forged. Trends cycle through hipsterdom like wildfire on acid, and as soon as bands or trends or whatever else the hipster consumer block subscribes to become "mainstream," they are sent to the hipster chopping block.

All misunderstandings of political clothing aside, it is this flitting through culture that I find most problematic with the hipster movement. Culture is complicated. If you're trying out a new band or movie and they actually mean something to you, they shouldn't be turned into a vehicle for looking cooler than other people, something that you shrug off when someone or something even more obscure comes along. Finding the music and movies and artists you love isn't a race, and culture can't grow when it is confined to trending periods that mature and die faster than a single-celled organism. The ultimate hipster may look really cool, but with that kind of struggle to stick with obscurity, to stay on the surface of culture, I suspect that the most tragically hip must also be tragically missing out.

Life and art don't exist in a vacuum. But extreme hipsterdom does, and though breakneck use and abandonment of art, music and entire past subcultures in the name of coolness may not signify the end of culture, it does nothing to move it forward.

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