The Land Between the Pages

Thinking about Hipsters..

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

This article by adbusters claims that “Hipsters” have failed to contribute anything to counter-culture. It’s very interesting, because (I hope, although I don’t know) that hipsters know they are not the counter culture. In my opinion, “hipster” is kind of a way of expressing frustration with the pastiche being fed to us in the age of information. Hipster style is a recycling of past counter-cultures, along with a taking away of the original meaning, or any meaning at all. I think rather than a failure, we should admit that hipsters were never trying to be a counter-culture.  I think this is why so many “hipsters” are quoted in this article as denying that they are hipsters or calling other people hipsters in a negative way, it is because they are all just consuming the mainstream, and no one wants to admit a hypocritical desire to do otherwise.

The end of the article makes up for the initial accusation:

“We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.”

Wow.. I’m so hipster for blogging about this…rad