TV Tropes Hipster Society

Post in this thread if you enjoy Pabst Blue Ribbon, moustaches, keffiyehs, Williamsburg Brooklyn, kickball, pretending to have read Pablo Neruda, bands endorsed by Pitchfork Media, and denying that you're a hipster.

Of course I'm not going to post in this thread because I'm not a fucking hipster.

edited 14th Jan '11 7:36:47 PM by merton

Words cast into the uncaring void of the internet.

I'm definitely not a fucking hipster, and that fact certainly isn't referenced constantly in all facets of my existence on this forum.

In all honesty, I don't go for any of the fashion side of Hipsterdom - just the music. And the self-rightousness. But I'm trying to do something about the latter.

Listen to Music with Tropers at The Troper Turntable!

Kickball?

Hipsters love kickball.

Words cast into the uncaring void of the internet.

I've never heard of that.

Ahahahahaha you just described every person I know in meat time.

Don't forget wearing Che Guevara t-shirts.

Sorry, I can't hear you from my FLYING METAL BOX!

...

I'm not acquainted with any of those things, yet someone I know keeps insisting I'm a hipster.

Any of you disgusting hipster douches wonderful people know what else one would have to do to be a hipster?

Have an ironic mustache.

... uh-oh, Middy.

“Love is the eternal law whereby the universe was created and is ruled.” — St. Bernard

Some of my fashion choices I've been told is hipster, I love The Onion, hummus, ethnic restaurants where I'm the only white person, and many others listed in Stuff White People Like, I love skinny indie boys with shaggy hair, accessories like purses made from old keyboards. And yet I dislike most indie music, I don't have bangs, and I'm too excitable to be detached.

Emperor Wu liked cake, but not exploding cake!

Does being a hip-hop fan preclude my being a hipster?

'Cause I suspect it might...

edited 15th Jan '11 7:47:31 PM by Wicked223

You can't even write racist abuse in excrement on somebody's car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat!

Wicked223: Look up a picture of Why?, lament your hipsterdom.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Good thing I'm not an anticon. fan outside of cLOUDDEAD!

You can't even write racist abuse in excrement on somebody's car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat!

@Rott:

I'm a hipster, but I'm only a hipster to be ironic.

One of my few regrets about being born female is the inability to grow a handlebar mustache. -Landstander

I guess this is as good a place as any to re-post my Grand Unifying Theory of Subcultures.

There are always people with interests, tastes, and fashion sense outside the mainstream. We can call them Interesting People. At least once per generation, some fluke of geography causes multiple IP's with similar (or at least compatible) interests to make each other's acquaintance and start hanging out. When such an aggregation grows sufficiently large, people outside that particular group begin to take notice of them, at which point they've become a Scene.

If you make a Scene, then scenesters will come: folks who come, not because they share the same interest as the original IP's, but because they like the scene itself. For them, the Scene represents a chance to rebel against the mainstream, or to scare their parents, or just to hang out with the cool kids.

If the coming of the scenesters is a slow trickle, then sometimes the old guard is able to cultivate the new blood into genuine members of the community. This is rare, however—the scene is more likely to be completely inundated by scenesters, completely overwhelming the old guard's ability to deal with them. The old guard may or may not abandon the scene with disgust at that point. With the the scenesters running the show, the best that can happen is for them to run the Scene into the ground, and then in ten years everyone can look back on the whole thing as a silly fad. At worst, they'll attract even more scenesters, and the entire Scene will become a bloated, self-perpetuating monster—heck, it could even become mainstream and thus something for future scenesters to rebel against by joining other Scenes.

So the current crop of hipsters are just the latest iteration of a process that's happened dozens of times before and will happen a dozen times again.

Although the hipsters are a slightly odd case, in that the old guard were all about independence (Local music! Locally-grown organic food! Locally-brewed beer! Clothes from the local thrift store!) and ended up being weirdos as a side effect—whereas the new blood are trying from the outset to be weirdos. In other words, the scenesters have twisted the hipster scene into one devoted to being Interesting People. Which is so incestuously meta that, when the alarmists claim that the hipsters will be the downfall of western civilization, I can see where the alarmists are coming from, even though I completely disagree with them.

(And for the record, if you're wondering "Am I an Interesting Person?", then you're going about it all wrong. Interesting People are interested people—people on fire for some topic or cause aside from themselves. Narcissists are only interesting in a trainwreck-y fashion.)

I mean, there were youth subcultures centered around independence and nonconformity (and the emulation thereof) for its own sake long before our modern hipster  ^*

came along. Remember beatniks?

The only difference that I can see in this current generation of coolkids is that pretty much from the outset "hipster" has been somewhat a derogatory term among the people it's usually applied to, making this one of the few subcultures that one identifies with by not identifying with it.

This means that, since I self-identified as a hipster earlier on, I'm not one. But since I just said I wasn't one, I am one...sigh.

Words cast into the uncaring void of the internet.

Aah, the eternally recurring paradox of the Hipster - if you dress a certain way, act a certain way, and listen to certain music, then you're a hipster. If you don't do one of these things, you're only a little bit less of a hipster. But then if you use this fact to claim that you're not a hipster, then people will say that you're the worst kind of hipster because you're denying it.

-______________-

Listen to Music with Tropers at The Troper Turntable!

Hipsterism is a very post-modern conundrum.

I just say I enjoy post-rock  ^*

but own no plaid shirts or messenger bags, and leave it at that.

edited 18th Jan '11 3:30:42 PM by SunshineWerewolf

I'm so goddamn hip I can barely see over my own pelvis.

Fuck, I am so far from hipsterdom...how do I start liking any of those things...except kickball that was badass when I was younger.

Hey guize! I think I'm a hipster.

I have a useless liberal arts degree. I live in a fairly liberal city in a very liberal state. I like foreign food. My jeans are worn and have holes in them. I also get off on looking down on people.

So lets go get some Ethiopian food, go look down on people with real jobs, then head over to the garden to watch the Cs play.

Obligatory self promotion: http://unemployedacademic.tumblr.com/

YOU ARE NOT SKINNY ENOUGH TO BE A HIPSTER, MEPT. SORRY.

A brighter future for a darker age.

THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT IRONIC.

Obligatory self promotion: http://unemployedacademic.tumblr.com/

I'm a college student in Seattle with low muscle mass and a love of irony. I don't think of myself as a hipster, but damn, I guess that just digs me deeper, eh?

My roommate and his sister are probably much more hipster than me. Especially since they are vocal in their disdain of hipsters.

Ruining everything forever.