Fed up with the phoney war against hipsters, Ferdia Carr says it’s time to leave the field.
Somehow, somewhere and sometime since the turn of the century, we noticed that the inner city ‘creative’ scene had become obnoxiously cool and exclusivist; absurdly self-conscious and at the same time blissfully unaware. Young urban millennials displayed a penchant for expressing themselves ironically without grasping what irony is, thus earning the ire of almost everyone outside their self-proclaimed counter-culture. Our frustration with their snooty attitudes, crystallised around growing use of the word ‘hipster’, now in a pejorative sense (no longer a reference to low slung trousers or lying on your hip in an opium den).
Hipster became the latterday version of the ultimate 1970s insult: poser. The trouble is that slagging off all things hipster has since become a sure sign of hipsterism. There’s no way out of here, folks! Surely it’s time to shout ‘pax’ – as the Latin speaking Mayor of London would say, and call the whole thing off.
The world of the hipster, and our attitudes towards it, were enshrined in the viral YouTube song ‘being a dickhead’s cool’. In their appreciation of lines like ‘20/20 vision just a pair of empty frames’, and ‘just one gear on my fixie bike’, all the Joe and Jo Normals expressed their contemptuous disdain for what they saw on the streets of Shoreditch.
But there were always complications. We were convinced that our own friends who might be seen as hipsters by other people, did not really belong in that odious category. Your mate Ed, for example, who rides a fixed gear bike like a hipster – he’s a cool guy and he’s actually into bikes; he’s not just pretending like hipsters do. Or Ben, he’s one of those coffee dorks like those hipster baristas, but he’s a cool guy too; he’s actually interested in coffee and where it comes from and who grows it etc etc.
Not like those other dickheads with no life, who just follow cultural trends, moving from scene to scene just to be seen, right?
Of course, bemoaning hipsterism is not entirely new. In the 1940s the term was associated with young white guys who wanted to be part of the jazz scene. It seemed that these guys had to learn ‘cool’ as a set performance, whereas black musicians appeared to just do it. Hence the idea that the hipster is necessarily not the real thing, who, in order to offset this, is obliged to enter into a spiral of obscurer-than-thou one-upmanship. Pity the poor hipster, in other words, he’s only trying (desperately) to prove himself. Today’s hostility towards ‘Shoreditch wankers’ is a direct continuation of this.
While trends may come and styles may go, looking down on hipsters still passes for fashionable. But it turns out that hipster-bashing is misguided and self defeating. To begin with, the culprits concerned have been dispersed and moved along like a homeless person in Hoxton Square. Financial services-types and established media people, pushed out of their traditional stomping grounds in North and West London, have lit a fire under the East End housing market, with the result that entry-level hipsters have been all but burnt out. Young twenty somethings in Hackney are being replaced by middle-class thirty something mums and dads (and it’s not that the same group just got older). They’re the ones, i.e. too old to stand accused of hipsterism, now getting the blame for ruining neighbourhoods like Clapton and Hackney Wick; which, lest we forget, used to be the part of town that most people couldn’t wait to get out of.
With London vintage becoming a worldwide brand, and Brick Lane thrift shops seeing more Japanese and Brazilian tourists than underground arty types, Shoreditch is now about as counter-culture as Oxford Street. But while loathed, loafer-wearing scene-kids are dispersing, one trend isn’t – the aforementioned one-upmanship. Except now its practitioners are those stalwarts who feel obliged to point out that they always saw through the whole ‘ironic’ fad – as if everyone else hadn’t worked it out for themselves.
Writing for the Daily Telegraph Alex Proud explains that, unlike his turf in Camden, which is ‘sustainably cool’, Shoreditch is a formula; it’s become commodified to the point of banality. I wouldn’t disagree with him about Shoreditch. It’s a tourist trap, although I’m not sure you could say much different about Camden town. But according to Alex, the main problem is the people, the hipsters, because they’re all mindless sheep. It’s not because people sought to make money out of an increasingly popular neighbourhood and turned it into a photo-op, shopping centre graffiti tour. Camden was cool before, Shoreditch is just a fad, Alex knows.
Or there’s Times columnist Katie Glass. Regular readers will know how cool her life is compared to the cut-off wearing, beardy twerps of East London. She explains how she was sick of ‘making small talk with hipsters in ironic 1980’s outfits’. She goes on to tell us how she made the totally unconventional life choice of moving to a small apartment in Soho, where tourists take pictures of her tiny metropolitan flat! Take that East London, Katie has proven herself a bigger hipster than all of you.
You can see what’s happening: if the true expression of cool is being enviably independent and autonomous, what’s going on here is a kind of post-modern McCarthyism where the person speaking decries everyone else (except their close personal friends – hope you spotted the Douglas Coupland reference) as hipster. All of which makes anti-hipsterism as redundant as anti-communism.
I realise I myself may be partaking in this ignoble tradition, by implying that those who complain about hipsters are the biggest hipsters. Does this make me, too, a victim of the pointless hipster feud – who knows? I don’t care anymore, as long as we can get over our obsession. Why not carry on with own interests? Even if it is micro-brewing or ironic bingo or, if you really must, football. Just stop making hipsters of ourselves, and we’ll have one thing less to worry about.