Hendrik Hertzberg's Politics is one of those books that's both a great pleasure to own and to read. To own because, with a seven hundred-page girth and an imposing title, it fills out a bookshelf nicely, and because purchase includes the kick of being able to say you just "bought the Hertzberg book." (Go on, try saying it out loud. A blast, no?) It's a pleasure to read because, well, it's just a lot of fun. Politics also holds the unique distinction of being the kind of book we here at Slanguage would normally deem irrelevant for discussion in the halls of this hallowed blog. There's narry a "motherfuck," "biatch," or "hifey" within. There is, however, an essay on Yuppies (written in 1988, when the phenomenon was at its cultural zenith) that strikes a Slanguage-worthy chord.
One of H.H.'s observations is how slippery the word "Yuppie" was; you could use it to describe both groups and individuals, but no one (or at least, very few) would pin it to themselves. There's no "I" in "Yuppie." Nor, apparently, is there an "I" in "Hipster." I won't go into the etymology of the term (I've heard multiple explanations, from low-slung jeans to North African origins), and defining the word acutely is difficult to do in blog post length. But I think it's worth talking about hipster shame.
Recently I was having a conversation with someone who, no matter how shallow you cast your net, could be described as a Hipster. To preserve anonymity, I won't go into too many specifics, but he plays in a rock band, has a jagged haircut, wears spandex-tight jeans, and says "rad" a lot. Yet, throughout our conversation, he continually referred disparagingly to a person he didn't like as "just this huge hipster." By the same token, once, while hanging out with some friends of friends, I was accused of being a hipster because I knew the name of the lead singer of the Strokes. So hipsterism is relative, natch. The only absolute is that you don't want to be one.
Why not? The values one might casually associate with hipsterness (creativity, independence, self-expression) are admired, if not fetishized, by our generation. Same, it could be said, of the Yuppies and the generation coming of age in the eighties. Hertzberginator talks about how the aura of money around the Y word was at odds with the financial realities of the eighties. That no one really had as much money as it seemed like, and the Yuppie notion that you could buy into a more desirable social bracket was, for the vast majority of Americans, untrue. Thus, the term went from a descriptive to a sneer.
The same can't be said of "hipster." Though "trust fund" and "hipster" are not total strangers, the negative connotation of the word doesn't have its roots in class. Rather, it draws its damning power from a collective fear of being perceived as insincere. Denouncing someone as a hipster is the same as denouncing them as being superficial; Hipsters are in it for the wrong reasons. "It" may be anything from wearing tight jeans to liking a certain movie, but what's definite is that their intentions are shallow.
Every generation has had its fascination with cultural sincerity (I remember in seventh grade, I bought a skateboard but was paranoid about riding in public, lest I come across someone who would call me a "poser"), but it seems particularly rampant now, which makes sense: the lines between what's genuine and grassroots and what's hopelessly commodified are increasingly bleary. Partially because the big bad media is so good at finding the sincere and bringing it to light, partially because the underground has to make money, and even partially because hopelessly commodified can be a fresh, genuine statement of sorts. Indie-level bands are providing music for McDonalds commercials. Does that take away from their credibility? Does it add to it? Is the question of credibility even relevant?
My point is: "Hipster" is the product of this confusion. It's a way of paring off those who come up with the wrong answers to these difficult questions, or even those who spend time answering the questions at all. If you're truly genuine, you just do what feels right, right? And in this fashion, the negative connotation of "Hipster" quickly becomes an annoyingly circuitous dilemma, whereby those seeking to avoid it end up becoming it. We can only hope the term suffers the same fate as "Yuppie": slow death by overexposure. Consider this posting a crucial step in the process.
