It's Square To Be Hip

Once again, I find myself hearing invective directed at hipsters.

I've heard others make the point, and I think it's a good one: it's not really clear who hipsters are. It's not like Mods vs Rockers where everyone hates the other group but both sides are well defined and admit to who they are. In this case, no one really admits to being a hipster, and has only a vague collection of stereotypes to identify them. Yet all are absolutely sure that they hate these people.

It reminds me of my high school years, where there was a great deal of anger directed at "preps" even though my small-town high school didn't really have anyone that would qualify as truly preppy. Some students were better dressed than others, but hardly qualified on the global scale of preppiness.

I've occasionally referred to myself as a hipster, though that is, at best, just a joking shoot at my less-than-mainstream tastes, and, at worst, ironic. Of course, hipsters themselves are ironic, so ironically calling yourself a hipster makes you a hipster, surely. And they also hate to belong to groups, so if you hate hipsters, that also makes you a hipster. So one way or another, we're all hipsters. But that just makes it more confusing that we all hate them.

So what do we hate about hipsters? Some don't like the prospect of being judged. Hipsters have, at their most basic, defined what is and is not hip, and the assumption is that the standards are rather high and inaccessible.

There's also the sense of pretension. Certainly on the few times I've looked down on people for being hipsters, it's because they had a very artificial appearance that seemed to be working too hard to attain a particular image.

But here's the nonsensical part of those worries: they're no different from our everyday social concerns. Worried your cultural choices won't live up to hipsters' standards? That's what we all go through all the time: following other people's ideas of what to wear, watch, and listen to. As for the idea that hipsters are pretentious and artificial, you've surely noticed that all trends are just as fake, but we can't see it when we're inside the trend.

Of course, none of this justifies whatever negative behaviour you might have seen from people you identified as hipsters. But realize that they are no worse than anyone else. If anything, they deserve credit for choosing their own culture instead of just accepting the one that was thrust upon us. I'd like to think of them as chickens coming home to roost: they are to our culture what our culture is to us.