Sunday, August 3, 2008

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

"We've reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it's been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style."


Personally I liked it more when Christian Lorentzen wrote it. While some of the points are similar I feel a little bit of "o.d." in the Adbusters piece. Ease up, homie.
"Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. "

1 comment:

KOOL A.D. said...

both of these articles smack of prudishness and condescending romanticism. there are and have been vapid scenesters, blind followers, and slumming rich kids in every last "authentic" "subculture" just as there are and have been intelligent and radical thinkers and artists whose visual markings could read as "hipster." broke people wear skinny jeans too. aesthetics can be (actually always are) political (as all things are). fashion does not invariably necessitate apathy and vanity. and that whole "b-boys are REAL" argument is some wack apologetic soft-racist authenticity-jocking, western-notion-of-a-universal-objective-truth bullshit.

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