I remember when the dominant counter-culture at my college, the University of Minnesota, switched from hippies to hipsters. The first sign was that everyone got thinner. I started to see a lot less “free thinkers” with dreads munching on organic banana chips and a lot more scene kids popping amphetamines and wearing leotards. This was probably about 2007, and I’m willing to wager that it was directly caused by Minneapolis getting its first American Apparel. The relaxed, super-stoned and idealistic hippie culture immediately waned as people started slimming down to fit into skinny jeans.
The hipster movement didn’t just swallow up the hippies, it swallowed up the indies too. Indie culture was a movement that wasn’t quite as prodded at and overanalyzed as hipster culture – maybe because it wasn’t as annoying. From my point of view as a millennial gen-Y-er who hit puberty at the same time as Britney Spears, indie culture – short for “independent” – was fueled by a DIY mentality. The music industry crashed, the Internet appeared, and suddenly it wasn’t about whoring yourself out to make it big, but about using technology to create and distribute your own art to like-minded people. That mentality gave indie culture a definite and sincere mentality that made it mesh easily with hippie culture. Both were fueled by idealism and art – Grizzly Bear fans could hang out with dead heads easily, as long as pot was in the room.
Hipster culture is more rocky territory. While it does center on the relaxed morals, love of “getting fucked up” and a DIY artistic mentality, it is bullheadedly anti-idealistic. Or at least this manifestation of hipsterdom is.But what does it have in common with hipster movements of the past?
Hipsterdom has a varied history in America. It’s roots come from either a slang term for opium or a Native American word for “to open your eyes,” and it was first associated with jazz culture. The first hipsters were into controversial art, against the establishment, free thinking and associated with a “new kind of white people,” who were inspired by non-white culture. The next major movement was the Beatniks, a term that comes from a combination of being “beaten down” and possibly from the word “beatitude,” although that might have just been an ironic hipster joke. Beatniks glorified the dark parts of America, gave them a voice, and stressed the importance of aimless exploration as a means of self-discovery.
I started wondering if there’s any power in a hipster movement when I recently noticed the re-emergence of poetry on the tastemaking sphere that is Tumblr. Now, poetry is something that I’ve long believed to be dead forever. First of all, there’s not much of a market for it. If you like writing in verse, you’re best off forming a dystopian songwriting team and selling your work to the marketers behind the next Ke$ha. Second of all, people want their poets to have a few romanticized characteristics, the most important of those being “dead.” We like our poets dead, to be martyred signifiers of bygone eras. Plus, the sincerity of Hallmark culture had merged with recent emo culture to make poetry more barfable than ever.
But maybe I was wrong. I realized something important that should have been obvious – poetry isn’t necessarily about sincere emotion or clever wordsmithing – it’s about a counter-culture. Or at least it is when it’s truly powerful. Hipsters might be anti-idealistic and purposeless, but they do have the ability to make something cool, to give something flat and dead a new momentum. Just look at the trucker hat. If hipsters attach themselves to poetry, they can resurrect it in a way that actually works because it fulfills its most “sexy” potential – representing a counter-culture.
This might be a misconception I gleaned from public education, but I have the notion in my head that any era when poetry is important is an era of cultural change. But there might be some truth in that, because poetry has evolved to become a powerful form of expression for the repressed and disenchanted, who tend to be the voices behind any revolution.
This essay has become too long and too disorganized, but I’m on my final point now. Let’s say that hipsters do start making poetry cool again (Tao Lin does have a popular book out, after all). Does this hipster era’s insistence on irony mean that our poetry movement would be completely insincere and thus not a true signifier of cultural change? I don’t think so, for two reasons. A) Irony isn’t anti-emotion. It’s simply a veil of detachment that actually lets people find a guarded way to say what they really think. B) I’m still not sold on apathy towards idealism as being a bad thing. We’re the first generation that has seen, on an immensely mass scale, just how destructive idealism can be. Christian vs. Muslim hatred, the fall of communism, the destruction of unregulated capitalism, the list goes on. Sure it’s not the final solution, but I can see why our overbearing irony exists.
So, does this current flood of hipster culture mean that we’re in a “renaissance” era? It just might. I think several elements of culture have collided at once to lead to major disenchantment – the market crash and downfall of the baby boomers’ “spend, spend, spend” mentality, the sudden global awareness of the growing population and increasing scarcity of resources, approaching runaway C02 rates, the Internet and accessible technology, unrest in the Middle East, etc. It’s hard to pinpoint it when you’re in the middle of it, but this is an important time of change, and those hipsters everyone likes to hate on just might be its byproduct.
I realize there are some holes in my point, but it’s more something I’m pondering than something I’m arguing. I’d really like it if people shared their own point of view and insight on the topic. If you’re still reading, what do you think?
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