The article didn’t explain that hipsterism is dead at all, but it did give a nice explanation of how Thundercat shirts and trucker hats had a rise and fall in popularity among hipsters.

I don’t think this article did much at all to explain what hipsters are, or why the “movement” is dead. The personal, working definition of hipster that I use is no something that is dead at all. I find hipsters to be people who aggressively conform to pop-culture trends of counterculture groups.

Skinny Jeans have been the choice for hipsters for a while now, some people genuinely like them and some people actually look good in them. Most however wear them not for irony’s sake but because they are popular among “cool” people. They aren’t popular among mainstream suburban types (well, not initially) but popular with musicians and artists so hipsters follow the trend.

These trends, trucker hats, ironic t-shirts…ect follow the same buying trends as all products Innovators > early adaprters> mainstream> laggards

“Cool” or “Artists” types serve as the innovators, wearing or doing something in a new way. Then you get hipsters as the early adapters who follow the trends and the trend becomes increasingly popular. Then the trend becomes mainstream and hits the malls and suburbs. Then the trend is dying and only laggards (uncool, middle aged) still follow it.

The hipster is always the early adapter, they don’t originate the trends and will drop the trend as soon as it catches on with the mainstream. So any particular hipster trend has a very limited shelf-life from the tme hipsters discover it to the time that either the innovators make a new trend or the trend becomes to mainstream for the hipsters to want to participate.

Actually the Ottomans had Constantinople well isolated from the West since they had gone and conquered much of Southeastern Europe prior to the siege. They also had fortress “Rumeli Husari” to help blockade the city as well as a giant cannon. It wasn’t an easy fight but cannon > walls

You know for the Turks to take Constantanople took a protracted seige to cut it off from the west and ultimately an overnight portage of an armada of galleys across the Golden Horn.

I’m just saying.

Because when you’ve got yourself a hollowed-out Byzantine Empire that needs its walls flattened, nobody does the job quite like a Turk.

And he’s about to be a Turk-in-law, so I figure he knows a few.

Let’s not say “indie rock” like that term means something. Yes, some indie music is intellectualized. Yes, some of it is about engaging and frustrating a certain emotional response.

And some of it totally isn’t. In fact, some of it is uber-sincere… maybe so sincere it circles back to insincere? I’m thinking of the Sufjan Stevens/Joanna Newsom/Shearwater subset. “Indie” is not a genre! kthx

-your friendly faux-hipster, currently listening to Okkervil River (whose lyrics are rather intellectualized/po-mo but whose music is wholly unironic and simply fun to listen to)

PS Where is Ryan Sheely on this discussion? Sheely, we need you!

As the kids say these days –

THIS

:-)

A lot of indie rock is about context.

Influence is very important to indie rockers. Confirming or frustrating expectations are very important to indie rockers. The act of intellectually engaging and frustrating an emotional response is very important to indie rockers.

And I wonder whether, to indie rockers, the music they engage with intellectually at one point in their lives doesn’t lose its currency and vitality and become more of a, as I’ve been calling it, “culinary” entertainment.

It’s the same arc – the brain disrupting emotional/intellectual emulsions until they become unmixed, the inellectualism sinks, and all you are left with is the emotional memory of your previous intellectual engagement, divorced from its source or context.

And then, if they move forward from that and look for more and more music to have new experiences with, how sustainable is that? Can you ascribe an aesthetic value to this intellectual pursuit, or is any aesethetic associated with it inevitably doomed, especially after the first couple of reinventions? To what extent can people remain hipsters, and at what point do they eat their own tails and have to look for something else or become something entirely different?

The more I talk about it, the more I think that a lot of us who have kind of ridden this culture wave in our generation have moved to a new cultural place of media saturation, with a new relationship with newness and with the intellectual enjoyment of media operating under different rules. But I’m not ready to write about it yet.

The one thing I will do is point you in the direction of learning the difference between “epic” and “culinary” as I discussed them. They’re theatrical terms that come from the work of 20th century dramatist Bertolt Brecht -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_theatre

In short, epic theatre is difficult to watch and aims to engage the intellect and prompt people to change the world, while culinary theatre (a term Brecht coins with contempt) is easy to watch and aims to satisfy emotional needs and make people content with the status quo.

The other super-short versions of my answers are something like “My specific examples are fine, but with very little difficulty you can sub in something that’s more relevant to your own personal experience and it will probably still work.”

and

“Listen to ‘Right Here Right Now’ by Jesus Jones and then think back to that one summer before 9/11 when everybody was really afraid of shark attacks for no reason, and I think you’ll get a good sense for the pervasive irony of post-Cold War America. Or else just watch _Three Kings_.”

Oh, and as for 5), I don’t think you’re really talking about the same thing I’m talking about. I was talking about the function of memory in the context of getting older, not the role of memory in forming personal identity. I’m talking about memory qua memory – the act of recall. You’re talking more about a dialectical notion of the past juxatposed against the present, which, while it may be part of how our minds work, isn’t how our brains work.

The more you tell me that I’m naming the wrong thing, the more I am confirmed in thinking that the thing I am talking about – which I did not just imagine – is dead and gone, and people are just now using the word for the same group of people who used to mean something specific to the culture and have a sort of underlying consensus and are now kind of scattered and not really part of the same culture as each other in an identifiable way. The culture has moved on and they are much less a center of gravity, so the specific things they like matter a lot less in the overall discussion.

6) I also do not reference my favorite recipe for Snickerdoodles. As much as I reference a lot of stuff, even I can’t reference everything in the world all at the same time.

Despite name-checking Brecht, I am not a Marxist, and I think Marxism is unnecessarily reductive. Not everything in history about the struggle. Prejudice is not the only thing one can talk about at any given time, and it is possible to have a complete discussion on a sophisticated topic without once mentioning gender or race. Although, to be fair, when I talk about the role of vital, intellectually provocative ideas in general, you can probably gather things like race and gender under that umbrella.

I mean, if I were writing a book, sure, and maybe I will someday. But it hardly seems fair to criticize me for not talking about every possible thing.

I don’t think you’re a fraud, Rachel. I think you’re awesome. I don’t think that hipsterism is bad, just that isn’t really vital anymore, and that people have moved on to something else, even if they haven’t named that thing yet (which they only tend to do in earnest after it is over).

I perhaps suspect that you are not really a hipster – that you are in fact something else.

I mean, you’re allowed to define yourself, sure, go for it.

But do you not suspect on some level that you may need a new word?