When 'Hip' is Dumbed Down for the Masses

I used to be a hipster.

(And if you expected me to roll out a lame ass punch line like “and then I took an arrow to the knee,” I’m sorry to disappoint.)

But wait a second, you say. How could that be? Like I’ve written previously, I was quite the outcast in my childhood. I didn’t catch up with the latest entertainment news, and I was devoid of any sense of fashion whatsoever. I was quite far from cool, in any interpretation of the word. So how in the world could I be a hipster?

“(A hipster is) one who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool ... The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream.” –The Hipster Handbook

Hipsters are a very mysterious group of people. Most people can’t even agree on what being a hipster is all about. Of course, technically the term originated around the 1940s, only to re-appear in the 1990s, referring to a subculture associated with non-mainstream tastes and alternative lifestyles. It remains largely the same today, except the range of definitions is substantially larger.

Hipsters were a subject of much ridicule. People scorned them for their “unique” tastes, laughed at them for their curious habits, and pointed fingers at their strange lifestyles. Their rejection of mainstream ways created a widening rift between them and the rest of society, resulting in a mild conflict between the two distinct groups especially evident in internet comments and memes. 

(Pic. source: quickmeme)

And yet, it seems like that was the way the hipsters wanted it. They were content being in their little walled garden of cool, indifferent to the negative reactions from “the rest of them”. 

Then Lady Gaga came around.

This is far from accurate, but I think a phenomenon that I’m about to describe later started to manifest around the time of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta(boy, that's a mouthful). Better known, of course, as Lady Gaga. Gaga was quite the shocker when she first started making it big on the music scene.  She looked and dressed literally like no one else, and her antics, both on stage and off, were astonishing, to put it very mildly.

Lady Gaga: one of the first big celebrities to embrace "weird" habits and antics. ( Pic. source: Internet Chronicle)

Come to think of it, that must have caused some confusion. On one hand, she made music that appealed to the masses. Quite a large part of it, at any rate, given her album records. But on the other hand, she was, in a word, weird. The ‘hipster alert’ alarms must have gone off in the heads of many. So what were they to do?

Over time, more and more celebrities caught on to this rebellious kind of habits. Rihanna was one, while a more recent addition is electro-pop duo LMFAO. The latter took it to equally outrageous heights, with Afro-like hairstyles and colourful costumes galore.

So what did the mainstream do? They decided to jump ship.

Suddenly, being weird was the ‘in’ thing. Dressing in over-the-top hipster outfits was cool. Doing antics that made no sense whatsoever? No problem. The unifying theme was: Do anything that in no way resembled normal.

The thing about hipsters is that they don’t just live in cool, they often create cool. In a way, they live ahead of time, doing things and trying stuff that isn’t even cool yet. Sometimes, these habits and styles overflow into the mainstream and it piques their interest, and they lap it all up like thirsty dogs. By then, of course, hipsters would have moved on to the next big thing, which in turn may be picked up by the masses some time later. It’s a never ending cycle. That was why, in some ways, I could be labeled as a hipster: While I wasn't 'hip' per se, I purposely kept out of or beyond the crowd, sometimes happening to do stuff that would become popular later (by the time which no one cared whether I started first any more). Planking is an example.

When the masses decided to become hipsters themselves, they took on the concept of being weird, or, to put it in a better way, “unique”. In that sense, celebrities like Gaga weren’t really hipsters; they simply were the first to follow in the footsteps of hipsters, emulating their weird ways. What they did – dressing and acting weird – wasn't as important as the lifestyle they decided to lead, the one previously only led by hipsters. And with their massive fan bases in hot pursuit, pop culture has seen the transition into a scene where we are no longer expected to conform, but to stand out, in our own ways.

Or are we?

What I have seen, instead, is a scenario where we are expected to be “unique”. We are expected to be weird, to have some kind of trait that would differentiate us from the rest of the herd. The reason? Because, apparently, everyone else is doing it. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem much different from a pre-hipster culture now, is it?

You now have so many famous people saying “be yourself!” or “stay true to who you are” when they are asked for some inspiring quote to spread to the rest of the world. But really, while the original, rebellious idea was a novel and intriguing one, aren’t we basically going down the same path as we always did? It seems that our little brains are always cursed by the want and need to be accepted by the rest of the community, even if it costs us our originality and what really makes us stand apart from one another. The only difference now is on the surface, where everyone tries not to look and act like each other, but in reality they’re all conforming to same idea of weirdness anyway.

I’m still a hipster. Because I’m trying hard to stand firm and really stick to myself, my true self. Who I am, and what makes me unique, not what people think I should do to make myself unique. By continuing to stray from the mainstream, that means I remain a hipster. And, for your sake, I hope you join me too.