ROLLING HIPSTER STUDIES 09

wtf trucker hats and gas station uniforms were hipster gear in Tucson in the early 90s. Why did it take so long to happen in NYC?

are you sure those were hipsters in Tucson or was that just normal garb?

peak trucker hat was 2006 here in the UK I think? Came a little late because people don't actually drive trucks in hats here. Doherty straw hat thing was roughly the same time IIRC

xpost nah it was a thing for guys in bands. Thrift store culture.

it's hot there, a mesh hat seems utilitarian.

didn't think 'hipsters' qua hipsters really were a thing until the late-90s, and even then it was confined to major city districts

because more mid/southwesterners started to move to nyc? xpost. Also wasn't it a thing about Punk'd when the trucker hat peaked?

the Grandaddy Era

i just remember like Max Fish was a sea of stupid trucker hats around 2002. I don't look too good in hats or else i probably would have had one too tbh

i cant remember if i dabbled in trucking, but i def had a dumb gas station shirt for a few years late90s/early00s

(dumb bc i looked dumb in it)

Too many current interpretations of the word hipster. I still think of it as the urban outfitter type of person. Wearing a gas station shirt in the 90s was just 'alternative'.

I think social media killed the hipsters tbh

xp otm

'Hipster' to me was Nathan Barley and his mates

I don't know why I am thinking that people around 2003 dressed much better than trucker hats. Maybe because there were much more style-y bands and dance parties.

to me, a hipster is like thurston moore in 1982, whatever he was like then

well, the huge ass hipster as a pejorative thread was started in 2003 "Hipster" as pejorative.

rip hipster studies 😔

the field needs some fresh ideas, a new paradigm, maybe a 'turn'

hipster studies got cancelled

epic tl;dr rant by ayesha siddiqi is vintage hipster studies

https://ayeshaasiddiqi.substack.com/p/memento-millenial?s=r

i don't agree with everything (probably most?) of what she says (at time she succumbs to what i feel are tired cliches about millenials and also blurring the boundaries between bush, obama era, and post-obama era. i'm also less sanguine about gen z) but she's so great at this type of stuff and it's a pleasure to skim through a master going off at length

first third is Sally Rooney discourse which is very skippable

quoting two long chunks i found provocative

When Millennials complain about Gen Z not being as pop culturally literate, I feel we can’t really blame them. They don’t have TV the way we did.There’s so much I learned, even as an immigrant, through like, The Simpsons, because that’s what was on air after school. It forced us to become fluent in the perspectives and references of the generations preceding us––albeit the very narrow perspectives and references of upper middle class white men. And this is not a defense of that era, any movement diffusing its influence is an improvement. But there was some linearity to inheriting knowledge. It’s not like those same people aren’t still the ones writing the majority of TV. Only they’re now showrunners telling their token staff writers of color to write dialogue in the style of Twitter threads. Which isn’t to discount all the real talent that managed to still break through from the internet, like Issa Rae, Quinta Brunson, Zack Fox, so many other creatives; it’s to recognize that things didn’t magically get as easy for them as it may appear. Every person who originally found an audience online had to be more than original: they had to be talented in multiple creative fields simultaneously, and still only just made it by being at the right place at the right time.

Gen Z has a completely different relationship to popular and digital culture. Those blonde TikTokers whose names are always some combination of two first names don’t represent Gen Z the way we were told Mischa Barton and Adam Brody “represented” us. There are social media celebrities with millions of followers whose names no one reading this would recognize. What we’ve finally reached now is the end of any possibility of monoculture.

The atomization of the cultural experience over the last two decades has significant consequences good and bad; it’s the subject of my book. But what we’ve gained is a generation relieved of a lot of bullshit and preciousness about aesthetics, with a greater awareness of how the digital can be just as fake if not faker than the mainstream. It started with the post hipster embrace of Lana Del Rey; it’s ending with ambivalence over Sally Rooney. It’s the same authenticity test our generation applied to “indie musicians” when the tide first started turning. With conversation around whether Rooney’s books are diverse enough, leftist enough, sincere enough.

Gen Z is better able to treat culture as a playground with less self-conscious dissonance because it’s not as central to their identity formation as it was for us. For them, the digital is the mainstream. And it’s disposable. Being “alternative” doesn’t have the same currency since it’s an identity accessible to anyone.

We only achieved these pyrrhic victories over “representation” politics once they were more thoroughly divorced from actual political victories. And that scales across the culture industries. Hollywood productions are finally hiring fresh talent scouted online, but only once the streaming wars were already eroding union power. Media companies are hiring more writers of color, but once it was no longer a financially viable career. It’s visible across Instagram influencers desperately mining themselves for content, completely beholden to a platform they don’t own and an attention stream they can’t control. A few years after trans women began appearing in fashion magazines, the legislated violence against them has gained more ground. Isn’t it such a scam, replacing material assets with opportunities for clout for all different body types?

A few years ago, being someone who creates social media for a living was being hailed as the new normal. But the full time influencer/content creator was just a trend that benefitted a handful, not a sea change. It didn’t represent the emergence of a new economy; it was the death throes of an old one. The actual legacy of the “content creator” boom is the rise of individual traders on apps like Robin Hood, it’s crypto culture and NFTs. It’s asset production in the age of hyper devaluation of labor. In short, it’s the affirmation of the ability to “make it big.”

People are chasing what they mistake to be paradigm shifts in a more democratic direction, when they’re just attempts to escape the strain of living as neoliberal subjects in failing states spiraling towards reactionary fascism. It was obvious back then too. The platformization of everything, the emergence of the “gig” economy, did not challenge old models of employment. It accelerated and entrenched wealth gaps by pretending there was an escape valve. And there was, for a few. Less than half of one percent of Youtubers make money. Even fewer make enough money to quit whatever else they may be doing or have to. Of all the top earning podcasts with big audiences, not a single one is new. It’s been the same top earning productions for a decade now. They were the exception not the rule. As a friend recently said to me, all pyramid schemes need to pay a few people tons of money to get free labor from everyone else. And thats what social media users do, they create value for free. I’m not saying social media is a pyramid scheme, I’m saying the same capitalism that exists off of it has been more effectively reproduced on it. Eventually, people will catch on to the fact that “decentralization” doesn’t solve the problems of centralization. It just spreads them across a more atomized landscape with less regulatory power. If it matches the timeline of when the pundits catch on to things I post they’ll write their op eds on the subject about five years from me saying this.

But if you ask me if I think we live in a worse world, I wouldn’t hesitate to say no. We live in a better one. The effect of the internet on the world doesn’t uniquely harm the world as much as it exposes and amplifies what was already wrong with it. Racism, sexism, misinformation. Sure, there is a misinformation crisis, but that’s exactly what Fox, CNN, and NYT produced in the lead up to the War on Terror too; they continue to produce that world. The internet accelerates and it fills in the gaps. Nothing that’s gotten worse in recent years was something new or unprecedented––it all had historical points of origin. Meanwhile, a lot of what is better about the world now is new. It is unprecedented. We’ve made so many gains.

And every genuine gain facilitated by social media I credit to people, not platforms. I credit it to people building digital alternatives to what was missing in the physical world; spheres of influence, access, connection, empowerment. I think of people who made it possible for sexual violence to have social consequence. I think of the students using Discord to organize school walkouts. I think of all the people getting help through therapists posting on Instagram and life coaches on Tiktok. Sure, the quality varies, but that’s true of the healthcare system too. ADHD and autism is under-diagnosed in girls and people of color. These individuals have been better able to access life improving guidance online. Some of the best culture writers today came up on tumblr and Twitter; we would’ve missed out on so many valuable perspectives without them. I’m sure the people reading this can think of many more examples. The work I do now is with people who are trying to build better digital tools. They’re asking what furthers the public interest and how to meet needs of expression, connection, knowledge production and entertainment.

And to think amidst all this people want to talk about “indie sleaze” as an aspiration towards 2004 decadence rather than away from 2014 neuroticism. It’s so pathetic. It’s people wanting to discover the next “normcore” ahead of time. The “phenomenon” of indie sleaze is connected to us only in that its a reaction to the neuroses of painstainkingly tidy “millenial” aesthetics. Pastels and mostera plants. Immaculate bathroom tiles with pristine “top shelfs” of prestige beauty brands. “Clean” lines and “minimalism”. Ultra white Stan Smiths and Common Projects.

Amongst all else Gen Z is dealing with I’m so thrilled they’re not also pressed about getting their white shoes (Air Force 1s) dirty. “Geriatric” millennials misidentifying any of this as something that has to do with them are so desperate and arrogant. It’s like…millennials, , stop flattering yourselves. No one wants to recreate your college era looks. You looked bad. We don’t need to look to Gen Z to represent nostalgia for our youth; we already embody it. I’m happy for us to retire with our romantic little novels and leave pop cultural relevance to those the coming era belongs to.

The people that can’t handle not being the most interesting people at a party are always the least interesting anyway. And the people most defensive of their views usually don’t have a very strong case for them. Whether it’s about a particular cultural object being popular or not, or what that might mean.

Aesthetic analysis is about nothing deeper than consumption habits; but consumer habits reveal public appetites and the interests of capital and the state and that..can run deep.

It’s like…millennials, , stop flattering yourselves. No one wants to recreate your college era looks. You looked bad. We don’t need to look to Gen Z to represent nostalgia for our youth; we already embody it. I’m happy for us to retire with our romantic little novels and leave pop cultural relevance to those the coming era belongs to.

it's like ... millennials, look at history and reflect on how cringe it was when the baby boomers were doing this (and probably still are tbh)

Aesthetic analysis is about nothing deeper than consumption habits; but consumer habits reveal public appetites and the interests of capital and the state and that..can run deep.

i still think it's cool that a lot of this "discourse" has entered the mainstream, as opposed to being cloistered in academia as it was when I was a teenager and reading Bourdieu et al in college. it's like being able to buy a new fleece sweatshirt with the image from Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures on it ... in that, while it's cool that it is readily accessible at discount prices in a size that fits my middle-aged body, it also is awkward in that what it represents has shifted a bit (you can get one in white ... also tie-dyed) and the "rigor" has lessened. There is way more writing (and other media) that talks about these issues that does so in a lazy way, or a non-intellectual/theory way. But that raises the question -- does it have to be rigorous? Does the Unknown Pleasures shirt have to be a black t-shirt, and can only be a black t-shirt, or maybe, a long-sleeved t-shirt, but not fleece, not in colors other than black, and not on clothing made for plus-sized women?