I apologize for starting off with the most hipsteresque thing I've ever said, but you might be too young to grasp the first wave of hipsters - they were thick on the ground by 2002-2003. (A couple of good delineating points - the record store employees in High Fidelity aren't hipsters, but a lot of dudes who saw that movie and "got into vinyl" are; American Apparel and their Polaroid porn aesthetic shows up around this time; craft cocktails bars become a thing; most of the indie rock bands you'd most associate with hipsters had breakout albums by 2004.) Any 16-year-olds you're encountering in this style are just reflections of older siblings and media, and Hymen and company are more of an aggro "weird out the normies" subculture that's ever-present in high school/college; a clothing update for the kids in The Craft. Their modern equivalents are off shitposting somewhere as we speak, and probably in the tank for Trump.
As too what that hipster wave was, I think a lot of it was rejecting modernity (which at the time was the War on Terror, an ascending Republican majority and a suddenly pop, teen-infused popular culture) in favor of a cheap (the dotcom hangover was in full swing), thrift store aesthetic where you could deep dive into things and then annoy the fuck out people with holier-than-thou pissing contests about it. It overlaps with peak Lit Bro and a couple of other trends the internet still complains about despite having long vanished. Oddly enough craft brewing wasn't a big part of it - that group seemed to be an older, less cool crowd.
You're right that around 2010 it shifts to a new, porkpie hat and suspenders, craft brewing, distressed wood style. The Great Recession pushes a lot of people into the small-craft lifestyle around this time - I met my first twenty-something stained-glass artisan married to a professional woman hereabouts - and gentrification becomes the huge argument of the day. There's probably an argument to be made that Obama's success, plus Republicans the administration as hipster (remember the dustup about the guy in the Obamacare ad in glasses and a pajama onesie?) pushing a lot of people into being hipster-lite. Then it all collapses in the mid-2010's and people move on to other styles, with the stereotypical hipster remaining only as a strawman for internet debates.
As to where are those types of people now? Mostly off the internet, I suppose. Everyone likes to say streaming algorithms killed hipsters, but they're still behind the scenes pushing most of the content on streaming: https://www.vulture.com/2023/04/spotify-discover-weekly-songs-essay.html I think the context collapse of social media pushes a lot of this stuff out of view - when you truly want to avoid it, you don't move out to the country and make farm videos, you just... don't post things publicly. You just go about your day with niche fashions and niche interests, and the world at large doesn't know you exist.
Yes very much this. Hipsters to me means people who were living in Williamsburg in 2005, hanging out at Pete's drinking PBR (not single hop IPAs or whatever), enjoying the golden age of shows at the McCarren Park pool etc. The Hipster Olympics YouTube video hit in 2007 and note-perfectly skewered this group, right down to the fact that they were reliant on parent money and were weirdly (!) obsessed with their phones. Of course if you watch that video now what they're wearing and how they act is all just "normal young person" but at the time it was a very identifiable subculture of people who were into Animal Collective.
Anyway, what happened to them can roughly be divided into thirds: a third of them moved to LA and got jobs in TV and movie production, a third of them moved the suburbs and got normie jobs, and the last third still live in Brooklyn and work in PR or marketing. They mostly have kids, their dad who's a doctor in Connecticut still subsidizes their life, and they still won't go to their college reunion at Vassar or BU because it's lame.
I'd argue the High Fidelity guys were proto-hipsters, which had really long been a thing . .younger and middle aged white guys who live in the city, are into esoteric indie music (but weren't fully into any one subculture scene), "ironically" drank beer brands that were lunch-pail working class coded but had decreased in availability (Schlitz, Schaffer, PBR . .the latter was actually harder to find in the 90s) and looked down on those oblivious to their gnostic culture knowledge.
I also recall "peak hipster" being the late aughts . .the show Flight of the Concords really encapsulates that era and its humor so well. By the 2010s it became another mainstream "youth" style; when young evangelical Christian pastors started dressing like tatted-up hipsters in that decade you knew the end was near.
I'd agree they were proto-hipsters, but the interesting thing is how they're presented. They, (and Steve Buscemi in Ghost World, mentioned elsewhere in the comments) are pitiable - they're not cool, they're not the vanguard, they're dorks and losers who have trouble relating to people. Contrast that with the characters in say, 500 Days of Summer, who are obviously mainstream hipster heroes of the film.
Now you've got me thinking about the multiple bars (sorry, *lounges*) I would frequent that had off-menu PBR available in cans for those in the know.
I was actually just thinking about the evolution of hipsterdom, at least in NYC, is nicely captured by the shift from Flight of the Concords to Bored to Death, which aired just a couple of years later.
Although Flight of the Concords is mostly set in Manhattan, it always had a very late-period hipster Williamsburg vibe to me (and I was hanging out in Williamsburg in the late 2000s, so I know whereof I speak). The main characters are musicians, everything feels kind of grungy and ironic, one of their more well-known early songs was about how Bret's love interest could be a part-time model, which feels like a very 2000s hipster girl thing to do.
Contrast this with Bored to Death. The main character is a writer, he's got a kind of preppy-academic aesthetic, he's always hanging out in nice-but-not-too-nice bars drinking white wine, everything feels kind of twee and earnest, a big plot point in the last season revolves around a farm-to-table restaurant.
There was a definite hipster vibe shift around 2010, which CHH references, but I think her knowledge of the early period hipsters is a bit off.
Your first paragraph is very important! I was about to comment something like "well, I was a little too young to really get into the scene, but..." when I realized I'm exactly the same age as our hostess!
Just occurred to me: Ryan Adams circa 2002 was probably the first hipster I saw. He ushered in a new era of Americana/alt country, acted superior to everything and everyone, and then married Mandy Moore in like 2010 or something before completely falling apart and getting Me-Too’d for having online relationships with minors.
Yeah, I think basically what happened was that things that were "indie" became mainstream, or there was sort of a corporate mainstream version of it (Mumford and Sons is the perfect example) and just society just got a bit nicer and more sincere in the Obama era, so the asshole too-cool-for-school attitude was replaced by a sort of earnest and nerdy love for literature or folklore or whatever else.
That actually raises an interesting question: was 00s hipsterdom partially a reaction to George Bush and the right wing that became passe, replaced by "leaning in" and such?
I think there were quite a few things that were a reaction to the Bush II post 9/11 Freedom Fries Support Our Troops megachurch era. (Church attendance in the US peaked in 2006.) The New Atheism* I think was one, hipsterdom was another, all the “I f*cking love science” type Facebook posts yet another.
*not being an atheist, which is a personal POV. I am talking the whole posturing of the New Atheist movement.
Another important element of the downfall of hipsters is the ubiquity of streaming. Even during the time of the early internet, if you wanted to find, say Moondog or Captain Beefheart, you had to already know who they were, whether it be by listening to college radio or reading about them, and then be willing to make the trek to the local record store and talk to a clerk who Knows About Such Things as part of an initiation rite. Now, you can just go to Spotify's curated "American Originals" playlist and listen to Connie Converse or the Shaggs and call it a day.
To be clear, I think that the leveling of culture is in many ways really great! There's tons of music that is getting inifinitely more exposure than it would have otherwise. But with exposure comes a loss of cachet, and cachet was the bread and butter of hipsters.
I think you're on to something. When you're young, and especially if you go off to a large university, it's important to find your own like-minded group. To be an aficionado of obscure music and literature, emerging craft beer, intricate cocktails, is a sort of tribe. Part of being in the tribe is the shared esoteric knowledge. As a guy who went science track the tribe was immediate - all we had to do was open our mouths to talk about what we were studying (or later, talk about work) and immediately 90% of the room was lost. I'm 70, retired, and it's a bit astonishing how few of my friends aren't scientists, physicians, nurses, engineers.
“Cachet was the bread and butter of hipsters” - yes indeed! And not just music, either. Being able to access thrift shops, or those little boutiques you read about in “Lucky” magazine (another casualty of the social media Instagram era, says the former subscriber). I also think that the democratization of access is a good thing - I love me some ThredUp! Fast fashion I’m ambivalent on, not because I am a hardcore environmentalist but because I hate the cheap look and feel of shirts that fall apart after two washes and are so transparent you need three layers of underwear because you are wearing what looks like tissue paper.
I've been wondering some of the same things! Do you think also that maybe the kind of "check your privilege" theme of wanting to be inclusive etc made the hipster ethos sort of looked down on, even bad?
Around 2015 or so is when I noticed that people who had once bragged about only listening to New Age, and Joy Division outtakes were now unironically saying they loved a Disney movie or Taylor Swift or Beyonce. At first I was stunned, but I think it was actually their true selves coming out. Realizing that loving something that's normal doesn't make YOU less unique. Make weird outsider art if you want to! But you can do that and also dance to Beyonce or whatever for fun. They don't have to affect each other.
See, I view “poptimism” as ultimately a cynical last ditch attempt to grasp for relevancy and influence in a world in which content and entertainment options are exponentially exploding and elite gatekeepers hold less and less power over what gets discussed and what people considered.
Pitchfork taking Taylor Swift and Beyonce “seriously” was basically a cynical ploy to keep their Elite influence alive that ultimately failed because the size of the audience caring about the niche artist set that employed them previously had drastically shrunk and fewer and fewer people were even noticing them.
The lack of a pervasive, single stream pop culture means that you end up pushing rope if you try to be counter culture. We are all in the Roman wilderness now.
I have long postulated losing a single-stream pop culture (first with cable, then the Internet, but streaming services REALLY drove the nails in) led us to our current state of loneliness/despair/Trump as much as any economic developments. Having single frames of reference ("hey did you catch last night's ER episode!") served to really promote social bonding and cohesiveness. One of the reasons why I think the Olympics made such a ratings comeback recently . .people long for that unity of experience.
I think it also explains some of the more hardcore “Stan” communities. They are fighting for airtime to share their preferred entertainment, hoping it breaks through and becomes culturally relevant in the way Seinfeld once was.
Portlandia finishing up its final season probably heralded the dying off of this subculture, especially since it had lost a lot of its cultural aura by that point.
A big part of hipster culture was reading actual books and this has been dying off too. While hipsters were against mainstream corporate culture (at least superficially), they were also upwardly mobile at a time when being educated had more clout than now.
The fact that a lot of hipsters became specifically Bernie supporters - and thus supporters of an old man who kept losing - didn't help their cool factor. When they embraced Obama and he won, they seemed cooler.
Around 2013/2014, the hipsters I knew pivoted to liking rap and pop music and wearing hats with sports logos. There was definitely a vibe shift right around then. Also! It’s so annoying to me that Gen Z thinks that hipsterdom was about mustaches on everything and fake “nerd” glasses. This was the hipster aesthetic sold by target ten after peak hipsterdom. Must be how people who were young in the 60s feel about the “hippie” Halloween costumes you can buy at Spirit Halloween.
At least in fashion, the pivot towards more hip-hop inflected style started by like 2008/09, which I think coincided with a shift of the center of gravity in "cool" culture away from Williamsburg to the East Side of LA. By 2010 Brian Williams went on his "the New York Times needs to stop writing trend pieces about Brooklyn" rant and throngs of French tourists were wondering around Bedford Ave. buying mason jars and we had firmly entered the "Haight Ashbury in 1974, where the people selling the hippie aesthetic outnumber the actual hippies that had been there since the summer of love four to one" phase of the thing.
Also even within NYC, the center of coolness shifted to Bushwick. I remember going somewhere (I forget where) in Bushwick around 2017 and feeling like I was the only person there over 25.
Can only speak for myself, but as someone who was young at the tail end of the Hippie era I think that's a legit Halloween costume. It's been a half century, hippiedom is ripe for caricature. Besides, there was already Tommy Chong's Photo Mart Guy in "That '70s Show", while we're talking caricatures...
Another differentiator between hipsters and and emo/scene kids is that I think the original hipster culture emanated from 20-somethings in cities during the aughts. I'm thinking early Williamsburg/Vice/the Hipster Handbook/Cobrasnake/American Apparel, while I think emo/scene kids were younger and often suburban. The most hipster kids I knew in college (2005-2009) were either from big cities or were consciously emulating the tastes, style, and proclivities of people 5-10 years older than we were.
Which leads to my next thought, which is that actual hipsters were primarily a late Gen X/Bush era phenomenon, and had little continuity with the Obama era mason jar stuff. I don't think they were the same people at all. (Like .. no one who was into Neutral Milk Hotel was also into Mumford and Sons later, that just didn't happen!). The 2010s era stuff that Gen Z thinks of as hipster culture was, as you say, a mass marketed version of the previous hipster signifiers. I just don't think the people who partook in it were into any of the earlier hipster culture - they were younger millennial earnest normies with disposable income.
I think you have a point, but as an older millennial from NYC whose experience of hipster culture kind of straddles these groups, there was some overlap. Like, the people drinking PBR and going to McCarren Pool shows in 2005 were in their 30s by 2015 and not really at the vanguard anymore (and the vanguard was breaking down, anyway), and they may have sneered gently at Mumford and Sons...but they very well could have been drinking craft cocktails in bars with distressed wood panelling on date nights. I think a lot of the DIY food culture type stuff that became associated with second-wave (can we call it that?) hipsters was marketed, at least to some degree, to older first-wave hipsters who had some disposable income by the mid-2010s. And they did buy it.
As others have noted, hipsterism was replaced by “shh let people enjoy things”-ism sometime around the mid 2010s as the culturally hegemonic framework of white liberals. Some brave standouts like W. David Marx (hipster ass name smh) are doing interesting cultural critique work to try to get out of this poptimist rut.
Poptimism contains a great truth, that great art can come from anywhere, even from highly polished pop princesses. But over time it just turns into that Drill tweet about there being zero difference between good & bad things.
Man I’d love to know what happened with Hymen lol. I knew the hipster thing was over when my very normal, unironic preppy cousin started getting random hipster coded tattoos. It was like, ahh, it’s mainstream now.
I was wondering when someone would bring this up. I mean if they kept feeding CHH drinks and then tried to screw her we'd all be in agreement about predatory douche behavior, lack of consent, should all be shot in the face - OK, maybe not the last one but I think broad agreement that it was a serious violation. But feeding her drinks and then using her as cheap entertainment? FEELS like a serious violation to me.
I dated one of these guys in high school in 2010 right when it was starting to become mainstream. The social capital felt good but he was honestly really annoying to be around and we broke up after 3 months lol
We are getting deep into Millenial micro-generations here, but someone saying that they dated a hipster who was in high-school in 2010 reads to me like someone saying their high school boyfriend in 1998 was Grunge. Even if you lived in Seattle, that is simply too late for someone to have been part of that scene! They couldn't even drink until 2014 or later! You did not see an early Wolf Parade show 12 years before you were even old enough to get into the bar where it was being played!
Haha I love the micro-generational differences! I was in high school in 2010 too, and I would say hipsters of that era were into bragging about finding Belle and Sebastian records in thrift stores, posting film photography on Tumblr, and calling everything racist
The way the political valence of hipsterdom evolved is so weird. Early-mid 2000s hipsters definitely were not into calling everything racist, except maybe as a joke. If anything, much of the aesthetic of 2000s-era hipsters feels kind of right-coded now, though at the time it didn't seem particularly political (this was still possible in the 2000s).
I remember seeing Vice magazine - in print, and I think it may have been given away for free - as a college freshman in NYC in 2002 or 2003 and it seemed like the coolest thing in the world. But it was mean-spirited, and in a way that, when it turned out the guy who founded Vice went on to start (I think?) the Proud Boys, it didn't surprise me in the least.
I can’t say that as a 12 year old in 2007 I was experiencing the people around me in middle school dressing in suspenders and buying records of circus sound effects, but I can say that I stole drug store eyeliner, cut my own extreme side bangs, had suggestive My Chemical Romance fan videos saved to YouTube playlists, dressed in a lot of black and ripped denim and definitely identified with “emo/scene” subculture.
Maybe it’s because the “hipster” label was more accessible to those with a bit more disposable income/freedom of movement, such as high schoolers. So by the time I got to high school it was still a Thing but like CHH described, becoming co-opted by Urban Outfitters. So I think the person I dated was rejecting that mainstreamification and trying to keep it alive by being an even more extreme hipster, derailing classes he was in with loud theatrical outbursts and scoffing at the lowbrow tastes of emo/scene kids and showing them on his iPod Touch how fucking cool Caravan Palace was.
I think the modern hipster, in terms of the cultural niche of “better than you and derives social status from expertise in something obscure” is the performative radical leftist. There was some blending of those two cultures early on (culminating in Portlandia stereotypes) but the woke memes ate the obscure art memes. In each case it was a way to be in a superior outsider class who sees the reality behind [lamestream conformist] / [heteronormative racist] corporatist society. In that way, both are throwbacks to hippies. Going way further back, you have stuff like the Burnt Over Districts and revivalism when this behavior was religious coded instead of fashion or new wave or postmodern political theory coded.
I like this theory because I think two developments drive the death of the hipster. The first is just the co-option of the aesthetic. Even my extremely Republican, former fraternity member, oldest brother drinks craft beer and old-fashioneds and thumbs his nose at the people more "basic" than he is. I think this is part 1. Part 2 is, you needed something else from which to differentiate yourself from the unwashed masses - and that ended up being politics.
The decline in monocultures (in music, film, TV, books, even magazines) into basically niches coupled with the decline of their respective elite cultural media properties basically forced anyone craving that sort of gatekeeper or influence dynamic into the last remaining monoculture - national politics.
The variety of early hipster you mention is probably best exemplified in Ghost World. There was a part of it that really, really spoke to me in middle and high school, where I saw them as beautiful misfits and freaks, finding their own way in the world. Rewatching it, I am struck by what unpleasant, contemptuous, mean-spirited assholes the main characters are.
Went to a hipster restaurant a few months ago and realized i miss the whole vibe. The America i immigrated to was very hipster.
In the aftermath of 2008, it seems like a lot of people didn't get as good jobs as they hoped, and hence were stuck working on things that were previously considered low income, lower class. But then they decided to elevate it. The "better than my station" vibe came in handy here.
So yeah they could only find a warehouse in the Dogpatch to rent, but they could make it into a bar that changed $10 a beer because it was craft brews. They'd make Asian food, but it would be "authentic" and they'd skimp on decor and sit- down experience so the cost would be elevated ingredients.
A big feature was to go back to the original way of doing things without the capitalism and industrialization getting in the way. More self-reliance, working in small groups, from scratch, not relying on the supply chain, local ingredients, working with what you have, fixing things. I saw a restored floor fan from the 1950s for sale at Brooklyn Flea for $1200 in 2012....felt like that was the peak.
And this ethos also pervaded tech. I had a boss who introduced me to Kombucha. People began to pivot from wanting to work in big tech or an innovative VC funded startup and instead focused on building a tech small business co-op. This didn't last too long once VC money was available again, but it became a mindset and a cornerstone of several companies and influencers. IDK what's happening with WordPress now, but that was its ethics, and Ravelry was built to its peak by a husband-wife team. Etsy was started by and for hipsters.
I wonder if in the face of everyone confused in the face of AI we ought to go back to the hipster ethos as a solution. But the environment is different now - every corner of the economy has been elevated and leveraged, just like how Etsy is now sweatshops charging boutique prices.
I think its also the hipster evolution to use phrases like "the village" in the context of childcare, to breastfeed, to make your own baby food, use wraps to carry your baby, have diaper services.
And maybe also attachment parenting, gentle parenting....
I apologize for starting off with the most hipsteresque thing I've ever said, but you might be too young to grasp the first wave of hipsters - they were thick on the ground by 2002-2003. (A couple of good delineating points - the record store employees in High Fidelity aren't hipsters, but a lot of dudes who saw that movie and "got into vinyl" are; American Apparel and their Polaroid porn aesthetic shows up around this time; craft cocktails bars become a thing; most of the indie rock bands you'd most associate with hipsters had breakout albums by 2004.) Any 16-year-olds you're encountering in this style are just reflections of older siblings and media, and Hymen and company are more of an aggro "weird out the normies" subculture that's ever-present in high school/college; a clothing update for the kids in The Craft. Their modern equivalents are off shitposting somewhere as we speak, and probably in the tank for Trump.
As too what that hipster wave was, I think a lot of it was rejecting modernity (which at the time was the War on Terror, an ascending Republican majority and a suddenly pop, teen-infused popular culture) in favor of a cheap (the dotcom hangover was in full swing), thrift store aesthetic where you could deep dive into things and then annoy the fuck out people with holier-than-thou pissing contests about it. It overlaps with peak Lit Bro and a couple of other trends the internet still complains about despite having long vanished. Oddly enough craft brewing wasn't a big part of it - that group seemed to be an older, less cool crowd.
You're right that around 2010 it shifts to a new, porkpie hat and suspenders, craft brewing, distressed wood style. The Great Recession pushes a lot of people into the small-craft lifestyle around this time - I met my first twenty-something stained-glass artisan married to a professional woman hereabouts - and gentrification becomes the huge argument of the day. There's probably an argument to be made that Obama's success, plus Republicans the administration as hipster (remember the dustup about the guy in the Obamacare ad in glasses and a pajama onesie?) pushing a lot of people into being hipster-lite. Then it all collapses in the mid-2010's and people move on to other styles, with the stereotypical hipster remaining only as a strawman for internet debates.
As to where are those types of people now? Mostly off the internet, I suppose. Everyone likes to say streaming algorithms killed hipsters, but they're still behind the scenes pushing most of the content on streaming: https://www.vulture.com/2023/04/spotify-discover-weekly-songs-essay.html I think the context collapse of social media pushes a lot of this stuff out of view - when you truly want to avoid it, you don't move out to the country and make farm videos, you just... don't post things publicly. You just go about your day with niche fashions and niche interests, and the world at large doesn't know you exist.
Yes very much this. Hipsters to me means people who were living in Williamsburg in 2005, hanging out at Pete's drinking PBR (not single hop IPAs or whatever), enjoying the golden age of shows at the McCarren Park pool etc. The Hipster Olympics YouTube video hit in 2007 and note-perfectly skewered this group, right down to the fact that they were reliant on parent money and were weirdly (!) obsessed with their phones. Of course if you watch that video now what they're wearing and how they act is all just "normal young person" but at the time it was a very identifiable subculture of people who were into Animal Collective.
Anyway, what happened to them can roughly be divided into thirds: a third of them moved to LA and got jobs in TV and movie production, a third of them moved the suburbs and got normie jobs, and the last third still live in Brooklyn and work in PR or marketing. They mostly have kids, their dad who's a doctor in Connecticut still subsidizes their life, and they still won't go to their college reunion at Vassar or BU because it's lame.
I present as contemporaneous evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyeH2vxR41Y
I'd argue the High Fidelity guys were proto-hipsters, which had really long been a thing . .younger and middle aged white guys who live in the city, are into esoteric indie music (but weren't fully into any one subculture scene), "ironically" drank beer brands that were lunch-pail working class coded but had decreased in availability (Schlitz, Schaffer, PBR . .the latter was actually harder to find in the 90s) and looked down on those oblivious to their gnostic culture knowledge.
I also recall "peak hipster" being the late aughts . .the show Flight of the Concords really encapsulates that era and its humor so well. By the 2010s it became another mainstream "youth" style; when young evangelical Christian pastors started dressing like tatted-up hipsters in that decade you knew the end was near.
I'd agree they were proto-hipsters, but the interesting thing is how they're presented. They, (and Steve Buscemi in Ghost World, mentioned elsewhere in the comments) are pitiable - they're not cool, they're not the vanguard, they're dorks and losers who have trouble relating to people. Contrast that with the characters in say, 500 Days of Summer, who are obviously mainstream hipster heroes of the film.
Now you've got me thinking about the multiple bars (sorry, *lounges*) I would frequent that had off-menu PBR available in cans for those in the know.
I was actually just thinking about the evolution of hipsterdom, at least in NYC, is nicely captured by the shift from Flight of the Concords to Bored to Death, which aired just a couple of years later.
Although Flight of the Concords is mostly set in Manhattan, it always had a very late-period hipster Williamsburg vibe to me (and I was hanging out in Williamsburg in the late 2000s, so I know whereof I speak). The main characters are musicians, everything feels kind of grungy and ironic, one of their more well-known early songs was about how Bret's love interest could be a part-time model, which feels like a very 2000s hipster girl thing to do.
Contrast this with Bored to Death. The main character is a writer, he's got a kind of preppy-academic aesthetic, he's always hanging out in nice-but-not-too-nice bars drinking white wine, everything feels kind of twee and earnest, a big plot point in the last season revolves around a farm-to-table restaurant.
There was a definite hipster vibe shift around 2010, which CHH references, but I think her knowledge of the early period hipsters is a bit off.
I think The Hipster Handbook came out around 2002-2003 and I would say reflects a lot of what you've outlined here.
Yes! Was waiting for someone to bring this up.
I am glad I am not the only one who remembers this!
Your first paragraph is very important! I was about to comment something like "well, I was a little too young to really get into the scene, but..." when I realized I'm exactly the same age as our hostess!
Just occurred to me: Ryan Adams circa 2002 was probably the first hipster I saw. He ushered in a new era of Americana/alt country, acted superior to everything and everyone, and then married Mandy Moore in like 2010 or something before completely falling apart and getting Me-Too’d for having online relationships with minors.
Yeah, I think basically what happened was that things that were "indie" became mainstream, or there was sort of a corporate mainstream version of it (Mumford and Sons is the perfect example) and just society just got a bit nicer and more sincere in the Obama era, so the asshole too-cool-for-school attitude was replaced by a sort of earnest and nerdy love for literature or folklore or whatever else.
That actually raises an interesting question: was 00s hipsterdom partially a reaction to George Bush and the right wing that became passe, replaced by "leaning in" and such?
"New Sincerity" is a term that came around to describe art after the Obama vibe shift. Things got less mean at the expense of being more cringe.
I think there were quite a few things that were a reaction to the Bush II post 9/11 Freedom Fries Support Our Troops megachurch era. (Church attendance in the US peaked in 2006.) The New Atheism* I think was one, hipsterdom was another, all the “I f*cking love science” type Facebook posts yet another.
*not being an atheist, which is a personal POV. I am talking the whole posturing of the New Atheist movement.
Another important element of the downfall of hipsters is the ubiquity of streaming. Even during the time of the early internet, if you wanted to find, say Moondog or Captain Beefheart, you had to already know who they were, whether it be by listening to college radio or reading about them, and then be willing to make the trek to the local record store and talk to a clerk who Knows About Such Things as part of an initiation rite. Now, you can just go to Spotify's curated "American Originals" playlist and listen to Connie Converse or the Shaggs and call it a day.
To be clear, I think that the leveling of culture is in many ways really great! There's tons of music that is getting inifinitely more exposure than it would have otherwise. But with exposure comes a loss of cachet, and cachet was the bread and butter of hipsters.
A substacker named Sam Kris wrote something about that:
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/all-the-nerds-are-dead
In short, algorithms replaced hipsters as a filter. Spotify can find music better than any lumberjack looking man.
I think you're on to something. When you're young, and especially if you go off to a large university, it's important to find your own like-minded group. To be an aficionado of obscure music and literature, emerging craft beer, intricate cocktails, is a sort of tribe. Part of being in the tribe is the shared esoteric knowledge. As a guy who went science track the tribe was immediate - all we had to do was open our mouths to talk about what we were studying (or later, talk about work) and immediately 90% of the room was lost. I'm 70, retired, and it's a bit astonishing how few of my friends aren't scientists, physicians, nurses, engineers.
“Cachet was the bread and butter of hipsters” - yes indeed! And not just music, either. Being able to access thrift shops, or those little boutiques you read about in “Lucky” magazine (another casualty of the social media Instagram era, says the former subscriber). I also think that the democratization of access is a good thing - I love me some ThredUp! Fast fashion I’m ambivalent on, not because I am a hardcore environmentalist but because I hate the cheap look and feel of shirts that fall apart after two washes and are so transparent you need three layers of underwear because you are wearing what looks like tissue paper.
I've been wondering some of the same things! Do you think also that maybe the kind of "check your privilege" theme of wanting to be inclusive etc made the hipster ethos sort of looked down on, even bad?
Around 2015 or so is when I noticed that people who had once bragged about only listening to New Age, and Joy Division outtakes were now unironically saying they loved a Disney movie or Taylor Swift or Beyonce. At first I was stunned, but I think it was actually their true selves coming out. Realizing that loving something that's normal doesn't make YOU less unique. Make weird outsider art if you want to! But you can do that and also dance to Beyonce or whatever for fun. They don't have to affect each other.
The rise and triumph of "poptimisim" is definitely an element in the collapse of hipster as an identity.
See, I view “poptimism” as ultimately a cynical last ditch attempt to grasp for relevancy and influence in a world in which content and entertainment options are exponentially exploding and elite gatekeepers hold less and less power over what gets discussed and what people considered.
Pitchfork taking Taylor Swift and Beyonce “seriously” was basically a cynical ploy to keep their Elite influence alive that ultimately failed because the size of the audience caring about the niche artist set that employed them previously had drastically shrunk and fewer and fewer people were even noticing them.
The lack of a pervasive, single stream pop culture means that you end up pushing rope if you try to be counter culture. We are all in the Roman wilderness now.
I have long postulated losing a single-stream pop culture (first with cable, then the Internet, but streaming services REALLY drove the nails in) led us to our current state of loneliness/despair/Trump as much as any economic developments. Having single frames of reference ("hey did you catch last night's ER episode!") served to really promote social bonding and cohesiveness. One of the reasons why I think the Olympics made such a ratings comeback recently . .people long for that unity of experience.
I think it also explains some of the more hardcore “Stan” communities. They are fighting for airtime to share their preferred entertainment, hoping it breaks through and becomes culturally relevant in the way Seinfeld once was.
Re the college hipsters, you had your "Tony Soprano gets invited to play golf with Dr. Cusamano & Co." moment.
Hahahhahahaha
Portlandia finishing up its final season probably heralded the dying off of this subculture, especially since it had lost a lot of its cultural aura by that point.
A big part of hipster culture was reading actual books and this has been dying off too. While hipsters were against mainstream corporate culture (at least superficially), they were also upwardly mobile at a time when being educated had more clout than now.
The fact that a lot of hipsters became specifically Bernie supporters - and thus supporters of an old man who kept losing - didn't help their cool factor. When they embraced Obama and he won, they seemed cooler.
Around 2013/2014, the hipsters I knew pivoted to liking rap and pop music and wearing hats with sports logos. There was definitely a vibe shift right around then. Also! It’s so annoying to me that Gen Z thinks that hipsterdom was about mustaches on everything and fake “nerd” glasses. This was the hipster aesthetic sold by target ten after peak hipsterdom. Must be how people who were young in the 60s feel about the “hippie” Halloween costumes you can buy at Spirit Halloween.
At least in fashion, the pivot towards more hip-hop inflected style started by like 2008/09, which I think coincided with a shift of the center of gravity in "cool" culture away from Williamsburg to the East Side of LA. By 2010 Brian Williams went on his "the New York Times needs to stop writing trend pieces about Brooklyn" rant and throngs of French tourists were wondering around Bedford Ave. buying mason jars and we had firmly entered the "Haight Ashbury in 1974, where the people selling the hippie aesthetic outnumber the actual hippies that had been there since the summer of love four to one" phase of the thing.
Also even within NYC, the center of coolness shifted to Bushwick. I remember going somewhere (I forget where) in Bushwick around 2017 and feeling like I was the only person there over 25.
Okay sure probably but it didn’t trickle down to my neck of the woods (neither LA nor NYC) for several years.
I was just about to say the demise of rock music is a big part of the story.
Some of that contingent at least moved on to the burgeoning alt country scene—Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, etc.
Oh yeah, lots of discourse around that time about how “rock is dead.”
Can only speak for myself, but as someone who was young at the tail end of the Hippie era I think that's a legit Halloween costume. It's been a half century, hippiedom is ripe for caricature. Besides, there was already Tommy Chong's Photo Mart Guy in "That '70s Show", while we're talking caricatures...
Another differentiator between hipsters and and emo/scene kids is that I think the original hipster culture emanated from 20-somethings in cities during the aughts. I'm thinking early Williamsburg/Vice/the Hipster Handbook/Cobrasnake/American Apparel, while I think emo/scene kids were younger and often suburban. The most hipster kids I knew in college (2005-2009) were either from big cities or were consciously emulating the tastes, style, and proclivities of people 5-10 years older than we were.
Which leads to my next thought, which is that actual hipsters were primarily a late Gen X/Bush era phenomenon, and had little continuity with the Obama era mason jar stuff. I don't think they were the same people at all. (Like .. no one who was into Neutral Milk Hotel was also into Mumford and Sons later, that just didn't happen!). The 2010s era stuff that Gen Z thinks of as hipster culture was, as you say, a mass marketed version of the previous hipster signifiers. I just don't think the people who partook in it were into any of the earlier hipster culture - they were younger millennial earnest normies with disposable income.
I think you have a point, but as an older millennial from NYC whose experience of hipster culture kind of straddles these groups, there was some overlap. Like, the people drinking PBR and going to McCarren Pool shows in 2005 were in their 30s by 2015 and not really at the vanguard anymore (and the vanguard was breaking down, anyway), and they may have sneered gently at Mumford and Sons...but they very well could have been drinking craft cocktails in bars with distressed wood panelling on date nights. I think a lot of the DIY food culture type stuff that became associated with second-wave (can we call it that?) hipsters was marketed, at least to some degree, to older first-wave hipsters who had some disposable income by the mid-2010s. And they did buy it.
As others have noted, hipsterism was replaced by “shh let people enjoy things”-ism sometime around the mid 2010s as the culturally hegemonic framework of white liberals. Some brave standouts like W. David Marx (hipster ass name smh) are doing interesting cultural critique work to try to get out of this poptimist rut.
Why would you want to 'get out of this poptimist rut'? It's a good thing and certainly an improvement over hipsters
I think this era of music is a snooze but that's just like my opinion man
Poptimism contains a great truth, that great art can come from anywhere, even from highly polished pop princesses. But over time it just turns into that Drill tweet about there being zero difference between good & bad things.
Man I’d love to know what happened with Hymen lol. I knew the hipster thing was over when my very normal, unironic preppy cousin started getting random hipster coded tattoos. It was like, ahh, it’s mainstream now.
Yeah, I'm all about finding Cavendish now
I get strong secondhand embarrassment, and your college run-in with the hipsters made my skin crawl.
I was wondering when someone would bring this up. I mean if they kept feeding CHH drinks and then tried to screw her we'd all be in agreement about predatory douche behavior, lack of consent, should all be shot in the face - OK, maybe not the last one but I think broad agreement that it was a serious violation. But feeding her drinks and then using her as cheap entertainment? FEELS like a serious violation to me.
Yeah this was a toughie
I dated one of these guys in high school in 2010 right when it was starting to become mainstream. The social capital felt good but he was honestly really annoying to be around and we broke up after 3 months lol
We are getting deep into Millenial micro-generations here, but someone saying that they dated a hipster who was in high-school in 2010 reads to me like someone saying their high school boyfriend in 1998 was Grunge. Even if you lived in Seattle, that is simply too late for someone to have been part of that scene! They couldn't even drink until 2014 or later! You did not see an early Wolf Parade show 12 years before you were even old enough to get into the bar where it was being played!
Haha I love the micro-generational differences! I was in high school in 2010 too, and I would say hipsters of that era were into bragging about finding Belle and Sebastian records in thrift stores, posting film photography on Tumblr, and calling everything racist
The way the political valence of hipsterdom evolved is so weird. Early-mid 2000s hipsters definitely were not into calling everything racist, except maybe as a joke. If anything, much of the aesthetic of 2000s-era hipsters feels kind of right-coded now, though at the time it didn't seem particularly political (this was still possible in the 2000s).
I remember seeing Vice magazine - in print, and I think it may have been given away for free - as a college freshman in NYC in 2002 or 2003 and it seemed like the coolest thing in the world. But it was mean-spirited, and in a way that, when it turned out the guy who founded Vice went on to start (I think?) the Proud Boys, it didn't surprise me in the least.
The evolution of Vice magazine is such a good proxy for the shifting zeitgeist of that era.
I can’t say that as a 12 year old in 2007 I was experiencing the people around me in middle school dressing in suspenders and buying records of circus sound effects, but I can say that I stole drug store eyeliner, cut my own extreme side bangs, had suggestive My Chemical Romance fan videos saved to YouTube playlists, dressed in a lot of black and ripped denim and definitely identified with “emo/scene” subculture.
Maybe it’s because the “hipster” label was more accessible to those with a bit more disposable income/freedom of movement, such as high schoolers. So by the time I got to high school it was still a Thing but like CHH described, becoming co-opted by Urban Outfitters. So I think the person I dated was rejecting that mainstreamification and trying to keep it alive by being an even more extreme hipster, derailing classes he was in with loud theatrical outbursts and scoffing at the lowbrow tastes of emo/scene kids and showing them on his iPod Touch how fucking cool Caravan Palace was.
I think the modern hipster, in terms of the cultural niche of “better than you and derives social status from expertise in something obscure” is the performative radical leftist. There was some blending of those two cultures early on (culminating in Portlandia stereotypes) but the woke memes ate the obscure art memes. In each case it was a way to be in a superior outsider class who sees the reality behind [lamestream conformist] / [heteronormative racist] corporatist society. In that way, both are throwbacks to hippies. Going way further back, you have stuff like the Burnt Over Districts and revivalism when this behavior was religious coded instead of fashion or new wave or postmodern political theory coded.
I like this theory because I think two developments drive the death of the hipster. The first is just the co-option of the aesthetic. Even my extremely Republican, former fraternity member, oldest brother drinks craft beer and old-fashioneds and thumbs his nose at the people more "basic" than he is. I think this is part 1. Part 2 is, you needed something else from which to differentiate yourself from the unwashed masses - and that ended up being politics.
The decline in monocultures (in music, film, TV, books, even magazines) into basically niches coupled with the decline of their respective elite cultural media properties basically forced anyone craving that sort of gatekeeper or influence dynamic into the last remaining monoculture - national politics.
The variety of early hipster you mention is probably best exemplified in Ghost World. There was a part of it that really, really spoke to me in middle and high school, where I saw them as beautiful misfits and freaks, finding their own way in the world. Rewatching it, I am struck by what unpleasant, contemptuous, mean-spirited assholes the main characters are.
I’m also thinking of Donnie Darko for some reason.
The comic is very clear on this, that they are just hurtful because they lack meaning in their lives.
Went to a hipster restaurant a few months ago and realized i miss the whole vibe. The America i immigrated to was very hipster.
In the aftermath of 2008, it seems like a lot of people didn't get as good jobs as they hoped, and hence were stuck working on things that were previously considered low income, lower class. But then they decided to elevate it. The "better than my station" vibe came in handy here.
So yeah they could only find a warehouse in the Dogpatch to rent, but they could make it into a bar that changed $10 a beer because it was craft brews. They'd make Asian food, but it would be "authentic" and they'd skimp on decor and sit- down experience so the cost would be elevated ingredients.
A big feature was to go back to the original way of doing things without the capitalism and industrialization getting in the way. More self-reliance, working in small groups, from scratch, not relying on the supply chain, local ingredients, working with what you have, fixing things. I saw a restored floor fan from the 1950s for sale at Brooklyn Flea for $1200 in 2012....felt like that was the peak.
And this ethos also pervaded tech. I had a boss who introduced me to Kombucha. People began to pivot from wanting to work in big tech or an innovative VC funded startup and instead focused on building a tech small business co-op. This didn't last too long once VC money was available again, but it became a mindset and a cornerstone of several companies and influencers. IDK what's happening with WordPress now, but that was its ethics, and Ravelry was built to its peak by a husband-wife team. Etsy was started by and for hipsters.
I wonder if in the face of everyone confused in the face of AI we ought to go back to the hipster ethos as a solution. But the environment is different now - every corner of the economy has been elevated and leveraged, just like how Etsy is now sweatshops charging boutique prices.
I think its also the hipster evolution to use phrases like "the village" in the context of childcare, to breastfeed, to make your own baby food, use wraps to carry your baby, have diaper services.
And maybe also attachment parenting, gentle parenting....