“We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.”
*sigh
It’s important that you read this.
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
More labels! maybe the author is so cultured and refined and experienced and wise as to be incapable of feeling anything new. Or maybe adbusters is just a hipster mag awash is self loathing and liberal guilt.
You know, this article and it’s main topic of hipsterdom really has made me think about things that are hard to reconcile within myself. My first response was to reject what he’s saying altogether because he just doesn’t understand what a hipster is. I’m somewhat hipster but don’t identify at all with what he’s labeling hipsters as but then he states the quintessential hipster trait is denying said hipsterness. Argh!
Another thing that I’ve been noodling on is the concept that hipsters are an economic entity with no culture. I think hipsters, a label that could easily be interchanged with “millennials”, are so connected by technology that we’ve been raised as children of the world so of course we’re uber-cultured. Because things in the past have always been so fragmented by country simply because the technology didn’t allow for the way things are now I feel like a lot of people who aren’t hipsters/millennials won’t understand because they can’t. They’ve never had to think of being a global citizen in the ways young people today do. I don’t feel at all like we’re cultureless, we’re just not defined by a country-specific culture like we’ve seen in the past with counter culture groups (like the hippies, for example) but a global culture of everyone being interconnected so our culture is much more wide-reaching than ever before. Pretty deep stuff!
Thanks for stopping by!
-Des
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