What was the Hipster? | HiLobrow

Hipsters haunt the Revivalist generation (born 1974-1983):

Noting that the term “hipster” was first applied to certain black subcultural figures in the 1940s and to 1950s-era “white negroes,” Greif notes that although the look of “Hipster, in its revival” [emphasis added] may have “overlapped enough with a short-lived moment of neo-Beat and fifties nostalgia (goatees, fedoras, Swingers-style duds) to help call up the term,” the 1999-era crop of hipsters were white, and uninterested in fetishizing blackness. Instead, with their trucker hats, “wifebeaters,” Pabst Blue Ribbon, mustaches, Americana T-shirts, tube socks, and tattoos, the hipsters “fetishized the violence, instinctiveness, and rebelliousness of lower-middle-class ‘white trash.’”

Yep, this is what I’ve been saying for a few years now about the Revivalist generation. Whereas their immediate elders mix and match fragments of received cultural forms, which sometimes results in works of great originality, and sometimes simply means freshening up reheated entertainments with air quotes, Revivalists don’t have an ironic take on bygone cultural forms; instead, they reboot them, like old videogames. The hipster takes to a risible extreme what all Revivalists — including n+1′s editors — do, in one form or another. It’s hard-wired into their generational DNA.

If Revivalists despise the hipster with white-hot intensity, it’s for that reason.

So if revivalists are always-already rebooting dead cultural modes, do they hate hipsters for giving away the game - thereby turning the whole ethos into a sham parody - or because they are incapable of the ironic distance required to, y'know, get the joke - and thereby laugh at themselves?

Does what you like define who you are? | Music | The Big Questions | The A.V. Club

The A.V. club asks:

It’s the question that launched a zillion angry message-board comments: Are you defined by what you like? Is it appropriate to judge people based on their iTunes playlists and Netflix queues? Are people who prefer a particular artist or genre inherently smarter, more interesting, more attractive, and better-smelling than those who prefer another, perhaps less-favorable artist or genre?

Most folks will bend over backwards to say, no. I mean what kind of snob, hipster, elitist would you have to be to judge someone on their cultural tastes? But really they know the answer is yes. Because if you strip away all of those likes and dislikes, ideas and passions, what's left? To know someone is to understand what gets them up in the morning. What gets them excited and what bores them out of their minds. To pretend that it doesn't matter is like pretending that Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Christmases don't matter. It's like giving everyone the same generic present over and over, because it's not like a gift can define you.

Can Church Be Hip? Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

It's an obnoxious question, but Neutral Milk Hotel has enough complexity and authenticity going for it to give it a little weight. For the most it's not about Church or religion, it's about faith and affirmation and connectivity and openness, and all that great Milch-ian romantic existentialism. The pain of the past being transformed into the future tense of joy. And so forth.

What people fail to understand is that the church is a political institution. Religion a sub-genre of art. Faith is the willingness to give oneself over to artistic invention. God is metaphor; the organizing principle around which a community can form.

1 2 3 4, Hey Ya!

The Gawker knows what's wrong with everyone else:

I was in the DUMBO West Elm watching stroller-pushing condo-dwellers tap their toes to the beat of "Sealion Woman" while admiring antler lamps when it finally dawned on me: Feist's "The Reminder" is totally the "Speakerboxx/The Love Below" of Summer 2007. Leslie Feist's Canadian smart-rock was fun for a minute and then so ubiquitous you felt like killing someone every time you heard it. Sure, the first few hundred listens were great! And those wistful yearning songs about how "I will be the one to break my heart" were perfect complements to all our summer crushes. But it's fall now, even though it's still 85 degrees out, and everyone's job is back to being serious and all those summer crushes have decayed like so many overripe farmer's market tomatoes. Please. It's over. It's time to forget.

Summer is over; just in time to go trolling around hipster neighborhoods looking for people to sneer at. If anything is going to ruin Feist for me it sure isn't the yuppies at West Elm. It's the endless iPod Nano ads during NFL Football!