Sunday, October 2, 2011

Hip, Hip And Away!

Last week I was at a club replete with hipsters. Seriously, there were four people over 40 in the room, and only 5 females including me and the MC. So you know there were lots of gratingly annoying mid-20s guys with weirdly perfect skin and clothing chosen carefully to indicate how little they care about clothes.

No one likes a hipster. It’s the new meta-insult. But do we know exactly what one is? I say, if they annoy me, they’re a hipster. Oh sure, there are a few universal hipster traits. One is their ferocious attachment to irony, which they’ve redefined to suit their convenience. Hipsters do the same stuff we do, but they do it ironically. Quite understandably, we all want to smack them for that.

Facial hair configurations, young women in hats – the list is endless, and problematic. Men have facial hair and it has to be configured somehow. Young women might wear a hat for a perfectly ordinary, non-ironic reason. We’re back at irony again. Ironic facial hair is hipster, same with ironic hats.

But why are we so annoyed? There have always been cool kids. Hipsters aren’t much more than self-proclaimed cool kids, which is as annoying at 27 or 37 as it was at 17. The self-proclaimed part is the problem.

You don’t get to decide if you’re cool or not. If you care, you’re not cool. You’re a hipster.

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