The Hipster War
It happens everywhere; at the mall, at a coffee shop, at that park down by the beach. Nowhere is safe from the Hipster War. Especially not live shows. Any show, regardless of the genre playing, will always and forever be ground zero to the Hipsters.
What are they? What is the war? The questions are many, and they’re nearly impossible to answer. Hipsters, by definition, like “uncool” things ironically, in an attempt to be cool; like PBR. There are very few people on this planet that actually like that piss water. Hipsters don’t like it because of its taste. They drink it because it tastes awful. It’s a confusing world they create for themselves, and they spread it to everyone around them. As far as the reason for the war, well, perhaps the most important thing to know, is that hipsters hate other hipsters, and refuse to see themselves as such.
Hipsters have no standard definition, either. There are many variants, from Original Hipster, who wears plaid, and oversized glasses, and loafers, to the Emo and Scene Hipsters. These sub-categories of Hipster are nearly indistinguishable from the trend that they seem to be. The Emo/Scene Hipsters tend to wear a little more color, a little less makeup (gender undefined) and listen to a slightly wider variety of makeup.
Perhaps you are friends with one, and you are just now realizing it. Maybe she has a strangely asymmetrical haircut, reminiscent of early 1990’s grunge. Maybe she has thick-framed glasses, that make her head look like Beetlejuice’s shrunken one. She definitely wears non-trendy clothes, and almost certainly has a white belt or two. Does she walk a little hunched, or shuffle her feat to give off an air of shyness or discomfort? Now, go to her Facebook page (or Myspace, if she’s feeling especially ironic). Are her pets/boobs/whatever named something…unique…like ‘Fernando’ or ‘Armand’ or ‘Rupert?’ Do her status updates revolve around music no-one’s heard of, or about how much she DESPISES hipsters? If you’ve answered ‘yes’ to two or more of the above questions, congratulations, you know a hipster. If you personally qualify for two or more of these scenarios, then face it, you’re a hipster.
At a show, you often see her one of two places: up front close to the band, acting only marginally interested, or in the back, only marginally interested, but still perturbed that she is so far back. Ennui is the figurehead of the hipster cult. She will inevitably stand there, adjusting her half-shaved hair so it looks just disheveled enough that it’s obviously taken hours of work. Dancing in any sort of rhythmic way is out of the question, rather, she will shuffle her feet awkwardly, or do ridiculous white-man dance moves that should have died back in the eighties.
“How is this indicative of a war,” you ask. Well, this is the beauty of the Hipster War. It’s silent, and invisible, and there is minimal collateral damage. Everyone can identify a hipster, but most people simply dismiss them as another subculture of American youth. It’s only the hipsters that get violent and angry at the sight of another. Say our model hipsterette Aubrey[1] is out in public, on a random day. She’s not working, and therefore is not being forced into a code of ethics that she doesn’t subscribe to. Another hipster approaches. Inevitably, one of them will shuffle aside so that they can pass each other uninterrupted. But as they pass by, Aubrey will be absorbing every facet of the other hipster (we’ll call him Dan) from his plaid shirt, to his pathetic facial hair (or ironic mustache, it depends on how well the male hipster can grow facial hair) and most definitely to his white belt. It’s possible he’s listening to music, from his iPod or other device, and his music is just loud enough for Aubrey to hear. It’s probably the Decemberists or Some Band You’ve Never Heard Of. They continue to get closer and closer to each other until they are parallel, and at this crucial moment, there will be a single whisper of disdain. “Fucking hipster,” she breathes. A deadly blow in the hipster war.
Dan may recover, or, he may reevaluate his life, and stop drinking PBR because seriously, only half a dozen people in the world can genuinely like that crap. Maybe he’ll finally shave. With any luck, a blow like that can cause such an extreme reevaluation that any given hipster might even drop the superiority complex, and finally just be themselves.
But where does that leave our intrepid young Aubrey? Well, it’s hard to say exactly. For now, she’s carrying on with her Hipster ways, wearing a Purple Heart in the form of a panda-bear backpack. Someday she’ll get hit with that final blow, the one that cripples her ironic ideals. Until then, she marches forward, another silent soldier in the Hipster War.
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