I think 'hipster' is just one lifestyle under the above criteria.
I think 'hipster' is just one lifestyle under the above criteria.
'The Century of the Self' is excellent. It explained to me how my commune-dwelling, sandals-made-from-old-tires wearing parents were converted back into happy consumers. It also cleared up a few other questions like: Why was the V-Chip was such a huge deal and then was suddenly forgotten?
Pay for it http://www.amazon.com/Century-Curtis-producer-Power-Nightmar...
Or not... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAD989035A4E8883D
I tend not to equate the two, myself. In my mind a proper subculture differs from a lifestyle in that, typically, a lifestyle comes from above. A lifestyle tends to be given to us by Madison avenue. The outdoorsy guy gets his opinions from magazines and buys super expensive toys from mainstream sporting goods with large advertising budgets.
The urban hipster we usually decry, picks up fashion at the thrift store, whose second hand sale does nothing for Madison avenue's masters. Music choices, reading, etc comes from the trenches of like minded fans. Politics comes from, typically, marginalized outlets via books easily had at the library or second-hand book store. There's a real crowdsourcing element to traditional hipsterism. Sure, they're all wearing black and listening to the same 50 or so indie bands, but the crowd made that happen, not marketers. I think there's a real value there and this type of person is really the only socially acceptable avenue to curb, what I consider, mindless consumerism.
If anything, the internet and its ability to tie us all together has made us all urban hipsters to some extent. Now we're getting opinions from 1,000 people on goodreads, not the NYTimes reviewer.
hipster is the standard mainstream culture today. Just look around.
>the typical urban hipster with his fixie.
"i was biking fixie way before it was cool". 30 years ago in USSR the geared bikes were much less available even if you had money for it - it costs 130 rubles - 2/3 of an engineer's monthly salary vs. fixie costing "only" 64 rubles. Going uphill on a fixie i dreamed about unreachable gears :) With wide availability of geared bikes here biking a fixie in SF is a cool way to beat those self-whipping monks.
Another bunch of urban hipsters on fixies feeling cool :) http://english.people.com.cn/mediafile/200906/08/F2009060815...
This is what bothers me so much about the term. Nobody calls themselves a hipster, and in my area at least, nobody who could be accused of being a hipster goes around thinking of themselves as some counterculture special snowflake. I ride a fixie because they're cheap and our city is flat, and I live downtown because I like to be able to walk to work, and so on. These are just normal things that young people do, generally without any pretention. Hearing people making ridiculous sweeping generalizations about how pedantic they think young hipsters are is just the same shit as complaining about Elvis and his dancing.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/10/how-pbr-co...
There are people who primarily seek to be different, and that can devolve into self-parody, but that is not the only kind of member of counter-culture.
I can spot people following that trend on the street but I can't tell if they'd label themselves as hipsters.
Hippies, grunge, punks claim to be hippies, grunge or punks.
That's why people hate hipsters - what they call irony is actually "being an asshole".