This is a really recent dark side of the hipster community's creative side ......WARNING ..this short film contains graphic scenes of violence......however the post hip-hop dub-step 'heavy metal influences with a film- noir type gloss is very well made ....and disconcertingly.. captivating ....
from sub-culture on it's way to mainstream ....or is the intention that mainstream is now reversed ......an interesting concept ?
A short film directed by Shia Labeouf and starring Kid Cudi and Cage
Directly inspired from the Belgian film "MAN BITES DOG " (1992)
NOV 2011 RELEASE ...So extremely relevant to us .. in today's world
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A series of photos of celebrities at 'Coachella ' festival in California 2011 ( the annual 'Hipster' outing)
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You can see how hipster neighbourhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as "liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands"; the attack is levelled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the "creative professions." These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy — but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural "cool."
Greif's efforts puts the term "hipster" into a socioeconomic framework rooted in the petty bourgeois tendencies of a youth generation unsure of their future social status. The cultural trend is indicative of a social structure with heightened economic anxiety and lessened class mobility.[16]
CHAV The Oxford University Press has said that the word is "generally thought to come from Chatham girls",[4][5] but, according to etymologist Michael Quinion, the term probably has its origins in the Romani word "chavi", meaning "child"[5][6] (or "chavo", meaning "boy",[4] or "chavvy", meaning "youth"[7]).[8] This word may have entered the English language through the Geordie dialect word charva, meaning a rough child.[9] This is similar to the colloquial Spanish word chaval, meaning "kid" or "guy".[4][10] Unlike the Geordie variant, the term derived from Chatham can be applied loosely to every culture with a nasty, thieving element. The derivative chavette has been used to refer to females.[11] The adjectives "chavish" and "chavtastic" apply to stuff designed for or suitable for use by Chavs.[12] By 2005, media references to 'Chavs' had spread the word throughout Britain. The Chav's cultural equivalents are: in Ireland - "Skanger", Scotland - "Ned", East Anglia - "Yarco" [12], Eastern North
Origins in the 1940s
The term itself was coined during the jazz age, when "hip" emerged as an adjective to describe aficionados of the growing scene.[5] Although the adjective's exact origins are disputed, some say it was a derivative of "hop," a slang term for opium, while others believe it comes from the West African word "hipi," meaning "to open one's eyes."[5] Nevertheless, "hip" eventually acquired the common English suffix -ster (as in spinster and gangster), and "hipster" entered the language.[5] The first dictionary to list the word is the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk," which was included with Harry Gibson's 1944 album, Boogie Woogie In Blue. The entry for "hipsters" defined them as "characters who like hot jazz."[6] Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely black jazz musicians they followed.[5] In The Jazz Scene (1959), author Eric Hobsbawm (originally writing under the pen name Francis Newton) described hipster language — i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk" — as "an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders." However, the subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it.[5] Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality."[7] In his essay "The White Negro," Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death — annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity — and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self."[5]
A Chad is typically depicted as originating in Chicago's affluent North Shore suburbs (Highland Park, Lincolnshire, Deerfield, Northbrook, Glencoe, Winnetka, Glenview, Wilmette, or Lake Forest), attending private prep school, receiving a BMW for his 16th birthday, obtaining a law degree from a Big Ten University, belonging to a fraternity, moving to Lincoln Park, marrying a Trixie, and then moving back to the North Suburbs.[4] As such, "Chads" are not unique to Chicago but representative of a stereotyped subculture in contemporary America. However, the term's use is specific to the Chicago area.
"The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" is a 9,000 word essay by Norman Mailer that recorded a number of young white people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s who liked jazz and swing music so much that they adopted black culture as their own.[1][2] In the essay, Mailer christens the hipster as a psychopath. Disillusioned by the systematic violence of the two world wars, the hipster nihilistically seeks meaning in his life through immediate gratification, especially in the realm of sex. In the rejection of the conformism wrought by industrial society, the hipster valorizes individual acts of violence as infinitely preferable to systematic violence. Mailer draws a distinction, however, between the psychopath, who is able to discharge his frustration with society's stagnant prejudices in spontaneous acts of violent rebellion, and the psychotic, who is not. The psychotic is legally insane; the psychopath is not. One of the definitive characteristics of the hipster is their language, adopted in large part from the African-American vernacular. Their vocabulary is semantically so flexible that a single word, such as "dig," can mean hundreds of things depending upon everything from context to tone and rhythm. According to Mailer, being so disenfranchised by mainstream American society, the African-American views everyday life in the terms of war, which the hipster adopts as his model for the rejection of conformity.
Although the essay considers a subcultural phenomenon, it represents a localized synthesis of Marx and Freud, and thus presages the New Left movement and the birth of the counterculture in the United States. Probably the most prominent academic exponent of the New Left in the US was Herbert Marcuse. The essay is also very prescient because it anticipates the pejorative use of the word wigger in contemporary society to refer to white people who emulate the manner of speech, the fashion styles, or other aspects of the expressive culture of African Americans.
"The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" is a 9,000 word essay by Norman Mailer that recorded a number of young white people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s who liked jazz and swing music so much that they adopted black culture as their own.[1][2] In the essay, Mailer christens the hipster as a psychopath. Disillusioned by the systematic violence of the two world wars, the hipster nihilistically seeks meaning in his life through immediate gratification, especially in the realm of sex. In the rejection of the conformism wrought by industrial society, the hipster valorizes individual acts of violence as infinitely preferable to systematic violence. Mailer draws a distinction, however, between the psychopath, who is able to discharge his frustration with society's stagnant prejudices in spontaneous acts of violent rebellion, and the psychotic, who is not. The psychotic is legally insane; the psychopath is not. One of the definitive characteristics of the hipster is their language, adopted in large part from the African-American vernacular. Their vocabulary is semantically so flexible that a single word, such as "dig," can mean hundreds of things depending upon everything from context to tone and rhythm. According to Mailer, being so disenfranchised by mainstream American society, the African-American views everyday life in the terms of war, which the hipster adopts as his model for the rejection of conformity.
Although the essay considers a subcultural phenomenon, it represents a localized synthesis of Marx and Freud, and thus presages the New Left movement and the birth of the counterculture in the United States. Probably the most prominent academic exponent of the New Left in the US was Herbert Marcuse. The essay is also very prescient because it anticipates the pejorative use of the word wigger in contemporary society to refer to white people who emulate the manner of speech, the fashion styles, or other aspects of the expressive culture of African Americans.
Slate writer Brandon Stosuy noted that "Heavy metal has recently conquered a new frontier, making an unexpected crossover into the realm of hipsterdom." He argues that the "current revival seems to be a natural mutation from the hipster fascination with post-punk, noise, and no wave," which allowed even the "nerdiest indie kids to dip their toes into jagged, autistic sounds." He argues that a "byproduct" of this development was an "investigation of a musical culture that many had previously feared or fetishized from afar." [9] In 2008, Utne Reader magazine writer Jake Mohan described "hipster rap" as "consisting of the most recent crop of MCs and DJs who flout conventional hip-hop fashions, eschewing baggy clothes and gold chains for tight jeans, big sunglasses, the occasional keffiyeh, and other trappings of the hipster lifestyle." He notes that the "old-school hip-hop website Unkut, and Jersey City rapper Mazzi" have criticized mainstream rappers whom they deem to be poseurs or "fags for copping the metrosexual appearances of hipster fashion."[10] Prefix Mag writer Ethan Stanislawski argues that there are racial elements to the rise of hipster rap. He claims that there "have been a slew of angry retorts to the rise of hipster rap," which he says can be summed up as "white kids want the funky otherness of hip-hop ... without all the scary black people."[11] In his 2011 book HipsterMattic, author Matt Granfield summed up hipster culture this way: "While mainstream society of the 2000s had been busying itself with reality television, dance music, and locating the whereabouts of Britney Spears’s underpants, an uprising was quietly and conscientiously taking place behind the scenes. Long-forgotten styles of clothing, beer, cigarettes and music were becoming popular again. Retro was cool, the environment was precious and old was the new ‘new’. Kids wanted to wear Sylvia Plath’s cardigans and Buddy Holly’s glasses — they revelled in the irony of making something so nerdy so cool. They wanted to live sustainably and eat organic gluten-free grains. Above all, they wanted to be recognised for being different — to diverge from the mainstream and carve a cultural niche all for themselves. For this new generation, style wasn’t something you could buy in a department store, it became something you found in a thrift shop, or, ideally, made yourself. The way to be cool wasn’t too look like a television star: it was to look like as though you’d never seen television."
Critical analysis
Christian Lorentzen of Time Out New York claims that metrosexuality is the hipster appropriation of gay culture, as a trait carried over from their "Emo" phase. He writes that "these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod."[3] He argues that "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic" elements of all of the "fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge," and draws on the "cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity" and "gay style," and then "regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity". He claims that this group of "18-to-34-year-olds," who are mostly white, "have defanged, skinned and consumed" all of these influences.[3] Lorentzen says hipsters, "in their present undead incarnation," are "essentially people who think of themselves as being cooler than America," also referring to them as "the assassins of cool." He also criticizes how the subculture's original menace has long been abandoned and has been replaced with "the form of not-quite-passive aggression called snark."[3] 
Time writer Dan Fletcher states that "Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity".
In a Huffington Post article entitled "Who's a Hipster?," Julia Plevin argues that the "definition of 'hipster' remains opaque to anyone outside this self-proclaiming, highly-selective circle." She claims that the "whole point of hipsters is that they avoid labels and being labeled. However, they all dress the same and act the same and conform in their non-conformity" to an "iconic carefully created sloppy vintage look."[13] Rob Horning developed a critique of hipsterism in his April 2009 article "The Death of the Hipster" in PopMatters, exploring several possible definitions for the hipster. He muses that the hipster might be the "embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics," or might be "a kind of permanent cultural middleman in hypermediated late capitalism, selling out alternative sources of social power developed by outsider groups, just as the original 'white negros' evinced by Norman Mailer did to the original, pre-pejorative 'hipsters'—blacks...." Horning also proposed that the role of hipsters may be to "appropriat[e] the new cultural capital forms, delivering them to mainstream media in a commercial form and stripping their inventors ... of the power and the glory."[14] Horning argues that the "problem with hipsters" is the "way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how 'cool' it is perceived to be," as "just another signifier of personal identity." Furthermore, he argues that the "hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity, by a sense of lateness to the scene" or the way that they transform the situation into a "self-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and exploit." Dan Fletcher in Time seems to support this theory, positing that stores like Urban Outfitters have mass-produced hipster chic, merging hipsterdom with parts of mainstream culture, thus overshadowing its originators' still-strong alternative art and music scene.[5] According to Fletcher, "Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity. Critics have described the loosely defined group as smug, full of contradictions and, ultimately, the dead end of Western civilization."[5] Elise Thompson, an editor for the LA blog LAist argues that "people who came of age in the 70s and 80s punk rock movement seem to universally hate 'hipsters'," which she defines as people wearing "expensive 'alternative' fashion[s]," going to the "latest, coolest, hippest bar...[and] listen[ing] to the latest, coolest, hippest band." Thompson argues that hipsters "don’t seem to subscribe to any particular philosophy ... [or] ... particular genre of music." Instead, she argues that they are "soldiers of fortune of style" who take up whatever is popular and in style, "appropriat[ing] the style[s]" of past countercultural movements such as punk, while "discard[ing] everything that the style stood for."[15] Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's work and Thomas Frank's theories of co-optation, Zeynep Arsel and Craig Thompson argue that in order to segment and co-opt the indie marketplace, mass media and marketers have engaged in commercial "mythmaking" and contributed to the formation of the contemporary discourse about hipsters.[4] They substantiate this argument using a historical discourse analysis of the term and its use in the popular culture, based on Arsel's dissertation that was published in 2007. Their argument is that the contemporary depiction of hipster is generated through mass media narratives with different commercial and ideological interests. In other words, hipster is a less of an objective category, and more of a culturally and ideologically shaped and mass mediated modern mythology that appropriates the indie consumption field and eventually turns into a form of stigma. Arsel and Thompson also interview participants of the indie culture (DJs, designers, writers) to better understand how they feel about being labeled as one. Their findings demonstrate three strategies for dissociation from the hipster stereotype: aesthetic discrimination, symbolic demarcation, and proclaiming sovereignty. These strategies, empowered by one's status in the indie field (or their cultural capital) enable these individuals to defend their field dependent cultural investments and tastes from devaluating hipster mythology. Their work explains why people who are ostensibly fitting the hipster stereotype profusely deny being one: hipster mythology devaluates their tastes and interests and thus they have to socially distinguish themselves from this cultural category and defend their tastes from devaluation. To succeed in denying being a hipster, while looking, acting, and consuming like one, these individuals demythologize their existing consumption practices by engaging in rhetorics and practices that symbolically differentiate their actions from the hipster stigma.[4] Mark Greif, a founder of n+1 and an assistant professor at The New School, in a New York Times editorial, states that "hipster" is often used by youth from disparate economic backgrounds to jockey for social position. He questions the contradictory nature of the label, and the way that no one thinks of themselves as a hipster: "Paradoxically, those who used the insult were themselves often said to resemble hipsters — they wore the skinny jeans and big eyeglasses, gathered in tiny enclaves in big cities, and looked down on mainstream fashions and 'tourists.' " He believes the much-cited difficulty in analyzing the term stems from the fact that any attempt to do so provokes universal anxiety, since it "calls everyone’s bluff." Like Arsel and Thompson, he draws from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu to conclude: You can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as "liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands"; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the "creative professions." These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy — but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural "cool."
They, in turn, may malign the "trust fund hipsters." This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into "cultural capital" (Bourdieu's most famous coinage), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear.[citation needed] Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital.[citation needed] They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be "superior": hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.[citation needed] Greif's efforts puts the term "hipster" into a socioeconomic framework rooted in the petty bourgeois tendencies of a youth generation unsure of their future social status. The cultural trend is indicative of a social structure with heightened economic anxiety and lessened class mobility.[16] References
“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, will a hipster buy the soundtrack?”
If you’re a hipster, and you’re getting ready to move out of your flat (also known as ‘apartment’ for non-hipsters), then you’ll need this checklist from FlatRate movers.
Gotta hand it to FlatRate for coming up with such a great nugget of hipster media.
Hipster Move Out Checklist
Some snippets from the form in web Text form (why not)
Reason for Move
- Gentrification
- Proximity to Music Venue
- Writer’s Block
- Artistic Differences
Checklist Steps:
- Schedule a free FlatRate consultation at your co-op/loft/art space
- Fold Skinny Jeans / ironic t-shirts / flannel into flatrate wardrobe boxes
- Separate Proust, Nietzsche and Freud collections in specialized FlatRate book boxes
- Plan on spending your free time grooming ironic facial hair while FlatRate handles the rest
- Don’t pay hidden fees, explore hidden emotions
- Arrange for FlatRate IT setup to ensure speedy blogging in your new co-op/loft/art space
- Resolve daddy issues (LOL!!)
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A hip hipster family in the 21st century...
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Displaying the jazz influence from the original 1940's
English version...
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“On the Offbeat”: the Original Hipsters
In News on March 26, 2011 at 11:19 pm By Clark Historical Society
The term “Hipster,” as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jazz. The first printed dictionary to list the word hipster is the short glossary “For Characters Who Don’t Dig Jive Talk,” published in 1944. The entry for “hipsters” defined them as, “characters who like hot jazz.”
At first, the American jazz musician is referred to as a “hipster” or a “beatnik.” Musicians used the word “hep” to describe anybody who was “in the know” about an emerging culture (mostly black) which revolved around jazz. They and their fans were known as “hepcats.”
Subsequently, around the 1940s, the word “hipster” was coined to replace “hepcat.” White youth began to frequent African-American communities for their music and dance. These youths diverged from the mainstream due to their new philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits. They were disappointed about American society, the strict rules and the rigid lifestyle. So they found this way to express their opinions about freedom and love.
Generally, most of these young hipsters came from the participants of the “Lost Generation.” The Lost Generation is a bunch of young men and women whose lifestyle was simple. They loved to wear fancy dress, rejected work and refused to attend school, or accept any social obligation and usually wandered for pleasure, against all stereotypes and the secular rule of monopoly capital, and they always looked for absolute freedom in order to be a decent challenge to traditional values. To the hipsters, the bird was a living justification of their philosophy.
In addition, these hipsters adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician during that period of time, including some or all of the following: dress, slang, use of cannabis and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty, and relaxed sexual codes.
Modern hipsters pride themselves above all else as being “original”, but today’s hipsters are actually very similar to the hipsters of the 1940s. As well as their dislike of conformity, modern and original hipsters share a connection to music, in the case of early hipsters, jazz.
The 1940s hipsters’ adoption and imitation of aspects of black culture, mentioned above, caused controversy among conservatives. Hipsters wore zoot suits and “continentals,” dressing to represent the hope African-Americans had of moving up in the world (Hebdige, Subculture 47-49).
They also adapted jazz lingo, or jive talk. They especially enjoyed rhyming similes, which were an opportunity to show off their wit. With an attitude that would not be out of place among modern hipsters, those ‘40s hipsters who adopted jazz lingo “tend[ed] to drop out of their usage terms taken over by “squares” (Gold, “Vernacular” 276-278).
It was Anatole Broyard who painted the first psychological portrait of the hipster, in a 1948 article published in Partisan Review. He was both a scholar attempting to define this new culture, and a member of it himself. The hipster, in his view, is someone who is “superiorly aware.” (Ford, “Somewhere/Nowhere” 51-2).
The crux of his argument was that the hipster was always trying to be “somewhere,” always trying to locate himself (Broyard’s hipsters all seem to be male) in the world, “nowhere” being the hipster’s favorite insult. The struggle for definition led the hipster to reconcile himself with society symbolically.
Rather than dwelling on the hipster’s origins, Broyard tried to characterize the hipster of the time in terms of language and music. Language, in the form of jive, was the ‘40s hipster’s tool in the quest to “re-edit the world with new definitions.”
The language had no neutral words, since words were used not just to describe but also to evaluate. They were all good or bad, “solid” or “gone.”
As for music, the hipster used it as the soundtrack to his life, never as a reason to dance.
The ‘40s hipster did not dance, except in the offbeat, a “half-parody” way that today’s hipster might call ironic. The ‘40s hipster first adopted blues, then jazz. Bepop was the final genre to which the he attached himself. Bepop is full of surprises (again, one might even say irony), playing with the audience’s expectations. Its lyrics are usually nonsense syllables, which suited the hipster; he had made himself so abstract that he had nothing left to say.
Broyard then describes the downfall of his era’s hipsters. They were set on a pedestal by intellectuals who were impressed by the hipsters’ aloofness from society. They were treated as “ambassadors from the Id,” and idolized, and so they finally got the “somewhereness” they had always wanted.
Once that was in place, the language and philosophy of jive became routine and rigid, and the subversiveness of hipster culture was gone. It became like an indie band that finally gets the mainstream success it always aimed for, and thereby loses its image and cachet.
Broyard’s Portrait has been overshadowed by Norman Mailer’s 1957 Dissent Magazine article “The White Negro.” In the article, Mailer described hipsters in a way that “managed to offend almost everybody” (Ford 50).
“Like children,” Norman Mailer wrote on the hipsters of his day: “hipsters are fighting for the sweet, and their language is a set of subtle indications of their success or failure in the competition for pleasure.” He believed that hipsters, seeing death as inevitable, sought mindless pleasure at the expense of morality. “[T]he hipster,” he wrote, “is a psychopath, and yet not a psychopath but the negation of the psychopath for he possesses the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher, that absorption in the recessive nuances of one’s own motive which is so alien to the unreasoning drive of the psychopath.” He characterized hipsters as a result of “the Bohemian and the juvenile delinquent” adopting black culture (Mailer).
The most criticized aspect of the article was that Mailer’s portrayal of African-Americans, which he intended to be positive, cast them as primitive seekers of meaningless pleasure (Ford 51).
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A HIPSTER TIME TRAVELER ?
Or perhaps it’s just an unusual perspective, and the arm from the man behind just looks like it’s over the “time traveler”, even touching the camera? Or could the arm actually belong to the hipster traveler?
1940's photo
