[MuscleHead]

Originally Posted by PoopyHead

Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is a hipster?

Latte sipping intellectuals?

Tattooed, black rimmed glasses wearing folks?

Trend setters?

Don't quite get it.

I attribute this white people contest to the nouveau hipster.

Now I understand that not all white people are hipsters (or do I mean trendsters?), and probably not all white people are participating in this new game, but I’m talking about white people at large here. To echo Bernie Mac, I’m talkin’ about universal white people.
I kid. I’m talking about the white people who are competing in this contest. duh!



I think hipsters have this need to prove that they are cultured and cosmopolitan, that they can traverse the metropolis without problems. They are post-everything, which is why they like to move to what might’ve been the hood (before they spread the word to their bros who pedaled over with kegs on their backs). They are post-white, post-class, even post-violence because they transcend all these things, they understand them, so they aren’t phased. Moving into the hood is also part of appropriating a middle class aesthetic, which is a key hipster characteristic that Douglas Haddow mentions in his hilarious article Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.

He writes:

The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.

Stuff White People Like: The A Train? the black scientist