Youth in revolt

If you had to mention it these days, you could be considered a bad conversationalist. The type that says, “So, how about that weather? It’s hot.” So how about people who state the obvious?

Like the slow cooker heat out there, the reality that local politics and crime can’t be mutually exclusive, and the years that must have been shaved from our life spans due to heavy traffic, the topic of hipsterdom is a bit tired, don’t you think? Serious, but tired nonetheless.

I have, in fact, tried to avoid using the word that rhymes with “dip” and “stir” combined. At least not without the same sort of mockery I use with the terms “cool” or “hip,” the origin of the word that must not be named.

In the ‘40s, hipsters were colorblind white kids who liked their scene black. Their penchant for the waywardness of jazz would later translate into their pursuit of rebellion on the road. One day, hipsters were a subculture with social significance, Jack Kerouac & Co. at the steering wheel. The next, Jack’s face was silkscreened on the tote bags hipsters were stuffing post-punk CDs and Art Film DVDs into. While Beats like Kerouac did away with authority and a permanent address, the modern hipster strove to flee from the conformity of conventional cool. Still, the constant consumption of what was dated in dress or undiscovered in music would soon make the irony of being uncool, well, cool. Even if your statement tee — I’m a Loser, Baby” — urges otherwise.

Yet few knew what they were in 2007, the year the Hipster had become more visible at the Pop Culture party. Leaning uninterestedly against a wall of neutrality, it was like that kid who got your attention simply by way of an off-frequency in attitude and outfitting. It may have been the drainpipe jeans that left you in awe of how anyone, male or female, could withstand such pelvic constriction. Maybe it was the headgear that came right out of the ‘50s, the reissue of sneakers that had been popular with Harlem MCs in the ‘80s, or the T-shirt bearing the lyrics of a grunge anthem from the ‘90s.

It was all of these things. Dipping itself into eras, genres, subcultures, and icons of cultural camp and stirred into an indifference inspired by modern history’s movements for difference, the hipster had been created.

Indie-Liverance

You could pack the product on for a New Wave-era hairdo, slip into a Guns ‘N Roses T-shirt, throw on a prep snob cardigan, sling an eco bag over your shoulder, and top it off with rapper bling — whatever. It didn’t matter, so long as you stuck by the sensibilities of It Doesn’t Matter. You ended up a collage of pop cultural influences. Essentially, you were your art. 

Your playlist, too, as abstract and assorted as it was, was your art. By 2008, Steve Aoki had become the messiah to the label-less — both the indie bands he’d shepherded into his LA-based Dim Mak Records and the kids who’d become insatiable in discovering new, no-boundaries music. After a fan-harvesting first visit to Manila in 2007, the following year saw Aoki’s second coming to what was then called Embassy Superclub (but despite its new name, is still actually known as such) as the ascendancy of Manila hipsterdom.

That was also the year I’d become editor of a magazine that is now, without my participation, deemed essential reading for the “urban,” “street” and “indie” set. Or rather, kids who rallied their identities under whichever consumerist campaign disguised itself with the vagueness of these labels, as vague and uniting a label as “hipster.” Aoki, fittingly enough, landed the first cover of this magazine.

“Music is changing and it’s all about being a part of a cultural thing around the song. It could be the label, it could be the Cobrasnake ‘cause he’s there shooting, it could be Cory Kennedy ‘cause she’s dancing on the scene,” Aoki explained in an interview for the mag’s maiden issue, the messiah citing his two horsemen — underground society photographer, Cobrasnake, and style muse for the bemused Kennedy — as party favors to his DJ sets. “The connection is good and that’s what I see in every city I go to — these kids going out and having a f*cking blast. And the meatheads might come too ‘cause they wanna see what the f*ck is going on there.”

The meatheads, representing all that was close-mindedly mainstream, did see what was going on, if all the plaid and skinny jeans that followed were any indication. Then came all the kids who wanted to create cool for the sake of it, turning the facets Aoki’s horsemen represented into instant facades. Buy a DSLR and be a photographer! If not, be a strung-out style icon!

Generation H

Scrolling down a point-and-ridicule blog like “Look at this F*cking Hipster,” hipsterdom’s manic avoidance of being stereotyped was its own undoing. If you remember that Penshoppe billboard with all that neon and posturing with lomo cameras, you’ll know that the brand is a shareholder in Hipster Inc. Major record labels are too, in case you didn’t catch Owl City here last week. As are all the club kids who pose for their friends’ digi-cams like they’re in a Nylon editorial. As is anyone who puts on a pair of oversize, black-framed non-prescription glasses to make an instant statement; or puts up a personal-style fashion blog; or recommends an obscure band to claim some kind of outward-bound forwardness.

Hipsterdom may be treated like an epidemic now but it seems as though everyone’s got the symptoms. We’re all trying to claim something, all trying to make a statement somehow.

Since the dawn of our lives online as well as the demand “You’ve got to download this,” weren’t we all splicing together what identity we could from search engine queries and whichever shared media we could identify with?

Through the Net, we own everything and are everything — every blog you scroll down on, every clip you stream, every thing you “like.” No rules to whoever you want to be. That spirit of creating yourself from all these influences and references; I guess we must have slapped a label on it once and for all, overwhelming as it was. 

Not too fitting a label since it’ll never live down shutter shades and the fact that there’s a graffiti installment in every event that lays a claim to “street,” “urban” or “indie.” No, we’ll never admit to being hipsters.

I think the label we’re looking for, vague and uniting as it is, is youth. ‘Cause really, isn’t all this what youth is today — the ability to not care or at least look like you don’t? The liberty to be whatever you want and do whatever you want? Which is all well and good, I guess, so long as the next guy isn’t doing it.