Remember When Elaine Called Kramer A "Hipster Doofus"

I think a lot of people keep forgetting that it’s precisely the give-and-take between subcultures and their mainstream counterparts that allows most of us to even get a whiff of the former, via the latter. I’m a couple weeks behind the curve on this, but a quick thing on my significant quibble with the recent Adbusters “hipster” article. There are myriad problems with the piece, but predominantly this quote, which undergirds the author’s entire thesis:

“Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.”

I’m not overly familiar with Adbusters, but while this seems like the exact sort of thing that passes for cultural critique under the banner of such an entity, I’m amazed at the level of head-up-the-assness that would lead the author to come to the conclusion that “hipsters” are the “first” “counterculture” to…well, anything, really. Instead of going on and on and on about this, I should just point in the direction of Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, in which he demonstrates not a firm divide between the mid/late 60s counterculture and those who are paid to market a lifestyle to them, but no real divide at all. Instead of the tidy boundaries put around these things by (let’s face it, incredibly conservative) writers like Adbusters’ Haddow, Frank’s version of the relationship between consumer culture and its counter is, as he writes, “quite a bit messier”:

“Postwar American capitalism was hardly the unchanging and soulless machine imagined by countercultural leaders; it was as dynamic a force in its own way as the revolutionary youth movements of the period, undertaking dramatic transformations of both the way it operated and the way it imagined itself.”

For Frank, an idea of “co-optation”—you know, the cycle of business picking up an authentic subculture, commodifying it, and selling it back to them—is a myth produced by a generation of critics and scholars all too ready to rally around the supposed outsider. Let him explain again:

“…it was and remains dificult to distinguish precisely between authentic counterculture and fake: by almonst every account, the counter-culture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemias that preceeded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particularly the arrival of the Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots.”

And then this, the best part, a super-obvious point so often ignored:

“As it turns out, many in American business…imagined the counterculture not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer culture but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles against the mountains of dead-weight procedure and hierarchy that had accumulated over the years…Like the young insurgents, people in more advanced reaches of the American corporate world deplored conformity, distrusted routine, and encouraged resistance to established power. They welcomed the youth-led cultural revolution not because they believed it would allow them to tap a gigantic youth market (although this was, of course, a factor), but because they perceived in it a comrade in their own struggles to revitalize American business and the consumer order generally.”

There’s so much more to be said about this, especially, I don’t know, the way the Web and digital photograph factor into the current situation, but I’ll stop here, for now. I will point you (after Marc pointed me) to Momus’ and k-punk’s responses to Haddow, both of which address in their own ways the slippery, “messy” connection between the current crop of “hipsters” and the wider world of which they’re so obviously a part.

And it’s never not a good time to wind things up with Cat and Girl. (I love Cat and Girl):