Cultural Spelunking

I have come to realize that I hate hip.

Not in the way that you say you hate something so you don’t have to face the fact that you actually want to be it secretly because you think it’s cool. I actually hate it. Honestly. Hip is like cool’s younger sibling. Where cool is exuberant and self-assured, hip is mangy and intensely self-aware, just trying to stay in cool’s good graces. Like the high school geek finally let into the cool kids’ club, hip is infinitely more cruel to those on the outside than cool would ever feel compelled to be (kinda like how the sophomore frat boys always haze the freshman the hardest, the seniors don’t really care). If hip ever started to be uncool (and by this I do mean unmarketable) the hipsters will be the first ones to publicly denounce it and jump ship to a new genre.

This begins to get at the heart of it. Hip is fundamentally based on the glorification of what should be uncool. Put a nerdy band kid in some skinny jeans, swap out half their meals for cigarettes, add some ironic sunglasses and viola, hip. Hip is the glorification of kitsch, irony and anachronism, all of which is painstakingly held afloat–above the waters of the genuine dorkiness these characteristics were founded in–by a fiercely maintained sense of superiority.

This is my problem with hip.

Hip thrives on pretension.  That ugly characteristic so ready to slash apart any one or thing which doesn’t meet its mark. I despise pretension. As a naturally awkward, enthusiastic, goofy, compassionate person, pretension doesn’t suit me well. This is why I clarify that I do not hate hip because I secretly want to be hip. I have wondered that, when I meet my hipster friend’s hipster friends, and been greeted with that standoffish silence. Hip watches you perform to try to impress it, toys with you and laughs at you while you struggle, when ultimately the only way you could ever really do so would be to affect the same I-could-care-less-about-you-because-I-am-so-hip-it-hurts attitude.

That is what separates hipsters from the band of social outcasts they used to be. It isn’t cool to care. It isn’t cool to try to be cool. Most hipsters try to glorify just how uncool they actually are, with the ugly clothes and the greasy hair. But it is all just an act. Almost like they are saying “but look I really still am cool because I am so avant gardly unconcerned about you and how uncool you must think I am.” It all seems a little desperate. Like giving Abercrombie and Fitch the stiff middle finger from your thrift store clothes really makes its influence over you any less.

Mostly I hate hip because it steals a certain joy from its apostles. So many kids who I used to know as uniquely interested and engaged with XYZ in whatever field, now have sacrificed this interest in exchange for hip. Hip has stolen the nerds I used to know and love. They have given into what Mark Edmunsdon discusses in his essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education” as the “hyper-cool ethos of the box,” a cool skepticism which is far more socially acceptable than enthusiasm. Hipsters are scared into line by “the specter of the uncool [which] creates subtle tyranny” and threatens to send them spiraling back to those dark days when they were the one too enthusiastic about: __________ and others coolly judged them from precariously high horses.

I would like to think that everyone has the ability to grow out of their social phobias and insecurities while still retaining a certain individuality and enthusiasm about them. Uniqueness is not a finite commodity, you do not gain it by asserting that others lack it. Buying an ironic pair of jelly sandals from Urban Outfitters doesn’t make you any cooler or less consumeristic than someone in a Polo.

Most importantly, convincing yourself that you are too good for others does not make you cooler, more artsy, more unique, or by any stretch of the imagination more interesting than you were when you were just busy loving what you loved. “On the Uses of Liberal Education”