Yup, I’m heading back to California for work next week, although the title of this post could just as easily apply to Williamsburg (see below). The destination is still Southern California, but not the ultra swanky environs of Beverly Hills that I had the pleasure of visiting last trip. No, this time I’m descending on the OC, Orange County, and I’m currently in the process of seeking out some Shangri-la to rest my head after what is sure to be a long and uncomfortable flight.
Meanwhile, I encourage you all to check out an article in this week’s Time Out New York entitled, The Hipster Must Die, which asks the important questions like, “Has the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it vanish along with Kokie’s, International Bar and Tonic?” Now I spent a considerable amount of time, one might say too much time, in Kokie’s in the late 1990s and I'll be the first to admit that it occupied a unique place in New York city night life. I never really thought of it as a bastion of hipster New York, but reasonable minds can differ on such distinctions. The truth is that the hipsters discovered the place just before the whole scene ended in police narcotic raids and prosecutions, not when it was a rocking after hours club with live salsa music at 8am on a Sunday morning. Alas, that was back in 1995 when Williamsburg was but a gleam in an ambitious developer’s eye and the only evidence of alternative culture in the neighborhood was Planeat Thailand (on Bedford) and the Bean. There were no hipsters in Kokies in 1996. Period.
The Time Out article is full of fun sentences like, “Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.”
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. Hipsters are self-parody taken to the extreme. The exist to mimic cool, not create it. Consumerism has taken the place of creation, as anyone who has taken a stroll on Bedford Avenue lately will be the first to admit. There is a scene, no doubt, but where is the creativity? As the article astutely notes, “Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.”
The narcissistic absorption of the modern hipster renders them the ideal target of marketers who have been quite successful plying them with overpriced Pabst Blue Ribbons and convincing them to shell out $50 bucks for phony vintage t-shirts made in a sweatshop in China (With all due respects to American Apparel). How this translates into some sort of alternative lifestyle is beyond my understanding. What these folks do for work is also somewhat of a mystery as is how they are able to afford $3000 a month apartments. The article also presents a hipster time line with 1996 receiving special mention: “Take everything that came before this, put it in air quotes, and you have Williamsburg. Drawn by cheapo rents, artists had been moving there since the 1970s, and by the mid-’90s, they predominated, waving an ironic retro look as their flag.” I lived in Greenpoint in 1996, then Williamsburg’s poverty stricken next door neighbor. I remember the masses of seemingly unwashed artists trying to talk their way into the Turkey’s Nest on a Friday night past the bitchy Native American bartender with the foot long scar running up the center of her stomach. I also remember thinking how odd is was that they were trying to express their art and individuality by dressing in the same retro clothes and sporting the same hair styles. I suspect that all of the actual artists were already on the M train and making their way to Bushwick by early 1997.
Meanwhile, I encourage you all to check out an article in this week’s Time Out New York entitled, The Hipster Must Die, which asks the important questions like, “Has the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it vanish along with Kokie’s, International Bar and Tonic?” Now I spent a considerable amount of time, one might say too much time, in Kokie’s in the late 1990s and I'll be the first to admit that it occupied a unique place in New York city night life. I never really thought of it as a bastion of hipster New York, but reasonable minds can differ on such distinctions. The truth is that the hipsters discovered the place just before the whole scene ended in police narcotic raids and prosecutions, not when it was a rocking after hours club with live salsa music at 8am on a Sunday morning. Alas, that was back in 1995 when Williamsburg was but a gleam in an ambitious developer’s eye and the only evidence of alternative culture in the neighborhood was Planeat Thailand (on Bedford) and the Bean. There were no hipsters in Kokies in 1996. Period.
The Time Out article is full of fun sentences like, “Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.”
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. Hipsters are self-parody taken to the extreme. The exist to mimic cool, not create it. Consumerism has taken the place of creation, as anyone who has taken a stroll on Bedford Avenue lately will be the first to admit. There is a scene, no doubt, but where is the creativity? As the article astutely notes, “Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.”
The narcissistic absorption of the modern hipster renders them the ideal target of marketers who have been quite successful plying them with overpriced Pabst Blue Ribbons and convincing them to shell out $50 bucks for phony vintage t-shirts made in a sweatshop in China (With all due respects to American Apparel). How this translates into some sort of alternative lifestyle is beyond my understanding. What these folks do for work is also somewhat of a mystery as is how they are able to afford $3000 a month apartments. The article also presents a hipster time line with 1996 receiving special mention: “Take everything that came before this, put it in air quotes, and you have Williamsburg. Drawn by cheapo rents, artists had been moving there since the 1970s, and by the mid-’90s, they predominated, waving an ironic retro look as their flag.” I lived in Greenpoint in 1996, then Williamsburg’s poverty stricken next door neighbor. I remember the masses of seemingly unwashed artists trying to talk their way into the Turkey’s Nest on a Friday night past the bitchy Native American bartender with the foot long scar running up the center of her stomach. I also remember thinking how odd is was that they were trying to express their art and individuality by dressing in the same retro clothes and sporting the same hair styles. I suspect that all of the actual artists were already on the M train and making their way to Bushwick by early 1997.
5 comments:
Brilliant piece of writing! I especially appreciated it given that our last few years in Fort Green were blighted by these fauxhemian/trustarian/hipster poseurs. Thankfully San Antonio is pretty 'uncool' and thus relatively hipster free [for now?]. one could reason to be here...
Thanks KM. How is Texas treating you these days? New York would be a nicer place if we could excise the LES and Williamsburg and ship them off to California where they belong. I lived in both places,pre-gentrification,and I vastly preferred the neighborhoods before the fauxhemians moved in. Don't get me wrong, the LES has a cool vibe but its mostly predicated on its history, not its present state of hipster chic.
Hey, Mark,
We don't need any more of that scene in California. We moved here to escape that shit.
K.Rust
I always liked the term bobo or bourgeois bohemian but fauxhemian works well. I was talking to a friend about this article after it came back. The scary thing that he brought up concerns tonic and venues like Northsix. According to him, fastly dissappearing are the musical venues that are independent and not owned by a corporation. Spaces like CBGBs are going away and being erected in there place are venues that appear to be free and independent but really are crushing the spirit of independent music. The people who ran tonic actually kept the doors open, or so I heard, and the music playing until the cops came and arrested them. They did this intentionally to protest what is happening here. A dismal view may find NYC music, and not just the big places anymore, but small places, being controlled by a small few, who have cross marketing intesests, and who will be booking only those they seek to promote. Of course, the hipster is the mark in all this. If that individual does wake up and begin to have a brain rather than a look, we should be fine. Articles like the one in TONY and posting like yours may help.
Hey K-rust, I was thinking about Southern California. It's already full of shallow, vapid posers so maybe they won't notice.
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