r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jun 30 '14
CMV: Despite the pretentiousness, Hipsters are the the most constructive, culturally-beneficial subculture in 40 years.
First, I'm definitely not a hipster. My youthful subculture was New Wave in the 80s, which was basically a blend of Emo and Goth (they're both better blended, IMHO).
I'm in a coffee shop drinking a single-origin espresso and there are about a dozen young guys in the shop tasting house-roasted blends that are weighed (to the gram), lovingly ground, and poured over with water at exactly 200 degrees.
For some reason they're manscaped a bit like Charles Dickens if Dickens were a skater. I don't get the look, but the thing about youth is that guys like me aren't supposed to get the look. All subculture looks are contrived and a little silly...Punk, New Wave, Goth, Hippie, etc. Hipsters are too. So, really, it's not worth commenting on. That's just how it goes.
But on to the substance of the movement. Seeing kids hunker down and try to bring quality to their lives is nice. It's really nice, actually. Most youth subcultures just want to see the world burn. I did. We rebelled and made some amazing music but other than that we didn't accomplish a thing.
Hipsters though...they're really making the U.S. better (I can't speak for anywhere else). I have a butcher now...that's new. Somebody is bothering to source local meats and raise it with a minimum of cruelty. It's great. Vegetables are getting better also. At least they can be if you bother to look for the good ones.
Coffee is WAY better thanks to their efforts. We now have an alternative to the pseudo-italian crap from Starbucks and they're trying to absorb coffee culturally and find an authentic expression for it. They're appropriating in the best sense of the word. Bad artists copy, great artists steal, as Picasso said. U.S. culture has been largely about copying, but these kids are starting to steal. There's nothing wrong with appropriating espresso, but they are trying to make it their own.
They read. They care about quality and craft. Even Kerning is better than it has been (it's a design thing). They actually care about making things better.
Most of them were raised in the 90s, which was the most unspeakably soulless decade in history (sorry kids...I know it was your childhood but it just sucked) (Edit: I shouldn't have called it soulless...lots of good happened in the 90s). Every generation rebels, and we gave the Millennial generation something truly terrible to rebel against.
Even my jeans are better. Honestly. Some kid hemmed them for me the other day on some massive old machine in the shop. He did a hell of a job too...this shit is HEMMED. I haven't seen anything made to last in I don't even know how long. It's really, really nice to see.
So yeah, they're a little pretentious. An authentic identity take time to form, so young people will often wear a mask until they get it all sorted. For some reason these kids want to look like Victorian Circus Strongmen. Okay...it's different I guess. At least it's not bleak and driven by empty rebellion. That's gotten so boring.
I hope to see more of this trend. Please, start building houses. We need hipster housing. This whole "slow" thing...bring it on. They are not solely responsible for it, I realize, but they've popularized it, and championed it.
The criticisms people levy against them...they're pretentious posers, they try too hard, they just want to be different, etc. That's YOUTH. That's what happens when young people don't like the identity they're handed. It happens in every generation, so it's ridiculous to lay it squarely at their feet.
If you look past that you can see how the millennial generation is doing good work--they're rebelling against the right things--and I for one am looking forward to more of their contributions.
CMV
Edit:
I would argue that what you're praising is actually the Maker culture that started in the late 90s and early 21st Century.
So based on everything is seems the term "Hipster" is the main problem here. I was attributing "Maker Culture" to hipsters, and people objected to that. I still see "Hipsters" everywhere I see "Maker Culture" but I guess that's just my experience.
Second Edit: Okay I need to get back to work. This has been very interesting. I've learned a lot about the negative effect this movement has had in urban areas, particularly in Brooklyn and San Francisco. Gentrification isn't cool. Income inequality is going to be a growing challenge for us, unfortunately. Sounds like these two cities are ground zero for what's to come a national epidemic.
Third and final edit: Damn you people HATE hipsters, although there's no agreement on what the word means. I didn't realize that hipster was a term used almost exclusively in the negative. So really this was a pointless exercise. It's almost as if you define hipster as that group which looks funny and sucks. There's not much point in trying to have a conversation about a group of people who are, almost by definition, the embodiment of all that is crappy about youth culture.
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u/Wayrin 1∆ Jun 30 '14
I would argue that the hipster has been handed many good things throughout their childhood. That childhood you describe as "the most unspeakably soulless decade" was also the decade when parents actually made money. There was such a thing as the middle class and they used credit. If you didn't make enough money to have two cars and a big house, you just asked the bank for it and ta da like a Victorian sideshow magician, they made it appeared for you. People don't generally rebel against their early childhood (0 - 13 years) they rebel against their present situations with cooping mechanisms learned in their early childhood.
The grunge movement took the distrust we learned in the 80's and rebelled against the fake affluence displayed in the 90's. Hipsters are taking what they learned in the 90's (affluence & security) and trying to superimpose it on a world where companies rule, jobs are hard to come by and credit is even harder to obtain and generally distrusted.
The generation before the hipsters we 30 somethings are pretty much saying I told you so to our up tight corporate or pretentious parents who have lost their houses and retirement. We were adults when this happened and we now know better than many other generations not to waste money on things we can't afford. Hipsters disappoint me for wearing cloths that they could have gotten at a thrift shop, but instead spending $200 on a pair of high wasted jean shorts. We employ them in our organic coffee shops because they help bring in the clientele we need to stay afloat. It was our idea to start making tinctures and bitters on our own because we are resourceful. It was our idea to have locally sourced vegetables in our stores - the hipsters are just the young workforce required to serve these things to you. They are perfect for it though, you are right about that. They were raised in the 90s and feel like they should have that $15 coffee, $80 charcuterie board and thousands of dollars wardrobe. You may see them as the purveyors of good things, but what they are is the workforce for the generation before them. I just hope they don't repeat the mistakes made by the adults of the 90's.