On a lamppost outside the hip Matchstick Cafe on East 15th in Vancouver someone posted a leaflet: “Hipster jerk garage sale, East 10th and Fraser.”
Best pitch ever. What would you get at a hipster jerk garage sale? Stuff that got too popular? Stuff that’s already passé even though you’ve never heard of it? Moustache wax? Arguments?
Poor 21st century hipster. While other minorities are protected by laws and Canada’s strong multicultural tradition, the hipster has no friend. Nobody defends a hipster. Mocking hipsters is hip. Even hipsters deride other hipsters, sometimes for insufficient hipness, sometimes for excess hipness, or simply for doing it wrong. The Real Hipsters of Vancouver reality show currently in development is surely not designed to attract hipster admirers, any more than Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is aimed at people seeking fashion tips.
What has happened to hip? It seemed different back when hipsters were hepcats. 75 years ago hepcats were cool customers. Cab Calloway was hep. Louis Jordan was hep. Being a hepcat meant holding the key to a subculture, a world of music and fashion that existed on the margins of the square, white world.
Perhaps the problem is that modern hipsterdom is perceived less as a subculture than as a pose. Ideally, to be hip is to be ahead, to know things worth knowing. But today’s hipster is rarely seen as the guy in the know. He’s seen as the guy who carries a photo into the local barber shop and spends 15 minutes explaining just how his whiskers should look. Hipsterdom is viewed as an expression of narcissism and self-regard. That connotation explains why even a hipster does not want to be described as such. The term has been made pejorative.
I headed on over to the hipster jerk garage sale with high hopes. Alas, the young couple were not jerks. Barely hipsters even (unless owls are hip—there was a wide array of owl figurines and a DVD of Legend of the Guardians, one of the very few owl-based feature films). “I figured that flyer would get some attention,” the young woman said. “But we’re not that hip.”
I should have known. How many hipsters possess the self-awareness to describe themselves as hipster jerks? Can “hipster” ever be reclaimed? Can it go from insult to proud label, like “Canuck?” Can hipsters once again be seen as cultural shock troops blazing a trail for the masses, rather than just unsmiling moustache farmers carrying Bionic Woman lunchboxes? Beats me. If nothing else, the Hipster Jerks would be a great band name.
