Hipster: Difference between revisions
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From this was derived the strawman hipster of numerous parodies: A person who spends $60 on a new, designer-brand t-shirt which was faux-aged to look like something you could buy for $2 at Goodwill. A person whose taste in music is calculated to win "Whose iPod playlist is most obscure?" contests, and who disowns their favorite band for being played on the mainstream radio. A person who, upon admitting that she partakes in any form of mainstream entertainment—especially anything with a [[Deep South|"redneck" stigma]] (like [[NASCAR]], [[Nickelback]] or [[Mixed Martial Arts]]) -- claims that she's only "[[So Bad It's Good|enjoying it ironically]]". A person who [[Hypocritical Humor|mocks every other hipster he sees]] but vehemently denies being a hipster himself. In short: ''that jerk who thinks he's better than you because he's so aggressively different''.
Due to this strawman, the term "hipster" is frequently used as an insult, lobbed in the direction of anyone deemed pretentious or the slightest bit "artsy". Further confusing the issue, hipsters themselves will, owing to their "indier-than-thou" attitude, [[Ruined FOREVER|frequently disown]] any hipster fashions or artists that [[It's Popular, Now It Sucks|catch on in the mainstream]]. One year, hipsters may wear distressed jeans and t-shirts with ironic vintage logos; the next year, self-professed hipsters will stop wearing those because they're available at every Wal-Mart in America, while the latecomers who start wearing those ''will still be labeled hipsters'' by outsiders. Which only further contributes to the decay of the label (although the term "scenesters" is sometimes used for these johnny-come-latelies). But the real reason hipsters get so much hate is probably just the smugness. According to certain alarmists, hipsters are not just [[Acceptable Targets]], but [[The New Rock and Roll|an occasion for]] [[You Can Panic Now|outright panic]]. To them, hipsters represent [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]'s Last Man: they stand for nothing and believe in nothing, so their ironic sneer is [https://web.archive.org/web/20151214191559/https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html a harbinger of the downfall of Western civilization].
On a slightly more reasonable note, criticism of hipsters from right-wingers tends to focus on their left-wing, countercultural politics, while criticism from left-wingers accuses them of being the vanguard of [[The Man]] and undermining all the subcultures they appropriate from. [[Morton's Fork|So hipsters are bad because they're rebels, and they're bad because they aren't rebelling enough.]]
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