What’s a Bad News Bears haircut? I know it’s a baseball movie, but what’s the haircut like?
Great, great thread. 
And NDP is right… it’s very in vogue among hipsters to be an afficionado of 60s pop, particularly girl groups… as you will now see.
Hipster cred: I read Pitchforkmedia.com, I go to at least two indie rock festivals a year, I never ever listen to the radio, I have never spent a dime at Wal-Mart, I own A People’s History of the United States, I think 60s pop songs are brillilant (“Be My Baby” is in my all-time top 5), I would have sex with The Arcade Fire and Radiohead were they incarnated as women, I own six pairs of Chuck Taylor All-Stars but have bought none since the Nike merger, and I think hipster girls, with their weird knit hats and striped leggings, etc., are very, very sexy.
Hipster heresies: I think a lot of 21st Century pop songs are also brilliant (“Since U Been Gone”? Best pop song I’ve heard in years.), I think Pavement is ridiculously overrated, I think the good stuff-to-crap ratio among indie films and music is not that different from Hollywood films and major label music, I love sports, have never actually read A People’s History of the United States, think argyle sweaters are ugly, own Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” and would have sex with my Tivo were it incarnated as a woman.
Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser were the worst things that ever happened to the English novel: after them, everything had to be serious lit-ra-choor to be reckoned of any worth, and storytelling was swapped for indulgent navel-gazing, self-obsessed misery-mongering, and half-witted prose “experiments”. I would like to dig up Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce and hit them with the shovel with which they were exhumed; and P. G. Wodehouse was the greatest prose stylist of the last century. Oh, and I like Pat Benatar.
As a member of the college hipster stronghold of Bloomington, IN (home of the Secretly Canadian record label,) I can tell you that some of these things you’ve listed aren’t really a part of hipster culture, at least not in my experience. Now, I know that there’s no such thing as a universal hipster culture, but everyone I know hates Napoleon Dynamite and views it as mainstream crap, and believes it to be overwrought and “trying too hard” to be cool.
Nobody here who calls him/herself a hipster, even sarcastically, is big on designer clothes. It’s Goodwill, baby! Or other used or vintage clothes stores - there are several of them here. I wore a few Izod Lacoste argyle vests at the height of my hipster phase as a freshman in 2004, but I got them at vintage stores. If when you say designer clothes, you’re talking about stuff like Hollister - not hip at all.
And energy drinks? Since when are they hip? Coffee, baby! I’ll take mine black, like my soul.
I do not understand the love for Wes Anderson movies.
Oh, forgot to share my hipster cred. I have the ultimate in ironic t-shirts. It’s a gray shirt with black script on it that simply says, “Irony.”
The ironic part is that I wear it with complete sincerity. I’m very earnest about my support for irony.
This is a quintessential hipster statement if ever I saw one. I like coffee with lots of cream and sugar.
My heresy is this: rock is dead. Long live hip hop.
I was more hipster-esque when I was in college, and had time to pursue various interests to a fuller extent. Things I do that are fairly hipster:
I get excited about new bands that no one has ever heard of. The only music site I read for years was NME. I would live at the bookstore if I had more money and it didn’t close. I don’t wear brand-name-emblazoned clothing if I can help it. My wardrobe combines (well, combined; work has toned me down a bit) articles of clothing that were never meant to be worn at the same time. I like watching indie movies, and never listen to music on the radio. I watch very little TV; maybe one or two shows at a time. I own bootlegs of (and actively search for bootlegs of) old REM and Nirvana shows. And I like films with subtitles.
There are also plenty of things that I do that. . .well. . .are kind of anti-hipster:
My clothing comes from mundane, chain stores–the cheaper, the better. I have a definite affection for 90s-era Eurodance music. I detest the. . .style, I guess. . .that poetry, short stories, and literary novels have possessed for the past five years or so. Tarantino is “meh.” And Fight Club is an overrated, piece of crap movie that presents 14 year-old pseudo-philosophy as a sort of nirvana. That last bit is. . .well, maybe not anti-hipster. Oh, and I identify as Wiccan, which with the hipsters around here earns you a heaping plate of the :rolleyes:s. Even if you’re talking to fellow neopagans–pagan is in, Wicca is out. Though, to be fair, it isn’t as though this comes up very often.
As for myself:
Hipster Heresies:
I love gas-guzzling SUVs and off-roading. I sold my truck a few months ago but if I had the extra cash I’d buy a '96 Tahoe 2-door with a six inch lift kit, brushguard, light bar, super swamper tires - the works.
I hate movies with subtitles. I can’t watch them - I need to hear what the damn actors are saying, in MY native language, for it to mean anything to me.
I own a Hollister shirt. Just one, and I never wear it, but still.
My regular footwear is a pair of heavy-duty Wolverine logger boots that come up 3 inches over the ankle - while this is not cool in the tight-pants-and-multicolored-Adidas-hipsters, it’s definitely fine by the outdoorsy-camping-hipsters. (Like I said, the hipster label is fuzzy.)
Hipster non-heresies:
I own sweater vests. Lots of them.
I smoke a pipe.
I wear thin-line glasses (they don’t have black frames, though.)
I have an Asian girlfriend.
I am a big fan of Pavement, the Silver Jews, Grandaddy, the New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene, plus many obscure bands.
My cheap beer of choice is Pabst Blue Ribbon. This may seem like it doesn’t make sense, but it does - PBR has been the hipster standby booze ever since it was supposedly embraced by bike messengers in Washington - and it’s definitely part of the scene here (as opposed to the non-hipster scene which seems to prefer Keystone, Natural Ice or Bud, Miller, Coors, etc.)
I am either clean shaven (in the summer) or bearded (in the winter). “Stubble” exists only during the short transition phase every fall.
I don’t wear ironic T-Shirts. (Except for this one because it’s hilarious.)
The only concerts I’ve ever gone to have filled up entire arenas.
I care about shit.*
I like sports.
I like Hootie and the Blowfish.
I wouldn’t vote for Howard Dean. (YEEAARGHH!!!)
I have been known to buy clothing and music at Walmart.
- I’m sure plenty of hipsters care about shit, too. But the ones I know don’t.
Same here, and I actually don’t think it’s all that bad a beer. One of my other hipster dichotomies is that my two favorite beers are Magic Hat #9 (big with hipsters, and with good reason; it’s fantastic) and Miller Genuine Draft (regarded as “swill” by hipsters).
Perhaps my biggest heresy though is that I live in Washington, D.C. And I like it.
Argent, does your Asian Girlfriend have a shaggy head of hair, ideally with bangs? That’s really the ne plus ultra of hipster girlfriends, right there.
Miller, your most recent post has sucked my brain into a logical vortex from which I may never escape.
Wearing vintage Adidas makes you look like a competitor in the 1976 Special Olympics.
Wearing vintage Adidas makes you look like a competitor in the 1976 Special Olympics.
PS Clothing is not “vintage”, OK? It’s used.
Wait a minute—is there a difference between “hipsters” and “hippies”?
Hippies have long hair, smoke pot and wear John Lennon glasses.
Hipsters have “combed with a Weed Eater” hair, smoke pot and wear chunky black square glasses.
I have hundreds of LPs. The biggest sections are from Beatles, Clapton, Ry Cooder, The Dead, Diane Schuur, Leo Kottke, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Dave Brubeck, Frank Zappa, and W.A. Mozart.
I have records by Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and The Fugs.
I had my acid and crystal meth phases a long time ago.
I have, but have not read all of, the *I Ching * and the Tao Te Ching.
I was late for work several days listening to the news of the day’s events in the Chicago Seven trial.
I can tell you how to make a light show out of a plastic bread bag, and a hot air balloon out of a dry-cleaner’s plastic bag, hibachi sticks and birthday candles.
However, I tried and failed to love Miles Davis. Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs are a bit too outré for me. I struggled through Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and I didn’t like it. The movie was much better. I think that’s the only book where I said the movie was better.
Carlos Castaneda was a somewhat talented faker. Kurt Cobain was a no-talent whiner. Patti Smith? Lou Reed? What’s all the excitement about? Can’t sing, can’t write. Bono finally stopped dropping an anvil on his toe before each song, but I still don’t like U2.
I’m prety much neck-and-neck with you (especially on “Since U Been Gone” - it always goes on my mp3 player/car mix), but I was going to mention how I thought Radiohead was the most ridiculously overrated band on the planet, with the Arcade Fire just slightly behind them. And I like The Arcade Fire; I just don’t think their music’s anything special. Radiohead, OTOH, sounds like Pink Floyd to me. Which I do not intend as a compliment. Plus, Thom Yorke’s whiny-ass voice grates.
Speaking of Pitchfork, while I read it, too, I’d say that, estimating conservatively, about 85% of the acts they hype are mediocre-to-downright-shitty. I think much of the indie music of the past few years has been jacking itself off into a corner; what the fuck is wrong with writing a catchy song once in a while, rather than striving so hard to “progress” beyond conventional song structures?
Also, Nirvana was pretty one-note (wow, dig those dynamics from loud to soft!) and they didn’t do anything that hadn’t already been done a decade earlier by bands like Husker Du and hundreds of lesser-known 80s indie bands.
I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit several weeks before everyone else heard it, but it didn’t jump out at me as anything different from the other stuff on college radio at the time. The fourth time they played it on the radio they prefaced it with “now they’re all big and stuff but it’s still good music so I’ll play it,” and I was floored. Sure, it was good enough for me to recognize but not good enough to be a surefire hit.
Which doesn’t make it bad, of course. (Ironically SLTS helped to create a music scene that would actively have opposed the song SLTS. Nowadays, it would enjoy more success due to the loud/soft and melodic influences of emo than it would during the heavy guitar-obsessed postgrunge mid-90s.)
Angela Carter’s novels and stories were written by a marketing committee focus-group tested to sell to 19 year old Women’s Studies undergraduates who think they might be witches and won’t have sex with you until they’ve read your tarot and then won’t have sex with you anyway.
Bingo. Although I go both ways on this: I really do think it’s a great piece of pop music, and at the same time I appreciate the cheesy quality it has. I would like it in an ironic way if I didn’t already genuinely like it so much. Plus the cover possibilities are endless. The two bands I can think of now that I’d really like to hear cover it are the Ramones* and the Pixies. With the Ramones, I’d want to hear it in their original style, and it would be awesome to hear Johnny turn the keyboard melody into a guitar riff. With the Pixies it would be cool to hear them do it both as a straight up pop song, and another version as their normal style.
*I’m aware that 3/4 of the original members are dead. I’m talking in hypotheticals here.