Hipster / college dorm culture before the internet

Cafe Society
21

Come on, there have always been hipsters, just probably not always called the same thing.

Someone starts the fads that get followed :smack:

Remember in the movies of the time set in schools, there was always a small group of people that everybody seemed to worship and want to be like - first to wear their hair in a certain way, first to wear whatever clothing, listen to whatever music, first to find that perfect little restaurant/bar/diner … everyone always wanted to be …

Those are the hipsters.

22

I was in college 1991-1996, and the Web didn’t really even register for us CS dept geeks until mid 1993, and most people didn’t start having email accounts until 1995 or thereabouts.

Anyway, the sort of non-mainstream stuff that was popular back then was music like the Violent Femmes, They Might be Giants, REM (older albums, not Out of Time), movies like “Heathers”, “Pump up the Volume”, etc…

Pretty much anything out of the ordinary or weird, and also intellectual was pretty much it.

The thing was, there wasn’t really a “hipster” crowd like there is today; things were less defined. There was the mainstream, then there was everyone else, which encompassed all the SCA geeks, the computer nerds, the “college music” crowd (what I suspect you’re getting at), the hippies and social activists, and the out-and-out weirdos.

23

Movies are nice but, a shock I know, they are not reality.

In college before the requested time - '78 to '82. There were no hipsters and no single crowd that was setting the style that everyone wanted to be like. There were lots of ways to subdivide the population and lots of different groups … but that warn’t one of them.

Anyway … best answer for that time was Big Speakers for the stereo system and having some digitally remastered editions of live performances by The Who or The Stones.

24

In the '80s, the people that set trends that everyone followed were the same people who had done it in high school … jock and cheerleader types – good-looking conformists. The people who were on the edge of fashion, taste, and style were scorned as weirdos, not worshiped.

And “geek” was a term of abuse for socially inept weirdos. These days every starlet and fashion model claims to have been a geek in his or her youth, but that’s not how it was in the '80s. Geeks were awkward misfits who were obsessed with some out-of-fashion subculture, like technology, sci-fi, or fantasy.

25

1969 - 1973 the one shared cultural icon was Firesign Theatre, since that was when their classic albums were coming out. In the fall we’d all gather around the stereo of whoever bought it first to listen.
Music was Grateful Dead, Beatles, Stones, with some others. Movies were whatever was at the campus film series that weekend, except we all got tickets for a preview of Zachariah, a rock western co-written by Firesign Theatre - and a bit of a disappointment.
On TV we watched early MASH and early SNL.
For books, we weren’t pseudo-intellectual. Certain books would be passed around. Love Story, to laugh at, “Naked Came the Stranger” a book written as a joke by writers for Newsday, and we had readings of that Victorian classic “A Man with a Maid.”

The lack of portable entertainment, besides records, put a damper on things.

26

I evidently made a grievous mistake using the word Hipster in the thread title. I still don’t know what a hipster is and I didn’t mean it in any specific negative way.

Anyway, I thought of another common item I saw in that late 1980s milieu - the book Bored of the Rings!

I didn’t notice those people being into telecommunications/BBSs at all. Must have been a few years too early.

I’m still curious as to what the female students were into? Or are these cult followings a male only thing.

27

Again, the people who liked stuff like this (I was one of them) were not the people who were on the vanguard of fashions and trends. They were on the margins of popular culture.

28

Where does he state they were? Skimming through this thread again, the only people I’ve noticed that have even hinted that hipsters were on the cutting edge of anything are you, **Kyrie Eleison, **and aruvqan.

A hipster is just someone with non-mainstream tastes in fashion and culture, and trying to pin the subculture down beyond that is practically impossible because it incorporates so much of all the subcultures before it and is one of those “you know it when you see it” things that very few actually admit belonging to themselves. My rule of thumb is the more aware of (and/or are dismissive of) hipsters you are, the bigger hipster you are.

29

I was at a large Midwestern state university from 1985 to 1989. My take would be that the Violent Femmes were the antithesis of hip, that is what you would hear blasting out of the frat houses. The people I would consider hip were listening to Husker Du and the Replacements.

I would also agree that the trend setters that people emulated were the jock/homecoming king/fratboy types. Wearing Jams and hawaiian shirts and listening to the previously mentioned Femmes along with crap like the Cure.

The people I hung around with were into stuff like Black Sabbath and the Grateful Dead (I guess those are not really much alike) and read Kerouac, Kesey and Castaneda. I did not consider us to be hip or trendsetters, we probably would have been considered dorks by anyone who was cool.

30

These guys I saw were neither misfits or big man on campus, just basically regular guys who seemed cool enough to me (some were in bands and stuff like that), and I think for them this stuff was the cutting edge.

31

This is too broad a definition. Although the term “hipsters” might not always have been current, the idea behind it has existed with each generation. One boundary can be drawn by stating that they are not nerds, dorks, geeks, or other socially disadvantaged types who are into Monty Python, sci-fi, RPGs, computers, and fantasy. Spinal Tap was geek culture, not hipster culture.

32

Oh, I wasn’t offended or anything. It’s just that when I think hipster, I think of people wearing skinny jeans, going to art house movies, riding fixed gear bikes, going to non-chain coffee houses, and the like.

I don’t actually remember there even being a hipster genre when I was in college. It seems like a new kinda thing to me. When I was at college it seemed to be the frat guys, the grunge kids, the hippies, the townies, the druggies, the nerds, and the dull. With various amounts of overlap.

33

At my very small Midwestern state school (small enough that we had real Ph.Ds teaching 300-level and beyond classes), the following subsets overlapped heavily: “the grunge kids, the hippies, the townies, the druggies, the nerds” (Quoted from Darth Panda above; anyone who wishes or can may fix it properly).

I’m thinking of the 4 patchouli-reeking wake-and-bakes who faithfully attended the 8:00 A.M. class with the openly gay Marxist prof on Non-Western Music, and who made straight A’s in it due to actually doing the required readings and listenings, as opposed to the Greeks and business/education majors who just wanted an easy way to get the diversity/multiculturalism requirement out of the way. (Jonathan, Dylan, John – still there?)

As I recall, reading tastes would be described as “cult fiction” today. Pretty much anything fictional from the Amok Fourth Dispatch catalog could fit, Loompanics and Last Gasp were also well thought of as connections to the outside world.

Listening would have been subsumed under “classic rock” and what Allmusic describes as “college music”, along with mix cassettes for different moods and gatherings, and tapes and vinyl 45’s from bands your friends were in.

Wall art and taste in films were too variable for me to generalize on… although I remember a nasty but jovial vegan dinner and showing of “Henry and June” in someone’s basement, followed by a pass-around perusal of Madonna’s Sex. Martin the bisexual model gave us his informed opinion on which pictures Stephen Meisel got right in terms of lighting and composition.

The most ubiquitous fashion statement of the day seemed to be the old fashioned Army issue gas mask carrier. I never took a shine to the thing, remembering how easily the damn things spill their guts when one low-crawls, but they seemed to leave plenty of room for the requisite Burt’s Bees lip balm, hackeysack and pack of Camel Lights, and easy for your friends to decorate in ink with sketches and quotes.

One other thing that surprises me by omission. No one seems to have mentioned so far that this was the time of 'zines. It seemed every fourth person had one on the fire, and everyone read them avidly when they could get them.

All in all, a lovely way to spend the GI bill and Illinois Veterans Grant. I remember it fondly, if not too well.

34

From what I understand, hipsters are those who are those who insist on making the anachronistic or otherwise socially unacceptable cool. The difference between a geek and a hipster is that, while a geek may accept and applaud their geeky ways, a hipster acts and dresses like a geek because he thinks it’s cool.

So I would think that, in the past, these were the posers.

35

I agree.

I graduated in the middle of the 80’s, and the people who I considered what are called today “hipsters” were the ones wearing black jeans in a coffeehouse smoking clove cigarettes and reading philosophy. Think Dieter from “Sprockets” on SNL. There weren’t a lot of them, but they were around, and they were very annoying.

36

“Hipsters” by definition are on the cutting edge of fashion and coolness before they become adopted by the mainstream, or adopt trends in an ironic “retro” manner after the mainstream has abandoned them.

In the 80s and 90s when (and where) I was in school, Spinal Tap, D&D, Lord of the Rings, Monty Python, comic books, anime and listening to prog rock like Rush or Pink Floyd was not particularly “hip” or “cool” and in fact was actually pretty dorky (or at best part of the “stoner” crowd).

We didn’t refer to them by that title, but the closest thing to “hipsters” in my high school would probably be the “AV kids”. They were a sort of mixed bag of skaters, goth kids, punks, new waves and whatnot who were into theater (and the Audio Visual club, hence the name) and the arts and listened to bands like The Smiths, The Cure, Husker Du and Dead Kennedys. One of my best friends from middle school was pretty much a hipster. He basically shaved half his head (the left side I think), always rode around on skateboard, wore a nose ring (unusual in 1988) and joined a ska band after graduating college. And he’s the real deal (as compared to some kid who goes through his Robert Smith phase). For the past 15 years, he has been a professional musician or otherwise involved with the New Haven music scene.

In my college in 1991, we didn’t really have a lot of “hipsters”. Preppy Greek fraternity culture sort of dominated. The closest thing we had were affluent kids rebelling against the good life by taking up drugs and growing their hair long like Kurt Cobain.

37

My experience living in a dorm at a college in Upstate NY in the late 1980s:

About 80% to 90% of the programming on MTV was actually music, and it was more of a shared experience. Students had their own tastes in music, of course, but the lounge televisions were on MTV far more often than other channels.

White students tended to listen to mainstream and classic rock with some punk thrown in for good measure; black kids preferred rap; and Italians were big into dance music. The geek/nerd crowd preferred progressive rock and electronica - Rush, Laurie Anderson, and the like. What we consider to be “eighties music” was still somewhat popular but clearly on its way out; new wave, Rick Astley-like pop and the like.

The college radio station (FM broadcast, not carrier current) played mostly twee; Beat Happening, The Pastels, early Liz Phair, and the like. I didn’t know anybody who listened to it, except the students that lived in the artsy theme dorm. Far fewer people were into the indie scene than today. Music nerds didn’t impress people so much by the obscurity of their preferred bands, but rather their depth of knowledge of more common bands in their preferred genre; e.g. who were the various drummers that once played for Sepultura.

Dorm rooms were wired for cable. We had BITNET, and could access Internet real-time services (as opposed to the store-and-forward Bitnet services) through a larger university in town. Maybe 10% of students had computers, and their was dial-up access to the campus VAX.

Subcultures: “normal” kids, geeks/nerds (those into RPGs, Monty Python, etc), guidos/guidettes, JAPs, urban blacks, goths, artsy kids, political/hippie, heads/groders/heshers (mostly commuter students), serious Asians.

38

Another one here who thinks that the O.P.s list is all about nerds and not cutting edge “Hip” people.

Incidentally it is/was totally uncool to describe anyone as a hipster.

39

You and/or other posters here may be unfamiliar with the contemporary usage of hipster.

— Time, July 2009[5]

note: I am not a hipster, I hate PBR. I do know some friends of friends who would classify - decent enough people.

40

The thing is, the guys I was describing in the original post were not nerds. They were basically counterculture types who were in bands, which was totally acceptable in college at the time. Those interests just sound nerdy now because the internet has made everyone more sophisticated since then.

I sort of remember that real nerds at the time (the ones these guys would have made fun of) would have been into mythology, King Arthur, “medieval lore”, etc. They would have just been freaked out by most of the stuff I was talking about.