Hipster Hype – A Huge Steaming Load

I haven’t been part of what’s “cool” pretty much ever in my life. Sure I listened to The Smiths and REM when I was in high school, I wore a trenchcoat and had weird hair, but compared to my truly “in-the-know” friends I was a poseur. The only thing about Emo or Punk that I really knew was the music. But I have always been a music person.

The clothes, hair, the attitude – all of it escaped me. Then I got dumped by my preppy, wealthy boyfriend for an underclassman because her parents had a lot of money. So out of a misguided attempt to prove the error of his ways, I became preppy for a while. Eventually I realized he was a huge loser, and finally I just became me, and that was the last time I ever tried to be cool. If I have been cool since, it is a total accident let me assure you (although my stepkids think I am pretty cool :).

So when I stumbled upon this article about the magazine Vice and its sister affiliates, what struck me as insane – besides the fact that the founders of this “trend” are entirely UNCOOL and WHOLLY unattractive from my perspective – is that cool just is. It can’t be bought, sold or manufactured. Either you are cool, or you aren’t. And the irony of cool is that is it completely individual in nature.

Just seeing those three tools (scroll down, they are the three turds in shirts and ties at the bottom) associated with an article about hipsters forced me to read further. These three IT-department-looking-rejects are the arbiters of what is hip nowadays, and they also happen to be the biggest POSEUR DOUCHES ever.

One co-founder, Gavin McInnes is by all accounts a white supremacist and a hardcore right wing conservative that makes fun of liberalism, which is understandable to a certain degree – but to state openly such things as “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close our borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”

Sure, yeah, okay, dude! Preach on, you out-of-shape, unkempt, skanky-looking loser wannabee. Now don’t get me wrong, it is completely possible that someone with the above characteristics could market hip, but not someone who is entirely that closed minded. Hip encapsulates a broad spectrum of people and cultures and to state that only Western, English-speaking whites can achieve this is entirely ludicrous. Plus, anyone who knowingly drinks shitty beer trying to be cool has lost all credibility with me.

I would rather drink water because I can’t afford good beer, than drink shitty PBR. Even in high school that was considered shit beer.

This company and its affiliates market raunch as hip, low-brow as cool, trailer-park trash at chic, and sexual promiscuity as trendy, and elitism with exclusionaryism as the “now” political agenda.

What a load of horseshit. I didn’t even mention the misogyny behind all of this because I don’t want to be labeled a feminist. Honestly, feministas don’t represent my world view, but to assume that “all women want to be dominated” as this company’s founders and marketing agenda does, is totally absurd. Maybe what I like and what another woman likes are opposite. Generalizations like that will make you uncool rather quickly I think.

Promoting unsafe sex, with slogans like “I don’t have AIDS…yet” on underwear just undermines what I want to teach my children. Suggesting that if you don’t have sex with gay men and intravenous drug-users then you can just hump anything that moves is preposterous.

This whole schtick is the agenda of a group of asswipes who are pretending that the Jerry Springer mentality is cool, as though blue-collar life is something to adorn – but with a target market that’s uptown. I don’t know any blue collar persons who could afford a pair of jeans that cost $1000. Personally, the one thing I like about how the fashion industry and perception of fashion has changed, is that I can go to Wal-Mart, TJMaxx or Target and get a current style for my kids without killing my budget.

Back when I was a teen, namebrand was everything and without it you were a “L.O.S.E.R” and shunned from coolness forever.

Don’t buy the hype you twenty-somethings. You want to do something cool and original – be yourself, like what you actually like and wear what looks good on you and that you can afford. Read a book that you might never think to read, save your money for the future, be nice to your parents, volunteer to teach poor kids to read – DO SOMETHING GOOD – now that is fucking cool as shit man!

Oh, and feel free to shop at thrift stores, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Manufactured cool is NEVER COOL.