Harry “the Hipster” Gibson
Photo by William P. Gottlieb
Hipsters: Real vs. Fake
It makes my skin crawl whenever I hear a young person refer to his or herself as a “hipster.”
Not only do most people today not even understand what the term means, but they live in a corporate-infused world where it is now almost impossible to be truly hip.
The New York Times recently wrote about the origins of the word hipster, which might help to explain to those who don’t understand the history of the word and how it has changed over time.
Though the word has been in use for a long time, the Times credits the jazz clubs of 1940s Harlem for making the term popular. In the 40s, a Bronx-born, Juilliard-trained musician, Harry Raab, helped popularize the word with his stage name: Harry “the Hipster” Gibson. His big hit was “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine.”
At the time, “hipster” was used to describe someone who saw him or herself as hip and ahead of the curve, Lewis Porter, a jazz historian at Rutgers University, told the Times.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is also thought to be a modernized version of “hepcat,” which had the same meaning in jazz circles.
Porter added that the word might also have been used to describe white jazz musicians like Gibson, who played in traditionally black clubs. “That certainly was not its original meaning, but that could have become attached to it later on,” he said.
In his 1957 essay, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer examined beatnik culture, posing the theory that to be a hipster was to be a white American who adopted black culture, world views and music as an act of rebellion against capitalist greed, wartime violence and the ever-present specter of nuclear war.
Hipster was used to refer to members of the Beat Generation, who virtually all defied and criticized the white, capitalist establishment culture of the 1950s. All lived cheaply and outside the scope of mainstream consumerism. Virtually all true hipsters observed the counter culture ethics of the 1960s.
Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality.” Near the beginning of his poem, Howl, Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”
The New York Times said it has used the word “hipster” more than 3,000 times since 1851. Yet, the newspaper said, the bulk of those references came after the year 2000, when most of the people who used the term were only wannabes.
The Times said it typically used the word to describe a class of people who moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The problem with that, of course, is that if one could afford to live in Brooklyn after the boom, they were not genuine hipsters.
Today, the hipster subculture is composed of affluent or middle class youth who reside primarily in gentrifying neighborhoods. It is broadly associated with indie and alternative music, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility, vintage and thrift store-bought clothing, generally progressive political views, organic and artisanal foods and alternative lifestyles.
The subculture typically consists of white millennials living in urban areas. Often the world hipster is now used as a pejorative term to describe someone who is pretentious, overly trendy or effete.
In Rob Horning's April, 2009 article, The Death of the Hipster, he wrote that the hipster might be the "embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics."
Of all places, Time magazine, described the modern hipster phenomenon in a July, 2009 article:
“Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care.”
One of the benefits of getting older is being able to easily see through the pretensions of youth. Whenever someone living in a major city like New York tells you today he or she is a “hipster,” run for the hills. Fraud is written all over them.
Thanks New York Times!