It may be the best article on "hipsters" but, it missed the mark historically. Counter culture movements have been around since time immemorial. The article is a bit provincial in its scope. Socrates led a counter-culture, as did Murat, Martin Luther King, the venerated "Fathers of Our Country", Trotsky et alii, and any number of people over the centuries. And each was decried as the end of civilization as we know it by the "establishment.
Poor Mr. Haddow is sadly lacking in perspective if he thinks this all started after WWII.
Warren is so right on this.
Adbusters themselves dwell within a "symbolical hollowness", they can only attack in righteous indigination, and offer nothing except empty ideology - it's so easy to criticize things, and the snarky parody they often engage in reeks with that "look how clever we are" vibe. I have dismissed their publication entirely.
Mr. Haddow's cynical piece fits right in, and it's like shooting fish in a barrel, and most everything he writes is accurate, but it's also painfully obvious to anyone who might happen into that same sort of dance club and tries to interact with the people there. If he meant it to be a clarion call and to shame a certain cultural segment and prompt a more serious milieu, then maybe it was a noble effort. I'm unsure what his intentions were, but it reads as if he's just a bit smug and bitchy.
I think these are his best points:
Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.
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We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
But as Warren pointed out,
he is lacking historical perspective.
He should have at least read Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus...
from the London review of Books:
Around 529 BC the armies of the Persian Empire tried to conquer a mysterious and reclusive people who lived somewhere to the east of the Caspian Sea – to this day we do not know exactly where. The Persians acted simply because of Cyrus the Great’s overweening ambition. As it turned out, Cyrus’s armies were defeated and he was killed in the battle. The Massagetae, left once again to themselves, slipped back out of monumental history: back to their unusual customs of sex and death, to the horses for which they were famous, to their sun worship.
Practically all we know of the Massagetae – which is precious little – comes from a few pages in the first of our Western monumental histories, Herodotus. Later historians do not spend much time on a people who lived so resolutely, not to say religiously, at the margin, and who would soon be swallowed up in the quick abyss of time. We know the Massagetae must have had a rich culture from their brief and undesired appearance in one of our imperial histories. Nevertheless, the true history of the Massagetae has escaped us. It remains a closed book, a secret history.
Greil Marcus’s ‘secret history of the 20th century’ does not mention the Massagetae. His principal subjects – the Sex Pistols, Dada, the Situationist International – send him plunging back into earlier epochs for proleptic and analogous movements and events: the Catharists, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, the Ranters, John of Leyden and the French Commune. Marcus draws these and others into his secret history of the 20th century because he is interested in revolution and apocalypse: the kind of secret history which moves not in a world elsewhere, beyond the periphery of our dominant apparitions, but inside those apparitions, the ghosts within the ghostly machines of the social worlds we know.
Revolution and apocalypse are hardly secret or non-monumental topics. Indeed, the modern world – let us say the past four hundred years – has been fairly dominated by the revolutionary impulse and event. But monumental revolution is not much to Marcus’s taste either. We hear little or nothing about the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, nothing about the Soviet or the Chinese Revolutions. These are all out of court because Marcus is after something at once more catastrophic and more insignificant: the Sex Pistols, Dada, the Situationist International.
What these three phenomena embody for Marcus is a peculiarly 20th-century preoccupation: ‘art and revolution playing [themselves] out in a realm of amusements and commodities’. From the vantage of (any) realpolitik, Johnny Rotten, Guy Debord and the Cabaret Voltaire represent brief epiphenomenal waves on the powerful surge of human events – at most minor indices of greater and more important human struggles. Indeed, they customarily do not figure very largely in those monumental sub-histories which might otherwise have paid them homage: the history of music, art, poetry.
Dada or Surrealism; the Sex Pistols or Michael Jackson; the Situationist International or – well, if nothing bears comparison with it, few would have any trouble establishing the scale on which to measure the importance of Guy Debord and his band of angels. The comparisons themselves are eloquent enough, for in none of these cases are we dealing with ‘serious’ art or culture. Perhaps Surrealism has at last gotten a ticket to ride. In Marcus’s book, however, Surrealism emerges as the debased product of Dada just as Michael Jackson is the farcical return of the (repressed) Sex Pistols.
Lipstick Traces is an attempt to explain the significance of the Sex Pistols. It is a highly personal book, a kind of quest by America’s most acute citizen of pop culture to elucidate ‘the secret the Sex Pistols didn’t tell’ – ‘which they only acted out’. Toward the end of his book Marcus explains that the ‘secret’ is in fact a certain kind of (hi)story: ‘I found a tale composed of incomplete sentences, voices cut off or falling silent ... a tale of recapitulations staged again and again in different theatres – a map made altogether of dead ends ... And so, pursuing this story, when I finally came across Debord’s homily on the ephemeral ... I was drawn to it as far as I was drawn to the noise of punk: to his frank and determined embrace of moments in which the world seems to change, moments that leave nothing behind but dissatisfaction, disappointment, rage, sorrow, isolation and vanity.’
