MEME ROUND-UP ISSUE NO. 12: AM I A HIPSTER?
by BYT’s Oxford trained memeologist Marie Formica
People are bitching about hipsters everywhere nowadays.
But sometimes it’s hard to tell what a hipster is, exactly. You know that you know one. You know that you probably are one. “Oh hell no,” you say, but then a moment you doubt your judgment. What if you are a hipster? “How can I tell, Marie?”
Perhaps you take issue when someone misunderstands your passion:
Or you do things that are a little contradictory:
Maybe you’re nostalgic:
Or into new, undiscovered territory:
And you’re possibly the tiniest bit pretentious:
And, if you’re like me, you might feel a little out of place in this big world:
But mostly you’re a dick.
If you agree with most of these, welcome to the club (which we’re currently disbanding because like everyone is joining recently).
**REAL WORLD BONUS**
Think these meme posts aren’t relevant to real life? THINK AGAIN. This man is a real barista in a real coffee shop and got really pissed when he heard he was a meme. Look out– the next hipster meme model COULD BE YOU.
Friendship could be the Coptis trifolia groenlandica the fact that connections any kisses pores and skin world. casquette supreme http://www.b66.fr/
Reasonably literate persons – like the ones who run this blog – will note that this of course a massively contradictory picture of recession-era hipsterism, which is a charitable way of saying “Thanks, BYT, for a children’s treasury of 2007’s hottest class anxiety strawman.” So on the one hand we have the hipster as Condescending Patrician Aesthete, dropping banks on vanity eye surgery and casting aspersions on regular joes for their espresso schedules from the considerable height of his humanities-degreed, top-100 private university-socialized self-regard; on the other, we’ve got the hipster as Fragile Downwardly Mobile Declasse, pulling shots for yuppies who had the good sense to get MBAs instead of philosophy degrees. These things just can’t coincide in an empirical person (if they do, someone’s getting much better tips for their foamwork than any barista I’ve ever known,) but they can coincide in the kinds of weird popular ideological hallucinations class society requires to keep itself going. I’ll even be so grumpy and Marxist as to say that, by cobbling this stuff together and passing it along to your readership so uncritically, y’all are muddying up some of the most promising green shoots of class consciousness to come out of Occupy.
“Marie Formica,” I’m sure you’re a perfectly charming person who I’d enjoy drinking with, and with whom I’d be able to find consensus on 90% of what passes for politics in this town. And I don’t blame you for not using this space to write dense Gramscian critiques of meme culture. But I do think that, at the very least, it’s unflattering that you’d be abusing the considerable powers of your Oxford-cultivated critical apparatus to blandly recycle the neon nihilism that fuels so much of this blog, flagship of DC cultural capitalism that it is. Five years ago a piece like this would have been benign and genuinely distracting fluff; now it can’t help but seem stale at best, and culpably negligent of the material crisis facing an entire generation of post-industrial youth at worst. Irony died last fall of police brutality, gurl; stop leaving messages on her facebook page.
I’d like to thank the gentleman whose image appears in this meme for crafting the above comment.
unexpected comments section subculture exegesis as circa2006 Third Wave Feminothing Grandiloquence Subversion
Hey AGF
Isn’t is also possible if not plausible that poking fun at this meme and purposefully hyperbolizing hipsterism in general is equally as productive to the goal of destroying the false conclusions we draw of what a hipster is and what role this perceived identity and or lifestyle plays in class structure and class culture? You missing that this piece isn’t indulgent – it is critical! it is hyperbolic already! She is poking fun at the guy pictured for getting mad that he became a meme because that meant that he essentially refused to acknowledge that the point is this: hipsters are over, the world isn’t what they were.
Dear Pinko Commie,
Thank you for writing.
At the heart of this meme, the joke remains at the expense of a passionate person who feels strongly about an issue important to them, one that they cannot realistically accommodate in every aspect of their life. As a result, they seem hypocritical. Because of their passion and conviction, they also appear arrogant. At one time or another this meme is all of us, whether we participate in “hipster culture” as such, or not. The joke additionally appealed to me because, if we don’t realize that this guy is us sometimes, the meme also evokes a person everyone’s met, even if that new acquaintance wasn’t a hipster (maybe they, in the least hipster example I can generate, hate all frozen yogurt except Pinkberry). The green shoots of class consciousness will probably sprout just fine despite this post, and who knows, if they turn out to be plants with the ability to laugh, maybe they will also laugh.
While your comment was a fascinating read overall, my biggest concern was your criticism that the meme is stale. Damn it. I hate it when I pick stale memes. Mind as well go whole hog though. Next week, we’ll visit the subject of cats.
Sincerely,
“Marie Formica”
Then do sad dog etsy. https://sadetsydogs.wordpress.com/
Besides:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-t5TbO1QEeVo/T0MdMb8UuhI/AAAAAAAAUjo/oZ6rfKfxDo4/063_givotnie_33.jpg
And:
GIVE AGF A COLUMN! That comrade is a GENIUS. I want agf to comment on…everything. That kind of whiny, hyper-solipsistic (yet really, really well-written) drivel would add +10% to EVERY. SINGLE. THREAD.