A hipster manifesto

George Will and Dexter the Hipster walk into a bar. It’s a strange setup, but one I’ve been thinking about. You see, until recently, the word “hipster” meant basically nothing to me. When hearing it, I had some vague recollection of something unpleasant by Norman Mailer and a fuzzy image of a ’60s-era protester, but I suspected that that didn’t quite hit the mark. Naturally, as an industrious college student, I went to do research.

My reflex was at first to check the all-knowing Oxford English Dictionary, which turned out to be about as helpful as Columbia bureaucracy. “Hipsters” are rather worthlessly described as “a hip- (or hep-) cat,” which necessitated another search and left me more confused than ever. The last entry for “hipster” dates back to the Johnson administration, when the word “groovy” was common parlance and Generalissimo Mark Rudd was laying siege to campus. My reference having failed me, I, after careful deliberation and backup support, went into the field, to an outpost reputed to play home to the hipster. This strange and foreign land is called “Urban Outfitters.”

I don’t particularly like oddball experimentation or trying radical new things, but I felt silly for not having some idea about this key demographic of society. Supposedly, the hipster controls pockets of Manhattan, and allegedly even roams fair Morningside Heights. A hipster, I was informed, was ostensibly not a hippie, but some new strain of non-traditional youngster. I believe they share a love of the garden of pharmacological delights and pass their time sticking various things to the man, but other than that, the two diverge fairly radically.

The hipster, I learned from my trip, is an odd, tricky little duck. He seems to have a peculiar fondness for hats—shrunken fedoras and caps that old lawyers in midtown and crusty conservatives wear without a trace of mockery. In fact, everything in the store seemed to be two sizes two small; the shoppers had on Lilliputian apparel that looked ready to give way at any moment. After being cornered by an aggressive salesman, who had on not only a hat but also a hood—for double protection, I surmise—I was handed a pair of jeans that looked more tailored for a stretchy Oompa-Loompa than a human being. Some conservatives have a funny aversion to these trousers—Mr. Will has spent 700 words on the evils of denim—but in my diligence and curiosity, I took them. After trying for two minutes to put on the things, I gave up, as they locked around the knees. This was not before my legs and feet went numb from lack of circulation, however, prompting me to furiously and vainly try to remove the jeans. I have no idea how hipsters get dressed, much less how they walk around, but I myself consider pedial amputation a decent alternative to those pants.

After wandering around a bit more in the store through a forest of flannel, with some apprehension about being eaten by a giant plaid monster, I decided that I needed to leave before the people in the store sarcastically asked what I was doing poking around. Indeed, the whole hipster project seems premised on an ironic sensibility, one that questions the basic assumptions of propriety and tries to replace it with nonchalance. Such an ethos is dimly reminiscent of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye,” a book I never much cared for, as it plods along plotting the petulant attitude of an unpleasant teenager, which is perhaps the modern hipster’s manifesto.

Mr. Mailer, it turns out, did write something about the hipster in 1957, in an essay entitled “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Much of it is outdated, and Mailer had some mental issues, but he offers a provocative description of hipsters as “psychopathic” in the sense that they seek to create a new philosophical order. Underneath the large plastic glasses and form-fitting t-shirt spouting some pseudo-intellectual line, the hipster takes an inordinate amount of effort to break tradition, to question custom, and to either offer no alternative or a shallow imitation of greatness.

The hipster apparently takes great pains to do nothing and seemingly care for nothing, which at heart is a fundamental distortion of the solid American ethos of industry. We build towards the future with reverence for the past, but the hipster appropriates the old to satirize it and express either his disdain or apathy for the future. I’m not entirely sure what the hipster contributes to society, besides the suffocating jeans and keeping the tartan industry alive. For all the affections of insouciance and faux detachment, at heart, the hipster soul is void and empty. How ironic.

Stephen Wu is a Columbia College sophomore. The Remnant runs alternate Wednesdays.