Does it really matter?

In the long run, no. Even in the short run it doesn't matter. But the entire article was written in such a 'look at how cool I am. I came from a bigger city, let me tell you hicks about real culture' sort of tone that I figured writing in about it was a better option than kicking him in the shins should I ever run into him.

let me tell you, chuck is over rated.

i'd say around half of the spacemonkey fanboys we get here are 'hippsters' and half are like, whatevers. I don't know. It doesn't really matter.

I'm not even into chuck anymore.

Hipsters didn't make Chuck famous because hipsters always come into things late and pretend like they invented it. I'd say they're a large portion of his success now, but his success is based on the quality of his first couple books. And, you know, that one movie with the famous people blowing shit up.

You know what, coming from a town that's jam-packed full of these "hipsters" - or filthy hipster scum, as I used to say, when I had more of a fiery passion about these sorts of things - hipsters are just a phase. What the fuck IS a hipster? How does one define it? Sure, you can say a hipster listens to bands you've never heard of, drinks PBR and wastes their parents' money to look like they don't have any, but that's just a fucking asshole upper-middle class (another term that infuriates me) white kid (although they now come in different colors, I hear). The term "hipster" has no real meaning. It's just the title of this next wave of subculture branching off of independent rock. We had emo before this, and grunge before that. Anyone who dresses a little weird and smokes tobacco and grass and dabbles in the arts can be called a hipster. By that definition, all of us here are hipsters! But we're not. Because what people are actually referring to when they say this is the generation of kids that, after the thirties and forties and fifties and sixties and, oh god, the seventies and eighties and even the fucking nineties, has nothing to cement them to their decade like the ones in the past have so graciously done. There's no great movement for them. No musical revolution. No modern art. Not to sound too Durden-y here, but they have nothing to define them. But they DO have a brain, and a taste for the arts, even, and it's all so unconventional and doesn't adhere to commercial influence and really doesn't matter in anything other than the moment - which, in the long run of history, doesn't stand the test of time. As such, their behavior is bitter-sweet, in the sense that, a lot of their ideas aren't bad, but they're all such painful douches about the whole thing, you sort of wish that all the great genocides in the past hadn't been wasted on Jews and Africans and had waited for these kids instead.

I can't think of any actual hipsters that frequent this site.

Edward Norton and Brad Pitt (and Fincher) are responsible for Chuck's popularity. If you did a survey, I think you'd find more people learned of Chuck after seeing Fight Club than before.

The hipster term has always kind of baffled me. I've also heard that Mac users were considered "hipsters" but I've never actually heard someone say the word, it's just a word I've read on the internet (usually as a criticism). Usually the term is paired with some phrase about kids who hang out in Starbucks, which would explain why I've never heard it used in real life because there are no Starbucks around where I live (closest one is 45 minutes away). I think I learned more about the term in Jill's Tit's post than I have anywhere else. I always thought it was the 2000s term for "poser" or "wannabe" but apparently it has something to do with this generation of kids. And I thought this was the emo generation!

Anyway, David Fincher is the reason Palahniuk is popular. I'm pretty sure the Fight Club movie predates the term "hipster." I was in middle school when it came out and it was just popular among the guys, regardless of what stereotype they fell under. I actually didn't see it until it came out on DVD b/c the trailer looked lame. I thought it was just going to be an ultra-predictable male aggression film (this thought was reinforced by the idiots who glorified it for this reason b/c they were too stupid to see it was criticizing them). When I did finally see it I was quite impressed

Yeah, Chuck's popularity can be heavily attributed to David Fincher. And then the increasing popularity of both Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.

Hipsters, if we're going to stick with the pejorative sense of this term, they don't sit still long enough to read something until after pop culture tells them really fucking bullhorn loud that it's cool. Then they pretend it was on their radar screen much sooner than it actually was, because the hipster hungers for the avante-garde and thrives on being "First!" (but cool about it, ya dig?)

The next step is to affect pseudo-intellectual interpretations of said literary art, suggesting the perfect blend of street cred with academic understanding. A good tactic is to learn a smattering of existentialism and work it into a layered fudge cake with a few critical terms from the latest French-fried post whateverist literary theory and then you lavish these terms where you will.

Tyler Durden represents the emergence of the real man through the dangerous liminality of the secret self. He is the personification of the narrator's quest for authenticity, you dig? Joe Nobody's been living a nothing life in this white corporate slave existence and what isn't real in all that, man, it's right in his face and it's a drag. He is the White Negro who's been fooled by the Man into thinking that he's got it all. It keeps him awake at night, just like it should. But it's got to be bigger than just the insomnia, man, and he's got to do something more than treat that shit with one more pill. The borderland between awake and asleep provides a doorway. Durden, as the Authentic Self, trapped in a world where everything is a put-on and a fake, he's got no choice but to rend himself free by acts of chaos and destruction. Nothing short of that will liberate the narrator who is asleep, so deep asleep even when he's awake that nothing less will suffice. So we have this sort of post-modern enlightenment narrative, you dig? The Other within yourself who is really your True Self, coming through into your awareness only in moments of transgressive liminality.

Did I say liminality? Hip is using an academic buzzword for the pure effect of buzzword. It gives us a secret language. We're in The Club and our dazzled breakfast companions around the same table at Denny's get to eat some "liminality" with their hashbrowns. Hip is me pretending you know what it means and you pretending you know what it means and us, under no circumstances, condescending to define the term for anyone else as something "pertaining to thresholds."

Geek is to consult the dictionary or to interrupt the flow of a high-flown conversation with a request for plain language and real understanding.

Hip (again, in the sick and pejorative sense) is to pretend you know the lingua franca of all such convo deeply, deeply, man, and simply agree with what is said, show by a rhythmic nod of your head, and then skip directly to discussion of your growing vinyl collection and your sweet, sweet love for Miles Davis. You've been deep into jazz and blues and the low-fi experience exquisite for nearly a year, man, which gives you massive social capital over your pimply cornfed 19-year-old Nebraska friends who think of Snoop Dog as "old skool" and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as "classic literature." You're all of 23, but you're wiser than me. That's hip. You're cool enough to dress Salvation Army style even though your mom still pays your credit card bills at The Gap. That's hip, too, but you're too young to have invented it.

..

In short, there's a really bad sense of "hipster," as a sort of cultural vampire and impostor, misappropriating culture from sources he fails to fully understand and appreciate. To borrow another example from Leland's book, Quentin Tarantino acting like he's earned the right to say nigga as a term of approval. Fuck, I don't know, maybe he has. But he seems like an annoying prick that a brother should stomp for that shit.

On the other hand, Hip and Hipster are terms that might deserve special rescue from the land of the merely pejorative. If you're highly intelligent but not pretentious and if you're a genuine cultural sponge, just absorbing everything you love without prejudice. If it isn't a pose or a sad quest for belonging or a temporary membership in a non-Greek fraternity. If you simply stand outside of mainstream, square culture because that's who you are, then maybe you and your friends can bandy these terms at each other with endearment and respect.

But in no case is it genuinely hip to consolidate your belonging to this cultural type by excluding all the squares from the things that you and your buddies like by yelling "First! We were here first!"

Palahniuk isn't great because we hipsters like him. We (the culturally enlightened) like him because he is great, right? The moment our identity becomes exclusionary and reactionary, it fails in a very important sense to be hip any longer. If you don't belong to a politically oppressed minority group, for real, then your use of coded language and covert status boundaries isn't a justified necessity for your survival and self-esteem. Rather, it's just good old-fashioned elitism dressed in a different set of rags.

Hip as I've recounted from the history of the term, is good. It's almost synonymous with cool, but it's actually better than cool. What is taken for "cool" today can be faddish and shallow and forgotten tomorrow. Hip means something finer, something more like "in the know" or "culturally enlightened" or "savvy." Hip is forever subversive in any world with fascists or racial supremacists. Hip transgresses artificial boundaries that separate people into shallow warring camps. Hip has both intellect and swagger, both book smarts and street smarts. Hip is Mark Twain or Samuel L. Jackson or Jackson Pollack. Hip is not Ezra Pound, his stubborn classicism, his meager contribution to the arts swallowed in Fascism and anti-Semitism. Hip is not only demonstrated by these references, it's hip to understand the distinctions I'm making and to appreciate the difference.

But here is the rub. People who are genuinely hip aren't prone to refer to themselves as hipsters, because the latter is almost always a term of derision. In a similar way, the Beats didn't refer to themselves as Beatniks. These derivative and pejorative nouns are applied injudiciously by squares looking at the phenomena from the outside in, or applied judiciously, on occasion, to poseurs who give everything Beat or Hip a bad name.

Therefore, the college journalist in question is either a dullard who can't make a coherent cultural argument at all and doesn't know his history, besides, or he's a really subtle kind of square who's posing as a hipster (i.e., posing as a poseur) as a mask that allows him to be subtly and ingeniously derisive of Palahniuk by heaping upon him the praise of imbeciles.

VP just fucked this thread (in a good way) like he always does!

My profound pleasure, you, my brethren, my skin, my class and my kin, sweet and noble-minded motherfuckers, one and all.

I like when Pup posts.

I was gonna weigh in on this, but the buffet seems empty now...

And with that, I have a new sig.

Ain't nobody yet so much as yakked about hepi ("to see") and hipi ("to open one's eyes") as linguistic origins for both Hep Cat ("Sammy Davis, Jr. style cool") and Hippie ("the Goddess loves me even if I forget to shave or bathe style cool")

Ain't nobody so much as called me out for being OG about this shit and therefore just as touchy as any stereotypical hipster. (Maybe that's cause there's a straight razor in my shoe!)

And all of this is quite eclipsed for me, now, since I've just been sigged by a real southern woman, ya dig? But we can go on talking shit, all right. Hip, for all its merits, ain't got no job in the mornin. Hip works at night.

This whole 'hip' discussion is fascinating.

My associations with the word come from references to the fifties beat movement, which is where I thought the common usage of the term originated. Sadly, I don't have my copy of William S. Burroughs' "Junky" right now, but I think Burroughs writes that the term 'hipster' originally referred to opium smokers who would lie on one hip while imbibing.

Eventually, as we know, it came to have a wider meaning, and in the sixties spawned the term 'hippy'.

Perhaps I should get out of my cave more often. I had no idea the term was back in use with yet another level of meaning. My hold on pop culture is slipping badly.

Lobster, please. With lemons and drawn butter. The night is young.

In a similar vein, I have a friend who likes to claim that Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" was named for a particular psychoactive plant from South America. An idea my friend may have gotten from personal revelation or possibly from reading either Burroughs or Terrence McKenna (new age shaman and ethnobotanist, now deceased. Notably the book, "Food of the Gods"). I know my friend has read and revered them both.

Actual Whitman scholars tend to point out that Walt was apprenticed to the printing trade from a young age and that "leaves of grass" was printer's lingo for "cheaply produced publications of not much quality."

Sort of an ironic self-deprecating tone in a title like that, which is not at all incompatible with Walt actually reviewing his own work under various pseudonyms and lavishing praise upon it, as he did. After all, this great man and poet who wrote for women, homosexuals, outcasts, the underclass of his day, he, in his own words, "contained multitudes." What is less certain is that he would have had any access to be inspired by a psychoactive plant from South America, likely rare and mostly unknown in North American cities at that time (cannabis isn't even the "grass" in question; rather, it was something more obscure that my friend thought the Leaves made a direct reference to).

My point is that the drug culture, the American counter-culture, is particularly adept at revisionist history. A thoughtful and imaginative person who loves intoxication and experiments with many and various forms of it, will soon be pouring over favorite books while chemically altered and finding veiled references everywhere to his current drug of choice. Cannabis and related psychoactive herbs and compounds are particularly potent in insinuating their own logic with revelatory force. And from that force the claim gets made solely on the basis of personal revelation. And then it gets repeated by more than one hip person and so must be true.

Please don't take this critique as a slapdown of any sort. I'm fond of this conversation and I'm plenty glad that you've revived it. But I'm equally compelled to go after such thoughts and to ferret out the truth to the best of my own ability. I know from personal (long past) experiences of the insinuating force of psychoactive drugs, and how they'll lead you to see embedded messages about the magical substance you're currently using everywhere you look.

And we all know that Burroughs was a devotee of the many and varied drug experiences.

Equally, I find the linguist's tracings back to West African root words and the gently subversive "outsider" intelligence of a people who had lived as slaves to be a much more compelling account. There's an extreme likelihood that African slaves used a subtle mixture of English words in a creole with older words from their own countries of origin. And there's a strong cultural narrative behind the idea that "hip" begins with white people who liked and admired some things about black culture picking up and emulating some of those terms and associated cultural forms.

What didn't Elvis Presley steal from black folk, for just one example? White people didn't dance like that. Not anywhere. And then Elvis gets up and does it on national television. But he didn't invent it. And he didn't learn it from a little white kid named Forrest Gump (talk about revisionist history.) You could have found wild dancing that included, yes, the hips, men using their hips, yes, in a pelvic thrusting motion--you could have gone out and seen dancing that wild in any juke joint deep down in the delta. Just wasn't white folks doing it. So I think there's a cultural indebtedness and almost limitless circle of racial mimicry that gets lost if we go with the stoner hypothesis from WSB.

Finally, if there could be an almost literal, reductive, and anatomical source for the cultural term "Hip," then the dancing of black folk (and Elvis) is an even better candidate for that point of origin. After all, it's a disturbingly sexual and agitating display for any Victorian traditionalist or extremely white Protestant in the blood line of Puritans. Especially for any very white person in our culture prior to 1960. The hip-enlivened dancing is an extremely graphic and direct display of human sexuality, which white culture has traditionally submerged into utter repression.

Going into that juke joint in the deep south about fifty years ago, it's the first visual detail a white traditionalist would have noticed and been outraged by. And the first thing a more liberal white person would find liberating and pulse-quickening.

In contrast, the way one reclines within an opium den is a long, long way removed from centrality as the most interesting, salient, or notable feature of the whole opium den experience.

Apply careful logic and a bit of scholarship and bad folk etymologies (false word origins) come unraveled quickly. And they are rampant. As a lover of language and a student of culture, it's sort of a sacred duty to stay sharp on these things.

Thanks for carrying this conversation forward. Your lobster is on the table.

Don't forget that when white beat poets were secretly wishing they were black jazz musicians, since that was the only thing cooler to be (and since "all art aspires to the condition of music," anyway) the real jazz musicians, exemplified at the top of notoriety perhaps by Cab Calloway, would signify their respect for one another with the expression, "He's one hep cat."

Long before it was dope to emulate gangsters or call your homeboy a mother-f'er, way back in your granddaddy's day, classy, (but no less scotch drinking and "reefer" smoking) real jazz musicians used the term hepcat to signify approval. A hepcat was with it, was down with the scene, could handle himself, knew how to stay cool and stay out of trouble if things got a little hinky.

Regarding the Beats, they used the term hip but they didn't invent it. Even the Beats weren't old enough to do so. The word they invented was Beat, at least, in the particular application of the word to simultaneously reference the sense of jazz rhythms and the musical beat and equally the sense of being lowdown, down-and-out, broke, and tired, but still noble.

Regarding Hip, if we go with any sort of direct anatomical reference for understanding the word, then hip gets cut off entirely from the survival of the related word hep which has been used almost interchangeably and identically in the past.

On the other hand, if we stick to the idea of origin in the Wolof verbs hepi ("to see") or hipi ("to open one's eyes") then all of these cultural inflections are variations on African root words for being enlightened, with it, clued in, or in the know.

Going back to our opium den hipsters, or to the naive hippie faith that psychoactive drugs can be tools of enlightenment and wholeness, rather than escapism, regression, and fragmentation, then it's the content of the trip, the vision beheld, that matters. Not the position of ones body.

Would it be shocking to consider that we owe the term hippie to Africa? What is a "hippie" if not someone on a quest for authenticity and solidarity, even a sort of tribal belonging, and simultaneously tuned-in to a form of transcendence, a quest for higher consciousness or enlightenment? Did white people invent all those things? Did they do it in isolation?

So what is the deepest, darkest secret guarding the doorway to hip? What's the main thing you have to grapple with at the doorway to a truly American form of cultural enlightenment? What's the big, nasty secret that square society can't tolerate and doesn't want to acknowledge?

It's simply that no one who is *truly American* has been one hundred percent white in a very long time. Hell, I'm part Cherokee myself. Just not enough to prevent sandy hair and blue eyes.

_______________________________
(*through multiple generations)

VP is my dad.

No, really.

Three points.

What can I say? My coffee has real beans in it.

For you, you hep cat.

Awesome, thanks for that. In the spirit of hipness as a dialogue that crosses cultural and racial boundaries, here's what can happen some sixty years later.

You might not dig the orthodox religious component, but the dialogue between the sacred and the secular is one more amazing aspect for me, and I find it uplifting without adhering to identical beliefs.

I think Reggae music has a certain wholesomeness to it, without feeling oppressive or square.

I agree, very much, that's why I love gospel so much, to me it's about a yearning for a greater good and the spiritual dimension doesn't alienate me at all. I love what the human voice can convey.

There is a secular gospel group that I especially love. I think they call themselves 'A capella' but they cover many traditional spirituals in addition to writing original material about human rights and political activism. Here's an example:

I've learned something new about Mirka today!

From the Latin root of the word 'spirit', it pertains to any being that breathes. For as long as there is breath animating your body, there is a 'spirit' within, regardless of your beliefs. It's an easy step from there to acknowledge that the human spirit cries out for harmony and freedom.

From the Compact Oxford English Dictionary

spirit

• noun 1 a person’s non-physical being, composed of their character and emotions. 2 this regarded as surviving after the death of the body, often manifested as a ghost. 3 a supernatural being. 4 the prevailing or typical character, quality, or mood: the nation’s egalitarian spirit. 5 (spirits) a person’s mood. 6 courage, energy, and determination. 7 the real meaning or intention of something as opposed to its strict verbal interpretation. 8 chiefly Brit. strong distilled liquor such as rum. 9 a volatile liquid, especially a fuel, prepared by distillation.

• verb (spirited, spiriting) (spirit away) convey rapidly and secretly.

— PHRASES in spirit in thought or intention though not physically. when the spirit moves someone when someone feels inclined to do something.

— ORIGIN Latin spiritus ‘breath, spirit’, from spirare ‘breathe’.

Songs of Faith and Doubt

What's that? That I'm a bleeding heart liberal full of optimism and hope?

This is exactly how I feel, and what I believe.

And that's why I'm especially moved by hearing a human voice or a chorus of voices singing in harmony in a way that animates my spirit and makes it want to tap it's feet or weep.

EDIT: Oh, and I love that U2 song very much.

And because I feel I should quote your entire post out of respect, I will, and add this song. Sweet Honey in the Rock again.

I don't mind being selectively quoted when it serves emphasis and concision, rather than some obvious effort to shortchange an argument or mutilate the context.

Thanks, though. And thanks for linking Sweet Honey in the Rock. Good stuff.

Signature Promotion Power, ACTIVATE!

I don't know, why is anything popular with anyone? Cult classics, indie rock, pogs, etc. Chuck's books may speak to the hipster crowd and what they try to advocate in their daily lives more so than for other groups of people, or maybe the hipsters don't know what they're trying to advocate and are latching onto Chuck's books as something to identify with or define themselves. But it is Chuck's ability as a writer combined with the Brad Pitt-toting adaptation of Fight Club that made him famous.

That and the gay sex, it's what's in with the hipsters right now.

"C'mon guys! Everybody's doing it!"

Cum on guys indeed.

Why are all your posts in bold?

Well if I told you then everybody might start doing it! And then I'd have to set a new trend by not using bold text, and then where would we be? Trapped in a cyclic redundancy check. No sir, I'll keep my reasons to myself.

But in no way am I compensating for my small penis... at all.

...Did I say that loud?

HI BILLY MAYS HERE. CHUCK IS GAY DID YOU KNOW THAT.

I don't get it... it LOOKS like Billy Mays, but it doesn't type like him.

Suspicious...

WHAT WAS THAT SON

Curious, I could've sworn... huh, well there's no denying the facts. That is clearly the real honest-to-God Billy Mays, and not imitation brand Milly Bays (a.k.a. Vince Shlomi).

Oh, and some on-topic advice for Roger_Dodger, beat him at his own game! Become hipper than he is! Clearly the only way to do this is to shop at Hootenanny's and listen solely to bands that show up on indierockcafe.com

God Christ that shit's annoying.

I'm a hipster and damn proud of it. And I take full responsibility for Chuck's underground success.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go to pitch fork media and bash the new it band.

hipsters who self identify as hipsters are so not hipsters. you are a trueposer.

I am so a hipster! I listen to obscure English bands and hate MTV!

*sigh*

What group is exactly "hipster"?