Photo: Ini
Hot guy or unsympath?
He wears the hottest clothes, lives in the fanciest district, goes to the most iconic club: the hipster. Approaching a rather hostile species (yet emulating thousands ...)
A "tremendously trendy being", a "misunderstanding on two legs", "a nerd of the present" he should be: the hipster . As you can see, the opinions about this type of scene, which has conquered the in-quarters of London, New York or Berlin, are miles apart. Some admire his coolness - the others find his outfit and his egocentricity ridiculous. What exactly does he and his female equivalent do, let's call them Hipsterine, but now?
What you can already see in the definition of this species (see below)? The hipster is all about being cool. And not just like everyone else! The latter is getting more and more difficult, because in the meantime he has increased quite a lot: Even the less fitting biotopes Hamburg and Munich are no longer safe from him. Cultural scientists and columnists argue about what to expect of his performance.
The hipster himself does not understand all the excitement about his person anyway - because he sees himself not as a mass phenomenon, but as an individualist. No hipster would admit to be one (presumably one would catch one on the question ...). He does not take anything seriously, cynicism is his middle name. Only one thing is important to him: he himself. Or, as Mark Greif writes in his book "Hipster - A Transatlantic Discussion": "It's about demarcation, narcissism and a feeling of superiority that one produces with small differences". And the constant self-staging. "The danger of the hipsters is that their nerd glasses actually function like blinders, and he does not notice much of his environment, " said Greif recently in a television interview.
Of course, the hipster would completely deny that. He sees himself as part of a subculture, which - without looking at the effect - simply by its sense of style dictates what will tomorrow's trend. At least that's how it was in the middle of the last century, when the term hipster was born in North America. Based on the bebop music of the 40s, the blacks developed a "hipness", a cultural insider knowledge, which meant that they had success despite the strict segregation in the world of whites. The then jazz musicians, notably Thelonious Monk, played new music and looked different; Monk, for example, wore a goatee and a different hat every day - his kind of rebellion. Followers of a white bohemian eventually copied the style of the blacks, they wanted to be just as cool. Like musician Harry Gibson, who nicknamed himself The Hipster. Over the past decades, this scene type then disappeared, it came the hippies, later the punks. Until the hipsters around the Nineteer Years experienced a renaissance and from the depths of the sinking popped up like mushrooms, which shoot up from the ground.
Subculture, however, can no longer be talked about today. The individual hipster has long since become one of hundreds of thousands, the term mutated into a dirty word. The German band Kraftclub delivers the right song: In "I do not want to Berlin", the five men from Chemnitz parody exactly the type that has become a hate object. Critic's criticism: The figure of the consumption-oriented city dweller is characterized by superficiality without true message. The hipster is just an empty shell. Ultimately, however, the question remains: why all the vortex? Self-centered people who like to pose have always existed. Maybe the hipster is only up to date in the end? At least that's how Jens-Christian Rabe, co-author of the hipster book and columnist at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, sees it. For him, the hipster is someone who "knows how to handle the circumstances". Who is interested in the present, driven by curiosity and restlessness.
Is all that reason enough to make the hipster the whipping boy of the present ? If you do not feel like "cool" people with big glasses, colorful flies and tattered jute bags, you do not need to talk about them for hours in order to hit them sensitively. Something else works much better there: not to pay attention to it.
