Once were warriors
T he glasses borrowed from a photograph of Allen Ginsberg were framed by beautifully coiffed hair flowing seamlessly into a hand crafted beard woven from the gossamer threads of a sustainably farmed unicorn’s mane. Tattoos of flowers intertwined with fancy but illegible words protruded from beneath the neck line of the collarless plaid shirt. Braces ran in perfect symmetry down to the high waistband of skinny fit jeans rolled up to reveal hairless lower legs tapering down into sockless canvas runners. A heady pastiche of carefully harvested brushstrokes from various yesteryears retold as a post-modern soliloquy signifying; well, maybe something or perhaps nothing much at all.
My first up close encounter with what may have been a hipster 2.0 was indelibly seared onto my memory. Mid afternoon in the Madrid metro, I was entranced by this young man’s impeccable tribute to a good half dozen epochs, but ultimately left with the question – what’s your point? If he noticed me at all, I doubt I held his attention for more than a millisecond as a kind of fuzzy, black and white human shaped space. I would have preferred sepia toned but that was already taken by his leather satchel which outclassed me by some distance.
Never having seen a hipster in the wild before, the genre had been filed away in my mind as a Ginsberg/Kerouac beatnik blend of 40s and 50s smoke filled basement clubs in which poets and musicians ruled before overdosing on themselves. A time shot exclusively in black and white and brought to an end by colour film and daylight. I hadn’t ever needed a more profound definition but my slapdash collage of all things hipster was now clearly in need of revision.
A quick search for one came up with this extract from Frank Tirro’s 1977 book Jazz: A History.
“To the hipster, Bird was a living justification of their philosophy. The hipster is an underground man. He is to the Second World War what the dadaist was to the first. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and over civilized to the point of decadence. He is always ten steps ahead of the game because of his awareness, an example of which might be meeting a girl and rejecting her, because he knows they will date, hold hands, kiss, neck, pet, fornicate, perhaps marry, divorce—so why start the whole thing? He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions—so what values are left for him?—except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that, “be cool,” and look for kicks. He is looking for something that transcends all this bullshit and finds it in jazz.”
Unless Tirro’s mention of an ‘underground man’ referred to the metro, my fellow passenger seemed to fall quite short of hipster 1.0.
Once the refuge of domino playing old men sat around formica tables under interrogation quality lighting, local bars have been hipsterised with darker paintwork and softer illumination. In doffing their caps to the past, the furnishings and fittings are retained and pressed into the service of a sanitised edit of history. With just a lick of paint and a dimmer switch they have upped their game to become the haunts of well groomed men and women in dark rimmed spectacles. Out with the television set and in with nicer tapas and better wines, their well turned out clientele absorb the old style made new, eschew the dominoes and gaze intently at Apple laptops and iPhones.
The barber shop is styled to look as if it may once have tended Hemmingway’s beard and the coffee bar with its long list of exotic roasts plays host to people who have become niche experts. A young man orders an infusion blended from the perspiration of a high tech guru and rare Andean spider silk sweetened with eco friendly, fair trade almond milk. He carries a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil / On the Genealogy of Morals in the original German though he doesn’t read the language. It doesn’t matter; the well thumbed copy like second hand jeans bears the history of a previous owner’s use disguised as his own. The walls are hewn down to reveal naked, uneven brickwork and wooden beams which previous occupants thought better of plastered over. The feel is that of a minimalist theatre set that will sooner or later give way to another play. There is a sense of transient permanence conjured up as the backdrop to the role of now playing then. It is a sanitised version of a world that few who lived in want back. Those who did knew the smells, brief lives, poverty and bed bugs and any romance is best left to old photos. The hipster 2.0 is the photo shopped photograph, the 2D+ image, the niche interest bon vivant who likes their music untainted by success and preferably on vinyl.
It is a landlord’s wet dream as house prices soar in cool areas gentrified with retro shops selling polished junk once hoisted onto charity stores or discarded in skips. Hipster 2.0 bemoans the inflated rents they have helped hike up but bears the burden as a badge of honour as they shop for artisan beer. They are the unwitting foot soldiers of local capitalism and Trojan horse to developers who can scarcely believe their luck. Franchises creep in apace, camouflaged with faux antiques and exposed brickwork, their low paid workers commuting from the uncool modernity of the suburbs.
Given enough time it seems most fashions are cleansed of their original meaning and reinvented without the baggage of the zeitgeist that bore them. They are much like an uninhabited mollusc shell claimed for use by a hermit crab when its previous dwelling becomes too snug. The second time around is free of the constraints of chronology and may even be a composite of various vintages. In defence of hipster 2.0, they do have a taste for some nice styling and they often cut and paste with assiduous attention to detail.
As the world spins ever onward, something else will come along and the never ending cascade of dominoes may eventually fall back onto the formica tables of brightly lit bars frequented by old men. With any luck it will arrive before the neighbourhood becomes a museum to something it never really was. In the meantime and on the plus side, there is an abundance of places to offload one’s crap onto those with a fetish for a faux past.
