Authors: Brenna Ehrlich,Andrea Bartz

Stuff Hipsters Hate (21 page)

BOOK: Stuff Hipsters Hate

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—Bianca Z., 21, Victorian literature student

BROMANTIC COMEDIES

“Unfuckingbelievable. I bring over farm-fresh Strawberry Cough and you repay me by making me sit through
Old School
? Are we pubescent boys coming to term with strange sensations in our groins? Are we lounging in Tarrah’s basement and her mom just brought us pizza bites and we’re all arranging ourselves in a coed puppy pile in order to feel like we’re sooo tight while secretly hoping to cop a scary and confusing feel? No? Then why the fuck are we sitting here stoned out of our minds, two steps away from dead (no, literally, sleep is the only state in-between, I’m talking fucking
science
) and consuming this pathetic tribute to guzzling beer and seeing boobs? This is completely illustrative of a repressed nation’s attempts to fucking reclaim their wasted adolescence by focusing on tits like sterile bottle-fed Neander thals. It’s sick, man. It’s fucking sick.

What do you mean? What the hell does it matter that all my freelance fashion photography is of topless women? That’s fucking
art
, man. Now hand me another beer.”

—James G., 28, silent film pianist, photographer and book assistant

MUSIC MAGAZINES

ROLLING STONE:
“RS
is for aging dad-jammers who dig yacht rock but still feel the urge to cling to their last vestiges of youth. They know everything about the latest tween queen on the virginal sacrifice block, but nada about actual music. Jesus—it’s like the print version of MTV, but with more dry, political stories accompanied by nauseating cartoonish graphics. I’d rather spend all day at a mall record store, listening to slow-jamz on those nasty headphones—same experience, but I’d save five fucking bucks and maybe grab a pretzel.”

PASTE:
“Hmm, used to be cool… the downloadable tracks sound kinda sweet, but they’re hiking the price up substantially. I’ll just write down the track list and Torrent it when I get home.”

RANDOM INDIE MUSIC MAG:
“Oh man, I would totally buy that, but that asshole Marcus writes for them and if I wanted to read his preening bullshit, I would just surf on over to his pathetic Tumblr and pore over his dreadful personal narratives. I really enjoyed that one about how he hooked up with that merch girl while she was touring with whatever the fuck that SXSW band was and then decided his life was empty and that he should just quit his fucking job and go live for a year in some rural town with a waterwheel. Well, guess what? He’s still fucking here. And he still has that fucking job. Meanwhile, he keeps saying
my
pitches need more focus. I’ll show him focus—I’ll focus my weed onto his fucking story and my lighter to the edge of that fucking page and just focus on the wall for a while.”

POPULAR TV SHOWS

“Ten years from now, this convoluted, overexposed excuse for entertainment could very well be the next
Twin Peaks
. But now it’s just another thing that bros and Trixies can celebrate each week with a fridge full of Amstel Lights, Domino’s pizza laden with meat products and a typo-riddled Facebook invite titled something along the lines of: ‘Season Final: OMGGGGGGG I dunno how I’m gunna survive until next season without this genus show!!!’ Yeah, sorry, not even gonna dignify that one with a negative RSVP—just gonna let it hang in the social networking ether like one big ‘I don’t care.’

I mean, really, what is this? Some kind of cult? Will there be ritual sacrifices of young goats while some bro pretends to be what’s-his-face and some girl pretends to be what’s-her-face and then they, like, act out the sex scenes that they wish had happened last season? Honestly, I don’t begin to understand your rabid obsession with this insipid, idiotic piece of truly ephemeral, plasticine pop culture. Naw, man, I’m just gonna hit up two-fer Tuesday, stumble home drunk and watch reality TV—that shit’s actually got some oddly deep social commentary, if you really think about it.”

—Gigi Q., 25, decoupager and community organizer

CHAPTER 9

PHILOSOPHY AND BELIEFS

[CASE STUDY]

According to Jackson M., there is no God. It’s as simple as that. And he will frequently announce this fact to devout friends and relations in order to make them uncomfortable/spark debate/assuage a bout of intense boredom. He didn’t always feel this way: jaded, cold, entirely impassive to the religious themes in the films of Ingmar Bergman. Although he was raised a good Catholic boy in the mountains of Sequim, Washington, as soon as he traded in kneeling before crosses for kneeling before the communal acid cup, he concluded that there was less in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our feeble philosophy—which he majored in during college.

The fateful moment of nonbelief came one night in the woods, when he and his friends were seated around a crackling campfire, contemplating doing a rain dance to rectify a particularly intense drought that was seriously hampering their efforts to grow pot on the soccer field. A doe wandered into the clearing, blood gushing from a hole in its side—obviously the byproduct of a hunter’s shoddy aim. The deer fell to the ground near the fire and uttered its last dying cry. The assemblage decided to toast its demise with a shower of PBR from their nearly empty cans. As Jackson watched the stream of cheap beer soaking the deer’s dappled coat, cascading into its glassy eyes, he decided that no God in heaven could have created such a sad, cruel excuse for existence. Jackson often tells this story to girls in order to sleep with them.

Nonreligion is merely one realm of the hazy collection of convictions and beliefs that make up the average hipster’s theology. Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses, which indicates that your average prole is perfectly content to exist on a steady diet of, essentially, one big downer. The hipster, by nature, is not OK with being perpetually sedated (at least for long periods of time).
²⁶Hipsters seek to live in a dangerous and changing world, replete with twists and turns and fantasy and excitement—a fictionalized existence that shifts and churns like the liquid globules inside a lava lamp.

Hipsters thus reject the serenity of conventional religion, choosing instead to live by a seemingly arbitrary collection of beliefs and convictions.
²⁷But peeling back the plaid veil, one realizes hipster dogma centers on antithesis. One does
not
believe in God, one does
not
accept traditional gender roles and one does
not
strive for wholesome and fulfilling romantic relationships, all constructs embraced by our oh-so-structured society. If something is written down in the Bible, in the history books, or in the volumes of Miss Emily Post, you best believe that your average hipster will completely and totally reject it.

Figure 10
: The Acceptability of Major World Religions

As a result, hipsters are, in a sense, the eternal children of our wasted generation: uncontrollable free spirits dancing toward ruin. A 34-year-old man may persist in acting like a 17-year-old, downing shots of vodka at the very unHappy Hour of 8 a.m., chasing dreams of rock stardom and shunning his parents’ suggestions that he find a “nice girl to settle down with.” Such ideas are completely outside his realm of experience, even though many men his age already have mortgages and golden retrievers named Hank and Betsy and kids named Chance and Lassie.

In fact, in the same way there are “dog years,” there are “hipster years,” which convert in the opposite direction.
²⁸By blatantly flouting society’s rules (which are rife with pesky attributes such as results and effects and consequences), hipsters exist in a state of suspended adolescence. Such a realm is very much akin to Pleasure Island, the mythical, debauched arena that Pinocchio finds himself trapped within after indulging just a little too much. This state keeps a hipster well-preserved until he finally reaches a breaking point (perhaps around age 40). At this point he relents, grows up and rolls the stroller over to Carroll Gardens, his eyes low and his jowls sagging. Either that or he refuses to let go of the shiny baubles of youth and becomes that dude sprawled outside the only cool bar left on Bedford with a sign reading “Sexy and Homeless.”

REALITY