The Bard, the Boar, and the Culture War.
“…A subculture of men and women, typically in their 20’s and 30’s, that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.” — Urban Dictionary defintion of a hipster (CBC.com).
A Change in the Cultural Wind.
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Whenever talks of adolescence arrive, there is always the talk about ‘trying on different personas’ or ‘trying on different clothes,’ or ‘discovering who you really are.’ This is a stand from middle-school and high-school health textbooks everywhere; pictures of people in their early 20’s having fun only deepen the emotional fallout of inadequacy.
This is all part of growing up but I say a more dangerous notion is being sucked into a subculture without warning — or becoming part of the very group you never would’ve identified with in a million years. Enrolling at an urban-metropolitan campus — one which didn’t have the most rigorous academic standards to begin with — brought me into contact with people from every single walk of life, country, and culture. You would see everything from study-abroad students, older-adults going back to school, and undergraduates who grew up fifteen minutes next to the university-campus.
I will go ahead and move into the preface of this article: I don’t look like the card-carrying version of a hipster. A good number of friends and co-workers say I look like an investment banker stunted at growth; my key to Wall Street fell into the bottom of a pot of growth-destroying-coffee in a tragic-accident. When I swam to the bottom, I never found the key but instead a pile of history, economics, and business books provided a distraction. With my sports-team-shirts and nylon-shorts, I also just looked like an average joe on his way back from a basketball game or summer picnic.
So for those of you who proudly wear your custom-made flannel hats, worship at the altar of Pabst Blue-Ribbon, follow indie-music festivals, and explore counter-cultural movements, I want you all to know that I respect your individuality and hereby give you permission to laugh at the following sequence of events:
Where I was almost sucked into the urban-hipster-apocalypse without knowing it.
Apocalypse: n. a great disaster — Merriam-Webster Dictionary.com definition.
My Interests Started to Niche Instead of Diversify.
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Like a good chunk of the population, I have interests pertaining to popular culture. These interests involve movies, music, books, and current events. What started to take me aback was how I soon went out of my way to try to find things outside of the mainstream that I could enjoy. What started as seeing a trailer for a broad-appeal science-fiction-movie soon turned into looking up a list of independent movies which focused solely on time-travel or alternate-universes. This led me down a further rabbit hole when I started to only watch films that were directed by certain people or only explore local bands that were trying to break out of their city limits and hit it big.
By doing this, instead of ‘broadening my horizons,’ it led to my interests becoming stunted on one or two aspects I found interesting. I found less new things than I did previously because of my adherence or loyalty to a few specific genres or venues.
I almost did a double-take when I found myself idling by a row of supermarket coffee-flavors that promised something more than the standard brew. It’s advertising went something along the lines of ‘this coffee has been grown only in the finest fields; then it has been handpicked by seven virgins from seven different continents. We then ship it in biodegradable cardboard-boxes which are then used to worship the Ancient Unknowable Tree People. Please pay us $25 for a bag of coffee.’
‘Hmm…that does sound interesting,’ I thought to myself.
My heart stopped and my eyes went wide. I physically slapped myself as punishment.
‘Get a hold of yourself man! Pay for the cheap $2 coffee and call it a day!’
So much for expanding knowledge.
Another good example of this is how I never made time to go see a friend’s cover-band but I did listen to another friend’s solo CD of a soul/folk attempt with a guitar.
I still regret it to this day.
I Met More Political Radicals Instead of Moderates.
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Surprisingly, one side of the political spectrum wasn’t the focus — an adherence to demanding a political revolution of some kind was.
I don’t know if it’s common among self-identifying hipsters to be politically-disengaged or to throw hands in the air and say ‘all sides are the same’ but I didn’t find that here. Most people I grew up with leaned one way or the other on most issues but still found time for healthy debate; even if they didn’t agree, they at least understood where the other side was coming from.
The college-aged-hipster-apocalypse had other ideas.
A guy I met in a public lounge area had everything: the trademark vintage t-shirt, the yarn beanie, and the jacket stitched together from different fabrics. When he took his hat off, he resembled a bard transplanted from medieval times; he had the frame and stringy hair of somebody who’d run away from summer-band-camp and turned to a life of recreational drugs.
“We need a revolution!” he boldly declared. “We need an entirely new system of government!”
“Uh…we do?” I responded. “Why do we need that?”
“Because the current form of government sucks!”
I thought for a minute. “What do you mean? Can you give me an example?”
“Everything’s crap and people are trash! All the government does is hold poor people down! And weed’s still not legal too!”
I think what he was trying to talk about was income inequality but the giant Monster-energy drink in his hand was overriding any sense at thoughtful political discussion.
“Do you have any plan on how to have a revolution?”
He stared at me with wide eyes. “No…uh, I mean not really…”
“Well then…good luck with that.”
I gathered my things and headed to my next class.
—
Granted, young people arguing for social change on a college campus is nothing new. More surprising were the depths they’d go to in order to avoid easy identification.
“I think all parties are bad. I’m a green-leftist-libertarian-enterpriser by default. I study both candidates and pick the best one.”
Studying what candidates are for and picking one that best aligns with your beliefs and values is all well and good — when your political identification is a hodgepodge of contradictory viewpoints, then there might be a problem at hand.
I Started Viewing the World Through a Negative Lens.
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After days of sitting in student lounges — or on porches around campus — some of my new friends and acquaintances were starting to rub off on me. Originally, I had entered college as a wide-eyed freshman ready to tackle a major and get a degree. After days about hearing how everything was a conspiracy, about how ‘this person’ or ‘that thing actually sucks because’, or about the intricacies of local home-brew beers, the whole experience threatened to overflow my normal dam of negativity toleration.
Negativity isn’t supposed to be a staple of hipster culture. It could have just been the ones I happened to see from time to time. It almost felt like being a boar during a hunt: you know that there is a team of people after you…but you can’t quite place where they are. So you end up charging against everything in sight, hoping you hit your aggressors. Sometimes counter-culture movements can take on ambiguity. Sometimes a hodgepodge of unrelated things can become their own subculture.
Negativity was present with the ones I encountered.
Regardless, this type of thinking does wear on you. In an environment such as college that’s supposed to cater to the individual, being sucked into a herd of ‘groupthink’ about why all of those who drink cheap beer are MINDLESS SHEEP is a recipe for exhaustion.
Walking Away From the Flannel and Denim Carnage.
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The year before I graduated, I started to put my foot down.
Although pointing out the hypocrisy of multiple people liking unpopular things could threaten to make that very thing popular didn’t work out, trying to inject happiness into venues that did not normally call for it did produce interesting results.
A music venue for local bands was headlining a local alternative-punk band with elements of metal-core. After much screaming, weeping, and gnashing of strings, I walked over to the table where their manager sold some merchandise after the show. There were t-shirts, key-chains, and a couple of self-published CD’s. The manager was distraught: they hadn’t been selling much of anything. If the sparsely-populated audience’s reaction was anything to go by, they were a band that needed a ton of fine-tuning before anybody from Colombia or RCA was going to offer them a deal.
I didn’t buy anything but I did offer encouragement:
‘Band sounds good and…uh…loud,” I offered.
The manger — a stone-faced man with a lumberjack’s beard just regarded me sadly. “Yeah, they sure do man…
…they sure do.”
A Life Escaped.
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What I learned boils down to one thing: not everything mainstream has to suck and popular ideas don’t have to suck either. Having a reactionary vision to everything around you isn’t necessarily the answer — trying to make a situation, product, or service better can start to create an answer.
However, after taking loads of classes about every level of time and place (History major alert), you could imagine, I realized a vast number of great movements had originated because a good portion of the public at hand had rejected the mainstream way of thinking, without even going so far as to start a culture war. One doesn’t have to wear goofy hats or drink expensive beer to do it. One doesn’t even have to be a lumberjack-band manager.
One can just simply offer words of encouragement…
…and maintain their path to enact the change they wish to see.
