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What is the counterculture these days?

Started by Fambo Number Mive, November 23, 2021, 04:02:39 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Johnny Foreigner

Is hipsterism a thing of the past now? Not being rhetorical; I genuinely do not know. In the noughties and tens, I was a hermit for some years, living without Internet or television. I just read old books and listened to early music and Radio 4 on the long wave. I recall Private Eye often poked fun at hipsters, but that was as far as my interest went. The many names being dropped in this thread sound somewhat familiar, but I have never gone out of my way to investigate any of those people.

What about Bohemian chique? Is that still around? Was it merely a clothing fashion?


Retinend

I think hipster*dom is the mainstream now. Just look at how popular Vice is, while maintaining the same counter-cultural aesthetic. Here where I live in Berlin "hipster" is a synonym for "cool", as it always was, really. It's also generalized to refer to sorts of beards, styles of advertising, interior decoration, and other superficial things. So it's definitely "airborne".

*(To be clear - for me personally, "hipster" means the milieu of people who were hanging around parties in Shoreditch, Dalston, Williamsburg, Portland, or a place like that, in the mid 00s, and is summarized by Vice magazine, Pitchfork (for music) and that sort of vibe - and satirized in Nathan Barley by the great man himself.)

Video Game Fan 2000

Quote from: Retinend on November 25, 2021, 02:13:15 PM(to be clear - for me "Hipster" means the milieu of people who were hanging around Shoreditch, Dalston, Williamsburg, Portland, or a place like that, in the mid 00s and is summarized by Vice magazine and its vibe)

This really started in earnest the 90s when gentrification of those places started and college/university graduates started coalescing around cultural poles like indie rock and what have you. Between 99-03 you had the whole Shoreditch Twat and Pitchfork moment where being a hipster was the last thing anyone wanted to be. Then the negativity faded and it kind of became mainstreamed again around 2005ish with shitty fucking fake folk music and ukes and songs about domestic bliss.

Video Game Fan 2000

#63
Remember Hipster Hitler?

I thought the general consensus on Nathan Barley is that it arrived nearly half a decade too late to have the impact it might've had.

Paul Calf

Quote from: Retinend on November 25, 2021, 01:39:38 PMwhats a 90s hipster? surely hipsterdom is a 00s thing. Nathan Barley couldn't have been made in the 90s.

Perhaps it wasn't particularly widespread at the time, but the Nathan Barley-Legal MPEG-manga, wolf-bumming edgelord trampfighting  noo meeja bollocks started in the late 90s in Old Street / Hoxton Square. By the time of Barley (which I think largely brought it to national attention) the original Shoreditch Twat / Hoxton Bitch crowd had started migrating westwards towards Clerkenwell and respectability and poured scorn over the lines outside the 333 and Electricity Show Rooms.

boki


Video Game Fan 2000

Quote from: boki on November 25, 2021, 02:46:55 PMSounds like a euphemism for a nonce ring.

I don't think the hippies even needed euphemism.

Video Game Fan 2000

Charlie Brooker first blessed us with Cunt on the 14th of May 1999.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Retinend on November 25, 2021, 02:13:15 PMI think hipster*dom is the mainstream now. Just look at how popular Vice is, while maintaining the same counter-cultural aesthetic. Here where I live in Berlin "hipster" is a synonym for "cool", as it always was, really. It's also generalized to refer to sorts of beards, styles of advertising, interior decoration, and other superficial things. So it's definitely "airborne".

*(To be clear - for me personally, "hipster" means the milieu of people who were hanging around parties in Shoreditch, Dalston, Williamsburg, Portland, or a place like that, in the mid 00s, and is summarized by Vice magazine, Pitchfork (for music) and that sort of vibe - and satirized in Nathan Barley by the great man himself.)

I knew someone who left Vice at the point where they were overtly paying lip-service to their ideals but cutting deals with vape manufacturers and establishing television stations in Saudi Arabia.

Johnny Foreigner

Early noughties. Only interested in classical music in those days. Times and Independent reader, when the latter was still a newspaper. Anglophile, reading German at uni. Great distrust of anything fashionable. Shirt-and-tie man doing his own cooking. Moderate liberal, never smoked any weed.

I was my own counterculture.

Retinend

Quote from: Johnny Foreigner on November 25, 2021, 02:54:06 PMEarly noughties. Only interested in classical music in those days. Times and Independent reader, when the latter was still a newspaper. Anglophile, reading German at uni. Great distrust of anything fashionable. Shirt-and-tie man doing his own cooking. Moderate liberal, never smoked any weed.

I was my own counterculture.

This is the most hipster thing that's been posted so far.

Video Game Fan 2000

Pfft, I bet your man doesn't even have a little moustache tattoed on his finger.

poodlefaker

90s hipster was Beastie Boys, Grand Royal magazine, Bathing Ape, Mo-Wax, ect ect.

Video Game Fan 2000


Retinend

Fair enough, "90s hipsters" checks out. Apologies to @Video Game Fan 2000 for dismissing the idea as if it were contentious. Moreover, apparently he's right that "hipster nazis" was also a thing, although I maintain that it's topsy-turvy to say that hipsterdom per se carried an "undercurrent of reactionary traditionalism".

Video Game Fan 2000

#75
Quote from: Retinend on November 25, 2021, 03:03:21 PMthat it's topsy-turvy to say that hipsterdom per se carried an "undercurrent of reactionary traditionalism".

If you're talking about the early 00s, it definitely did. A huge part of it involved celebrations of tradition, domesticity, Americana and the like. That's how it went so quickly to all the bicycles, barbershop, outdoorsman and microbrew shit. I think of the contrast this way - in the 90s hipsters loved David Lynch and John Waters because they ironically skewered suburban and white American values. In the 00s hipsters loved them because they captured those things and turned them into myths.

00s Hipsters were very "post-feminist", which is something else you don't hear much about any more but was definitely a big trend amoung university educated middle class people. I think of a part of hipster culture being the unironic embrace of trad gender roles. It was definitely apolitical too. 90s hipster stuff involved explicitly political touchstones like Bikini Kill, Fugazi, the Beastie Boys and Free Tibet, Thurston Moore saying "I believe Anita Hill" and all that kind of thing. 00s hipster stuff was mostly quirky and cute, ironic and distanced itself from the sincere anti-GWB stuff in the media which was seen as embarrassing. Looking at the cultural legacy of 00s hipsters, you'd never know there was a major war on at the time.

Actual hipster nazis are something else altogether. That's more like Boyd Rice.

The Mollusk

Quote from: Video Game Fan 2000 on November 25, 2021, 02:22:51 PMI thought the general consensus on Nathan Barley is that it arrived nearly half a decade too late to have the impact it might've had.

On the contrary I think it became more relevant a decade or so after it aired.

Video Game Fan 2000

But by then everyone knew they were cunts. Cunt was great because it was castigating a type that the rest of the media was telling us was cool.

George Oscar Bluth II

Honestly my first thought was "cryptocurrency". Counterculture doesn't have to be good or admirable or even cool.

Otherwise it's quite hard to kick against mainstream culture when it doesn't really exist anymore. Even the stuff that you think of as big isn't that big.

Quote from: Video Game Fan 2000 on November 25, 2021, 02:07:02 PMThere's tons of stuff online about what "hipster" meant in the 90s. Just google it. You'll find forum threads from 15 years ago where people argue about whether the true hipsters were Seattle grunge fans or New York slackers.

Pavement are inarguably the defining hipster band, the band that had people calling each other hipsters, and their first record came out in 1989.

Elaine calls Kramer a "hipster doofus" in Seinfeld at some point.

Goldentony

Quote from: Video Game Fan 2000 on November 25, 2021, 02:07:02 PM(although there are actual libertarian counter-cultures they just haven't come up yet)

but people talk about nonces on here all the time


chveik

Quote from: George Oscar Bluth II on November 26, 2021, 03:34:06 PMHonestly my first thought was "cryptocurrency". Counterculture doesn't have to be good or admirable or even cool.

and apparently it doesn't even need to be a culture

Video Game Fan 2000

If crypto counts as a counter-culture then Avon ladies are Sutcliffe Jugend

thenoise

Quote from: Video Game Fan 2000 on November 26, 2021, 06:50:41 PMIf crypto counts as a counter-culture then Avon ladies are Sutcliffe Jugend

People are uploading 10 hour boxsets to YouTube, man. The most embarrassing subgenre in the history of music is over.

chveik

despite the edgelord facade, it's actually a pretty good band

steveh

Quote from: Stoneage Dinosaurs on November 24, 2021, 10:56:32 AMDrill music maybe? I mean you can usually judge what the counterculture is based on whatever the right wing media get all panicky about. So either that or 'critical race theory' I guess

There's someone I follow on Twitter who talks about that scene and the clampdown on it is quite something. Police stopping live events just before they are about to start, venues being pressured in advance that they will have opposition to licence renewals for putting on drill acts and the daily occurrence of videos being pulled off YouTube and other services after being reported by the police. No other artistic form in the UK is subject to so much censorship but unsurprisingly given who makes it, the 'free speech' mob don't have a thing to say about this.