Calvin, that's true.  I got my share of partying in before retiring at age 27 but I could have gotten a lot more in if I didn't have to work so much.  Imagine being 50 and never having had a job.  New York, Miami, SF, and LA are full of these people.  Clearwater is full of obnoxious divorced midwestern 50-somethings who dance on the bar 7 nights a week.   

 

 

I'm going to go with teal, forest green and purple. For real grownups it was beige, but you can say that about the '80s and even the 2000s as well regarding building exteriors.

 

Don't forget all of the retro baseball stadiums.  Camden Yards, etc., were amazing because people didn't like actual abandoned industrial buildings, but they liked new buildings that sort-of looked like old industrial buildings. 

 

 

Calvin, that's true.  I got my share of partying in before retiring at age 27 but I could have gotten a lot more in if I didn't have to work so much.  Imagine being 50 and never having had a job.  New York, Miami, SF, and LA are full of these people.  Clearwater is full of obnoxious divorced midwestern 50-somethings who dance on the bar 7 nights a week.   

 

 

I'm going to go with teal, forest green and purple. For real grownups it was beige, but you can say that about the '80s and even the 2000s as well regarding building exteriors.

 

Don't forget all of the retro baseball stadiums.  Camden Yards, etc., were amazing because people didn't like actual abandoned industrial buildings, but they liked new buildings that sort-of looked like old industrial buildings. 

 

 

 

Yes, in fact car salesmen in SoCal report that they don't really get excited when people in business apparel come in to look at cars at lunch or 6PM. That means they're working for somebody. Instead, when a long-haired 40-year-old guy comes in at 10AM on a Tuesday yelling "Rock and Roll!" they perk up. That guy's got money.

 

NASCAR needs to do the retro track thing NOW just like baseball did with the retro parks in order to save itself. Unfortunately, contracts...

Many things collided to create the hipster, but the Beastie Boys were unintentionally trailblazers, bringing pop culture crap into the music itself in a new way.  Making fun of White Castle, Red Lobster, Mr. Ed., all of the dumb clothes, etc.   

 

Damn, just realized that this video turns 20 this year:

 

The Beastie Boys were making fun of the mid-80s in the mid-80s, then in the 90s ignored the 90s and split their time alternately celebrating the early 80s, postwar Japan, talking about Tibet (YAWN...), and expanding endlessly on their mocking of 70s disco and cop shows.

 

The main thing I think is a commonality with all these people is desexualization. That's the rebellion. This movement has always been about making yourself less sexually appealing and it's androgynous. It takes gender out of the equation and doesn't show skin. In a way, that's a bigger slap across the face of America than anything else. In a nation that has always been obsessed with sex appeal, hipsters shun it...

 

Yes, I've always thought that hipster clothes (especially for women) are intended to be as unflattering and grandma-like as possible. But I think this trend of "desexualization" goes beyond hipsters and is something that applies to much of the millennial generation.

Yes. Unisex clothing is here almost like in the old movies where everyone wears silver jumpsuits.

ok, just did a Goggle Image search for hipster boy & girl & found nothing desexualized or unisex.

Granted, I like silver jumpsuits, but.....

The main thing I think is a commonality with all these people is desexualization. That's the rebellion. This movement has always been about making yourself less sexually appealing and it's androgynous. It takes gender out of the equation and doesn't show skin. In a way, that's a bigger slap across the face of America than anything else. In a nation that has always been obsessed with sex appeal, hipsters shun it...

 

Yes, I've always that hipster clothes (especially for women) are intended to be as unflattering and grandma-like as possible. But I think this trend of "desexualization" goes beyond hipsters and it something that applies to much of the millennial generation.

 

Large numbers of art school girls were wearing "vintage" clothing in the 90s -- the horn rim glasses and house dresses of 1950s/60s housewives.  These girls were generally terrified of a traditional domestic course of life, and wearing the clothes of what they opposed was a weird sort of safety blanket for them.

 

Meanwhile all these skinny guys with glasses were dressing like grandpas (like the Weezer guys -- sweater vests, horn-rim glasses) but their motivation was a bit different, I think.  A lot of those guys were jerks, even though they were nerds.  Definitely proto-hipsters in that regard. 

 

 

 

I think hipster girl clothing was trending toward FOB fashion for a while, but has since diverged paths. There was a brief period where I think it was unintentionally sexualized; at least it was by me.

I was acutely aware as a kid in the 80s that the clothes we were wearing were absolutely ridiculous. 

 

The early 90's were worse.  Colors by Alexander Julian.... and Slick jumpers (with one hook undone, of course).  Need I say more?

The early '90s were the acid trip days of my generation. Except none of us were on acid.

before retiring at age 27

 

I hate you

before retiring at age 27

 

I hate you

 

Clarification: retired from partying.

 

This is a 2-part post, comparing photos from about 1997 with about 2007.  You will notice the heightened self-consciousness and passive-viscious tone. 

 

About 1997:

 

 

 

This one is particularly excellent:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Around 2007:

 

 

 

 

Conclusion:

Hipsters ruined everything!

so the world was all chicks in 1997 and all guys in 2007?

Goth-esque vs Douchey-ish? It seems more a difference of genre than generational

More smoking in the '90s, or at least no shame in smoking

Goth-esque vs Douchey-ish? It seems more a difference of genre than generational

 

No I don't think there was the all-around, genre-defying "hipster" until sometime in the late 1990s.  It's tough to pinpoint when exactly it happened.  The guy who I remember being the very first "hipster" I knew of was heavily into David Bowie, the sculptor Vito Acconci, and...Texas.  Anything whatsoever having to do with Texas.  He got really pissed when he heard I went to Houston on spring break in 1999, as if I was making some sort of statement.  No, I was driving my roommate there so he could pick up the car he bought from his uncle Greg. 

those pics make the good point that there have always been hipster types. but the use of the term as we knew of it most recently is not hard to pinpoint. 1998 in the burg. that is, outside of the prior mid-century use like in the zoot suit or beatnik days or a few later false starts, ie., the band rem using it in a song in 1981 when they invented the alternative college radio rock era.

 

Could the passive-viscous facial expressions be a result of the practice of bands "mugging" for photos rather than smiling like they used to many years ago?

 

Or even how many Lego men mug now rather than smile?

those pics make the good point that there have always been hipster types. but the use of the term as we knew of it most recently is not hard to pinpoint. 1998 in the burg. that is, outside of the prior mid-century use like in the zoot suit or beatnik days or a few later false starts, ie., the band rem using it in a song in 1981 when they invented the alternative college radio rock era.

 

So do you think the term as we came to know it is tied explicitly to what happened in Williamsburg?  Living there at the time must have been incredible, because the place went from a ghost town to completely unaffordable in about 24 months.  I was there in the summer of 2000 when there was tumbleweed blowing across the street and you were the *only* person who got off the train.  I don't recall any businesses of any kind open in any storefronts. 

 

 

 

^ are you some sort of immortal? If half your stories are true, you've been an adolescent for at least 30 years.

^ are you some sort of immortal? If half your stories are true, you've been an adolescent for at least 30 years.

 

I can confirm that Jake is immortal.

^ are you some sort of immortal? If half your stories are true, you've been an adolescent for at least 30 years.

 

It's possible.  It seems I've spent a little over thirty years in my twenties.  8-)

The first Midwestern hipster-lite, Greg Norton from Husker Du. This is 1980's Minneapolis, which predates any talk of hipsters in Williamsburg or Mission:

 

 

^ are you some sort of immortal? If half your stories are true, you've been an adolescent for at least 30 years.

 

Somebody bought me this record when I was about 3 or 4.  It caused permanent brain damage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlX6hsAf39Q

 

The early '90s were the acid trip days of my generation. Except none of us were on acid.

 

I mean look at this:

 

Saved By The Bell fakery redux.

That's why there was such pent-up demand for something...then Beavis & Butthead arrived:

 

Is that Ross Perot?

Looks like some king of bum-snoidial butt-snoid...

 

What I never noticed about Beavis and Butthead in the day was that they were actually making fun of videos either way- either they were lame, or they were "cool" in the way a not particularly bright 13 year old delinquent would think was cool.

I liked it when B&B were so mean that MTV wouldn't put the song info at the bottom. That happened with Yoko Ono's "My Man" for one.

This link is in response to the previous speculative remark regarding the Millennial generation's envy of the spirited clothing of prior generations:

http://www.retronaut.com/2011/11/fountain-square-cincinnati-1973

 

There is a really great energy in these photos.  There is very little self-consciousness in any of these people's body language.  The flamboyant clothing isn't a look-at-me grasp for cheap attention but rather somehow a sign of self-respect.  Maybe there's some sort of resolve because people are simply happy to have physically survived the Vietnam draft era.

 

All the crap that went on during the 60s and early 70s seems to have been forgotten to some extent by those who were born during those years, but then those born in the late 70s and early-mid 80s seemed to be nostalgic for the Civil Rights/Woodstock/Vietnam era.  I have no idea what people born in the 90s and early 2000s think about. 

 

 

 

the $7 latte

 

http://m.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/behold-7-latte-article-1.1614894

 

What I never noticed about Beavis and Butthead in the day was that they were actually making fun of videos either way- either they were lame, or they were "cool" in the way a not particularly bright 13 year old delinquent would think was cool.

 

Of course they were.  That was the best part of the show.  And of course they made fun of the most unlistenable recorded act of the rock era.....

I was a not particularly bright 13 year old delinquent at the time, so I thought they were being serious in their praise for White Zombie.

Hipster wannabes get facial hair transplants

 

It’s shear madness! Brooklyn’s hipster beard craze has grown so popular that men in New York are rushing to doctors for “facial hair transplants” — surgery that helps make beards look thicker and less patchy, sources said.

 

Stubble-challenged guys are forking over up to $8,500 for the beard-boosting procedure, which has spiked in popularity in recent months, plastic surgeons told The Post.

 

“Brooklyn is probably the nucleus of the trend, it’s the hipster ‘look’ guys want. If you have a spotty beard, and you let it grow out, it looks sloppy, ” said Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a Midtown-based plastic surgeon.

 

“[Clients] want full beards because it’s a masculine look. Beards are an important male identifier,” he added.

 

Epstein performs two or three beard implants per week — up from just a handful each year a couple years ago, he said.

 

The specific hipster-inspired style  — a lumberjack-meets-roadie hybrid — was made popular in neighborhoods such as Williamsburg, Bushwick and Park Slope, doctors and patients said.

 

One happy patient  is Danny, 27, whose beard used to be so patchy, he was forced to “fill it in” with an eyebrow pencil, he said.

 

Two years ago, he paid $8,500 for the surgery, which he considers a fashion statement.

 

“I have a baby face but now I’m able to look older. My fashion statement is a little edgy, and I do like the ‘rugged look,’” he said,

 

He added, “It’s one of the best investments I’ve ever made.”

 

During the procedure, doctors remove hair from other body parts, including the head and chest, before implanting it in the face.

 

New beards grow back normally and can be shaved.

 

The hair-raising trend is also popular with female-to-male transgenders, Hasidic Jews, and guys who simply aren’t very hairy, doctors said.

 

“It’s the style. It’s just more common now to see scruff than ten years ago,” said Dr. Yael Halaas, a Midtown plastic surgeon, who performs the procedure.

 

“We’ve been getting a lot more calls about it,” she said.

 

A 39-year-old New Yorker, who works in catering industry,  got a beard transplant to make him feel younger, DNAinfo.com reported.

 

“I had contemplated [getting a beard transplant] for approximately eight months,” he said, “Knowing the results, I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time deciding,” he said

http://nypost.com/2014/02/25/hipster-wannabes-forking-over-thousands-for-facial-hair-transplants/

It just keeps getting worse. This is what they're selling in Starbucks now:

http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/01/music-for-little-hipsters-now-available-at-starbucks/

 

 

Real hipsters don't get their coffee at a chain like Starbuck's.

Let's go back to the beard transplant...WHAT???

 

It's called age you punks, I couldn't grow a decent beard until I was in my mid 30s.

Does the beard continue to fill in through your 30s? Mine is respectable, but it's not what it could be. I'd be cool with it filling in a bit more, but it's not something I've been expecting.

My beard is definitely fuller now than it was in my 20's. So's my ear hair.

I don't think the beard transplant is that strange when you consider all of the other things people do to improve their appearance. Breast implants, breast reduction, face lifts, liposuction, laser hair removal, hair transplants, etc.

Until you find out where the transplant came from. Gosh, Ryan, your beard is so thick.....and curly!

I didn't realize how hipster Hara Arena was until I looked at this slideshow:

http://www.stadiumsusa.com/stadium/hara-arena-45414/Dayton+Gems

 

The only time I was there was at night to see Primus in 1995 so I didn't get the full effect.  I also had tickets to see Nirvana in fall '93 at this place but my dad grounded me and I missed it. 

I also had tickets to see Nirvana in fall '93 at this place but my dad grounded me and I missed it. 

 

That was ColDayMan's first concert!

Not hipster related, but I remember at that show seeing how the drummer (this is not the same drummer) played the beat to "Over the Electric Grapevine".  I had practiced it in my basement with a standard drum setup, only to see how much easier it was to play with a floor tom to the left of the hi-hat:

 

Also, I was too young to realize how great that guitar player is, since the focus was entirely on Les Claypool.  I just wish he's totally open up with way more feedback and a Marshall amp. 

Larry LaLonde came from death metallers Possessed so there probably was a time he was like that. Though once the Boss Noise Suppressor pedal came around to quiet the hot-rodded amps (back when you had to do that) of the '80s feedback became passe in metal. "Shut that thing up!"

Larry LaLonde came from death metallers Possessed so there probably was a time he was like that. Though once the Boss Noise Suppressor pedal came around to quiet the hot-rodded amps (back when you had to do that) of the '80s feedback became passe in metal. "Shut that thing up!"

 

Yeah I have one of those Marshall amps that is totally out of control, or at least it was when it was working correctly. 

 

The problem with hipster bands starting in the 90s was that you'd see the guy up there with the most ridiculously perfect vintage equipment -- like the stuff you had only read about in magazines -- but then the guy was totally afraid to get outrageous.  And that's what rock & roll is -- totally outrageous.  Like if you've ever heard somebody playing in small club with those giant 100W Fender amps from the 60s, especially with the tube reverb unit, they should have been outlawed because they serve no practical purpose other than to disturb the peace.  These shoe-gaze, then hipster bands would sometimes have that gear, but the guy would be up there fiddling with it all night instead of just playing the damn songs like he meant it. 

 

 

 

^ In the context of the era, it sounds like you're praising emo. Because those were the guys doing what you're prescribing.

 

Edit: So were the third-wave ska kids.

I just watched that Primus jam again.  Pretty good for a song that makes absolutely no sense.  Thinking back, Les Claypool's rejection of the metal scene in the late 90s and his subsequent jump to the jam band circuit really was portended by a lot of the music he was writing earlier in the decade that nobody picked up at the time.  When I was a teenager I knew he was good but I didn't realize how good.  Still, there is a boundary that he never surpassed because everything he did suffered the limitations of everything Frank Zappa did, except he wasn't quite as good or prolific as Frank Zappa.  Now that I think of it, I would have loved if Zappa had done a thrash metal album.  Jesus, he did everything else!

 

 

^ In the context of the era, it sounds like you're praising emo. Because those were the guys doing what you're prescribing.

 

Edit: So were the third-wave ska kids.

 

 

For the record I have never explicitly or implicitly praised emo.  In fact I hold nothing but unmitigated contempt for emo. 

 

Second, third-wave ska is one of my various and unrelated areas of expertise, as I saw pretty much every single semi-prominent band of the era live at least once -- about 30 of them.  Only about five bands at most were any good out of the whole lot of them, and there was a time when there were in excess of 100 ska bands touring the United States.  It was perhaps the prime tragicomedy of the 90s. 

 

I had the vary random experience of working at a camera shop (remember those?) in Boston with the Mighty Mighty Bosstone's first drummer, a guy named Wright.  He was a really cool dude who I think left the band before they recorded their first album because his first kid came along.  Also working there was the longtime bass player of Bim Skala Bim, who was much more a Grateful Dead fan than a ska enthusiast, despite playing in the very first American ska band (yes, earlier than The Toasters, who kind of sucked).  This same camera shop also had a guy who was a prominent roving bass player in the hardcore scene and another guy who was the lead singer of an extremely popular yet extremely mediocre punk band.

 

The guy's name was Jasper, he's the farthest on the left in this photo:

 

Dude, you were working in a camera shop.  It wasn't that bad.  The funny thing was I went to their last show ever, held at a gay disco in Boston's "combat zone", the strip club area near Chinatown.  What was amazing was the shear number of fully-festooned punks existed and were functioning during W's first term.  You're scanning the crowd and you're like...seriously?

 

What was so idiotic about the Boston punk and hardcore scenes was that there was so much gangl-ike identity wrapped up in these "scenes", which consisted of about 250 people each, yet they were so segregated from one another.  There was nothing but animosity and tension between them and within them.  And what did it add up to?  A bunch of guys (and a handful of girls) who terribly regret their youth.     

 

Also for the record, I always tilted much more toward hardcore than punk.

 

 

 

For the record I have never explicitly or implicitly praised emo.  In fact I hold nothing but unmitigated contempt for emo.

 

I figured as much, which is why I pointed out that what you were saying sounded like an endorsement of emo, since the emo bands were playing on vintage equipment without a hint of the reserve you criticize the proto-hipster bands for.

 

I don't think the proto-hopster classification is totally fair, though. I don't know what type of equipment various bands were using, but a lot of them were getting "outrageous" with what they did have (unless I'm misinterpreting the definition...I'm thinking "rocking out"). e.g.: