Am I Hip Yet?

Alright, let’s see. Create a blog… check. Use a title that incorporates your name in a clever way… check. Provide links to any friends that picked up on the trend before you did… check. Post pictures and/or links to bands that are good, but not overly popular… (working on it). Alright... I've read my friend's blogs (the shorter postings at least) and for all I can tell, I'm off to a good start.

So starting this blog has brought me to the realization that being hip really isn’t in the cards for me. Its not that I don’t want to be hip, It’s just that I come from a long history of people that don’t even have an original last name. I think it’s safe to say that my family has come in late on pretty much every trend of the past 100 years… automobiles, color TV, polio vaccinations... Last weekend my dad asked me if I’d heard anything about dot.coms. For the most part, when it comes to recognizing upward trends, I probably fall somewhere between you and your parents or grandparents.

What is a Hipster?

As I see it, there are about three cardinal rules of hipness:
1) You must be able to sniff out a trend well before it enjoys any kind of main-stream popularity.
2) You must act as if you could care less whether or not anyone else thinks that the trend is cool (note: it is often more hip if no one does)
3) You must pull out well before a trend is accepted by popular culture.

It should be noted that there are a few caveats. For example, in deference to rule 3, hip people will often embrace trends that are extremely popular. Hipsters refer to these as guilty pleasures, and they can be extremely useful. You see, no one can have a perfect track record in accurately choosing each new popular trend, and so the hipster will pad any future foapas by preemptively liking movies, music, literature, and people that are extremely popular and/or have very little artistic integrity. This is geniuses, and my friend Tracy has made an entire blog based on it.

Alright, so now we have defined our parameters, how can you know a hipster when you see one?

Identifying a Hipster

Clothes:
First, you will like their clothes, but doubt that you could ever pull them off. Vintage tees, old western button-ups, wool knit caps… these are the staples of the hipster wardrobe. Do they look good on you? Nope… sorry.

Music:
This is probably the fastest way to identify a hipster. Ask the following question: “What is your favorite band?” Did they have one? Then you’re not talking to a hipster. Hipsters love music and their I-Pods (yes, most all of them have I-Pods) weigh about five pounds more than yours does. Your much more likely to hear an answer like:

“I don’t really limit myself to any one genera of music, much less a single artist or band. I have a pretty diverse pallet, that embraces a wide range of sonic expression. Right now I’m really into a band called “Borrowed Silver Stockings,”…have you heard of them (you haven’t)… yeah they have kind of a west-southwest-coast post-emo neo-alt-country indie-rock feel (humorous side note: most hipsters are against the categorization of music). I would say they probably fall between (some band you have never heard of) and (some other band you have never heard of)… yeah, I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of them. Pretty much me and my stepbrother’s roommate are the only people who have…”

Movies:
Hipsters like a lot of the same movies you do… They just liked them the first time that they saw them – it took you about five viewings and a number of coffee shop visits to come around. They also generally have a predilection for old black-and-white movies, foreign films, and documentaries.

Not hip? Now what?

If you are not hip, don’t fret… there is still hope for you. You can still be cool… but that’s a different post, and just to skip to the last page… that didn’t really happen for me either. So here’s what you can do… find hip friends. It’s perfect! They generally have great taste in most everything and they are more than willing to share a cup of coffee and tell you all about what they are listening to, who they are reading, what they’re favorite movies are, or any number of other things. For further resources, please refer to “people I often disagree with” to the right.