I was talking to a guy from California about Portland before I came here (well, before living here; I had visited before), and he described Portland as pretty hip, but too aware of its own hipness ("Keep Portland Weird" bumper stickers, for example) to be as hip as somewhere more unassuming, like Minneapolis (which is, incidentally, where the conversation took place). Now that I'm here, I agree, to a certain extent. The same is true of hipsters in general, I find. They are too aware of how unusual or ironic or meta they are, and don't realize that in order to be taken seriously, they have to find something, anything, to take seriously themselves.
If being cool is about not caring, then the stereotypical hipsters rule. But if it's about not sweating the small stuff, they are inexpressibly lame, because small stuff is all they ever seem to talk about.
As I understand it, the ideal for a hipster is to listen to certain music and wear certain fashions and do certain things not because commercial television and other media say they're popular, but because of the appeal of the music or clothing or activities in themselves. This is laudable. But so many more people are impressed by this idea than can actually fully understand it or put it into real practice that this ideal concept is tainted by the many people who are clearly only putting up a flimsy façade of counter-cultural quirkiness without any real sincerity or conviction. That, in fact, is the central irony of hipsterdom: the people who profess to dislike anything that has been discovered and thus ruined by mainstream society have themselves distorted their own hyper-individualist philosophy almost beyond recognition. They forget, or never bothered to learn, that unique things are still unique whether the rest of the world knows about them or not.
Whether they know it or not, I think this is why everybody loves poking fun at a hipster, even another hipster (who would of course never admit to being one). But I actually identify with the philosophy underneath all the cultural (or do I mean subcultural?) distortions, and I do have a fairly unusual set of interests and abilities, as well as a unique personal style, and am proud of this uniqueness, so even if a person might not peg me as one just to look at or talk to me (though for all I know they might do just that), I am about as hipster as I can be.
By the way, I have heard that one defining characteristic of a hipster is a refusal to admit to being one. What does it mean, then, that I claim the title as my own?
