hipsterism nailed
http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/06/selected_minor_.html
[…]
political. On a global scale, hipsters seem to have emerged out of
the Reagan-Thatcher years in those countries that earlier witnessed
the cultural shift known in Western Europe as “’68” and in the US
more broadly as “the sixties.” (To some extent, the origins of the
new form of opposition can be found in the sixties themselves, from
French situationism to Abbie Hoffman’s advocacy of ‘revolution for
the hell of it’, but the prevailing ideals of that era remained
serious ones.) The complete account of hipsterism’s emergence out of
the ruins of 1960s utopianism is beyond our scope here, yet the
genealogical link is clear: where sex, drugs, and rock and roll were
not a principal cause of historical change, where instead the youth
were contending with wars, dictatorships, and real –government-
imposed– cultural revolution, today there is little or no
hipsterism. Today you will see stencils of Mr. T (or whomever; you
get the idea) spray-painted on the walls of London and Amsterdam, but
not Bucharest.
For hipsters, prevailing ideas and values are not necessarily
oppressive, just stupid; not necessarily worthy of anger, just
ridicule. (They generally focus on cultural output from the recent
past, for reasons we have yet to consider.) Thus for example
hipsterism encourages its adherents to propose, in writing, on their
t-shirts, to sell moustache rides for five cents, not because they
intend to give anyone a moustache ride, and not even because the
apposition of ‘moustache’ and ‘ride’ is seen as a source of humor.
What is humorous is that in some imagined Country Comfort Lounge in
Amarillo or Cheyenne a generation ago some big slab of a man actually
sported a moustache of which he was proud, which he believed could
function directly and un-ironically as a sexual attractant.
[…]