Am I a hipster? You asked Google – here’s the answer
This article is more than 7 years oldJoel GolbyEvery day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queriesWe all fear it, being a hipster. A malignant diagnosis. Type the words into Google with that punch-sink feeling in your stomach, with your heart racing, sweat beading, with tattoos of anchors spreading up your forearms like a pox: “Am … I … a … hipster?” Once you are, there is no going back. Once hipsterdom embraces you or you embrace it, that’s you done: not one weekend of your life will ever not be spent “just popping in” to vintage stores, and you will never be able to resist pulled pork on a pub menu again. Buy a USB record player and accept your fate. Buy a single cactus and display it in an artisan cactus holder. Mine is an enamel mug repurposed to hold a fistful of cactus soil and a single succulent. I paid £8 for this enamel mug. I paid £3 for the succulent itself. And for what? For what?
Are you a hipster? That is not for you to decide. Being a hipster is sort of like a nickname: it is chosen for you, thrust and ordained upon you, eclipses your true identity slowly, death by a thousand cuts. One does not go overnight to “Gaz” from “Gary”. One does not simply wake up with a handlebar moustache and a job as London’s most furious bike courier.
I suppose at this point it’s important to classify what a hipster actually is, because it’s a nuanced and multi-level thing, and essentially there are certain symptoms it is safe to ignore and certain ones it is not, and because there are no qualified doctors in this particular area it’s hard to know what is and isn’t hipstery. Thus:
1. You have a lot of plaid shirts and you have bought an indie CD in the last two years
You are not a hipster this time. You did not win. You have three plaid shirts and an Arcade Fire album: so does everyone. So does everyone on earth. You are not a hipster. You are just a normal person. It’s fine.
2. You seem to find yourself spending two to three hours every Saturday and Sunday just wandering through Urban Outfitters, idly touching the T-shirts, reading the thick, padded books about “how to smoke the ultimate rack of ribs, bro” or “Journalling For Beginners”; you think really hard about buying a mug that says “UNT” on it and has a coloured-in handle; you think about buying a reclaimed wax jacket; you spend £12 on a three-pack of dotted socks; you wonder where the time went – time is a black hole here in Urban Outfitters; a girl with a septum piercing is asking you to leave, please, you have been stood listening to the same Elliott Smith album for three hours on the shop-soiled headphones. “Please leave, sir or madam, we need to lock up the shop.”
You’re not a hipster but you’re veering there. You’re asleep at the wheel and your car is ploughing over the bumps in the road, and if you do not start and get back on the motorway then you are going to crash leg-breakingly into hipsterhood, and no emergency service can help you.
3. You just went to Beyond Retro and bought a pair of tweed trousers that don’t quite fit you but they’re a one-off so you’re going to have to just make do, aren’t you, because this pattern of trouser just isn’t going to come up again, and also they have four holes in them but you could always patch them up, and they have a smell, a bizarre scent, something between mustiness and that dusty smell of death, like a house that was lived in by an expired nan some years before – this is what the trousers smell like, and also the trousers costs £36, somehow.
Yes, you are a hipster. The hipness might not have consumed your entire body yet, but this is the infection point from when it all starts. That’s how hipsterness gets you: an abscess that leaks into your blood. Look at me: I move pretty much in hipster circles – I live somewhere between north and east London, I am pretty sure I know what a flat white is, I ride a bicycle, I mean I literally work for Vice magazine – and spend a lot of my weekends at vintage shops looking at the people who buzz around there, wondering how they happened. How do you work your way up to wearing a fine fox fur, tweed trousers, a fitted blouse, tiger-print bandana, the word “MIXOLOGY” painted on your face in oil paint, and a culturally appropriative vintage bindi? You can’t just buy that all at once and go, “Huh, this is me now. This is what I wear. These are my outfits.” You need to work your way up to that. And look at you: standing in line, your soiled trousers folded neatly beneath your arm, watching as the boy behind the counter somehow manages to vape through a cigarette holder, thinking about where to get brunch: you’re on a slippery slope, my friend. A slippery slope towards hipstery.
4. You’re in a band called Hearts of The Lost and Damned or Sir Chris Hoylent Green; your only album is on cassette tape; you have a side hustle with your friend who insists their name is DOMIQUÉ where you sit in a park with a typewriter making up haikus for passersby and charging them £6 per poem; you are “thinking really hard about moving to New York, actually”; you rent a single room in a warehouse; you only watch Girls ironically – you only do anything ironically; your parents have stopped calling you after that weekend you went home and tried to explain to your dad what your job was; you have a longstanding issue with a particular megacorporation; you think Glastonbury has sold out; you have a favourite emoji, you think having a favourite emoji is lame, your favourite emoji is not a frequently used emoji – it’s like one of a fax machine or something; one of your friends has a tattoo gun; you and your ex had to divide the good Dalston nightclubs in the split and they got Alibi so essentially that’s you fucked now; you spent a whole Sunday afternoon decanting all of your dried goods into various kilner jars but you forgot to actually label them so now you keep having disasters where you confuse chia seeds and peppercorns; you once paid £250 for a lamp …
Yes, you are a hipster. You are possibly the hippest person alive.
Thing is, we fear being labelled a “hipster” in the same way we fear being labelled “basic” – opposite ends of the same spectrum, with humans in the middle, naturally erring one way or another. Being scared of being a hipster is an essential fear that enough people like the things you like that it suddenly renders you un-unique and your liking of the things insincere, because everyone likes them, making you the same as everyone. That all the little whirring quirks and oddities that make you you are actually just broadly daubed brushstrokes with the hipster pen. Do you really like that trucker hat? Or are you just a hipster? What about small batch cupcakes? Do you even actually like them? It’s hard to even know any more. Your preferences and motivations are lost to the dreaded h-word. Your identity grows obscured by a trendy beard.
It’s easy to boil hipsters down to those same few tropes – ironic T-shirts, lens-less glasses, craft beer, adult colouring books, etc – but essentially it all comes down to a far more basic feature: Morrissey-level sincerity in everything you do.
Nobody wants to be accused of being Morrissey, do they? And so nobody wants to be accused of being a hipster. But if you are – if you recognise yourself or facets of what you might be on the list above – shh, shh, stop worrying. Go to the nearest burger place that does American beer and deep fried pickles, and calm yourself with a side of mac and cheese. Queue up outside the cereal cafe and take some deep breaths. It’s not the end of the world. It just means you care slightly more about the American Apparel basics range than anyone else.
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