"The thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States"

Artie Shaw said that. The other thing you have to understand is that sometime in the early 1960s "being cool" came to be a more admired virtue than "being hip". The shift had been coming since the war but it was only in the 1960s that cool triumphed over hip everywhere.

That may seem puzzling at first as we sometimes use the words as if they meant the same vague but good property. But ask yourself this, would it be cool to say "I'm hip"? Or, would you describe a cool person as hip? The answer is, only if you were sure your listener would grasp the irony you intended.

I could say a whole lot more, and probably will beginning next week. For now, though, a couple of reminders.

This is what cool sounds like:




This is what hip sounds like (in a suitably uncool video):




Final thought, has hip come back? Well, not yet but when I see articles using eliminationist rhetoric such as "Why the hipster must die: A modest proposal to save New York cool", it's pretty obvious that the purveyors of cool are starting to get nervous.

"Is Beyonce a feminist?"

That's the question they are troubling themselves with over at The Atlantic.

Not actually answering you understand. Think of the ways you might answer such a question

1. Yes she is.
2. No she isn't.
3. Not enough evidence to say.

What is The Atlantic's actual answer:

Eight moments that seem to suggest she is

Oooh. Not eight moments that prove she is, not eight moments that suggest she is but eight moments that seem to suggest that she is. That doesn't exactly exude confidence does it?

And then the first "moment" is the Superbowl halftime show.

The foregrounding of female musicians was incredible as a symbol of resistance against an industry where male musicians are still the norm. At the paean to male achievement that is the Super Bowl, it was impossible to see the performance and not feel Beyoncé had somehow won the whole thing.

It's just a bizarre coincidence that the "foregrounded" female musicians were all really hot and skimpily dressed? that what they did was scripted down to the last second and based more on spectacle than actual skill? that Beyoncé's actually delivery wasn't very good?

(Added: Here is a rude question for you. How is the "foregrounding of female musicians"  different from the way a restaurant foregrounds hot waitresses while hiring people who can actually cook to work in the kitchen?)

Here is another argument from the piece:

In a matter-of-fact manner, the song [Independent Women Pt1] states the benefits of being a woman who isn’t beholden to a male breadwinner—a theme that repeats itself throughout Beyoncé’s work.

A couple things to note here:

1. It's one thing for a huge star with massive revenue-generating capabilities to insist on financial independence "from her man"  but for most women and men being part of a couple who support one another in various ways is actually the ticket to a level of financial security they could never achieve on their own. For most women, and most men, Beyoncé is an incredibly bad role model here. (BTW: Note the odd liberal notion that it's wonderful to have as many people as possible dependent on the state but awful that anyone might be dependent on someone whom they actually know and love.)
2. Beyoncé earns her money as a sex symbol who performs in scanty costumes. She isn't a good enough singer or dancer to have made it any other way.

Here is a rather bizarre claim:

Another on the list of feminist-Beyoncé controversies is her song that proclaims that girls run the world. Though she herself acknowledges in her GQ article and other places that this isn’t our reality, art has its own impact, and releasing a song that carries this message, with the intention of having it played on every dance floor around the world, is a ballsy political step.

Because dancers pay close attention to the words? Notice again Beyoncé's careful selection of venue's where no one is going to be paying attention to express her views. That is the exact opposite of "ballsy". It's either on the dance floor or in a GQ article where the text is there just to fill in the space around the revealing photographs of her. Beyoncé isn't stupid. She knows full well that no one would pay any attention to a single word that comes out of her mouth if she didn't look the way she does.

Finally, there is the claim that Beyoncé accepts the feminist label. Well, sorta, kinda maybe. Her exact words were the following: “I think I am a feminist, in a way.”

Actually, I think she gets this part right. Beyoncé grasps the essential thing about feminism and that is that the only feminist worth being is an individualist feminist. Hard-core individualist that she is (and it's a lot easier to find moments that suggest that than that suggest feminism), she embraces "equality" not on behalf of the sisterhood but for herself and the women she knows personally:

“It’s not something I consciously decided I was going to be; perhaps it’s because I grew up in a singing group with other women, and that was so helpful to me,” she told the magazine. “It kept me out of so much trouble and out of bad relationships. My friendships with my girls are just so much a part of me that there are things I am never going to do that would upset that bond. I never want to betray that friendship, because I love being a woman and I love being a friend to other women.”

 That said, I wouldn't count the "out of trouble" and "out of bad relationships" as solid just yet. When Whitney Houston (who was much more talented than Beyoncé) was the same age as Beyoncé is now, she was at the height of her career and was touted as a great role model for women, especially black women, just Beyoncé is now. The sad truth is that celebrities, feminist or not, are rarely good role models for anyone. No prudent person, and prudence is essential if you want to live the good life, would want to be a celebrity.

Miriam

Miriam was the first hipster chick I ever met. I met her way back in the 1970s in the year I was either fourteen or fifteen.

The obvious question is, How do I know she was really a hipster? I'll come back to that.

I was out sailing with my father when I met her. We went way up the reach 'cause it was blowing hard and it felt good to go tearing along. At one point we were both soaked to the skin, tired and hungry and maybe twelve to fifteen miles from home. And my father looked over towards the shore and said, "That's X's summer place."

It was a rocky shore and we pulled head to wind way out. I remember jumping out and standing in about four feet of water to hold the forestay while my father dropped the main, raised the centreboard and shipped the rudder so we could carry the dinghy up onto the grass (it was an International 14 for those who care about such things). Because the waves were running two to three feet, my head would be under water and my feet briefly off the ground at the peaks. It all felt good because it was an adventure and I was handling it well.

X was, and still is, a criminology professor (emeritus now). He is no longer married to Miriam. She was young, mid twenties. She may have been a former student. She was home alone. I remember she was wearing a long dress with a cardigan over the top and bare footed. I remember watching her walk about and realizing (because I was studying her with care) that she was wearing nothing at all underneath. This was a jolt because the dress and cardigan was like something someone's grandmother would have worn in the 1950s and to wear it bare-footed (among other things) was a playfully subversive thing to do.

Even as young as I was, I realized that Miriam was playing at life. She had no serious responsibilities and she wasn't in any hurry to assume them. The life she spoke of was like like student life only with no classes alternating with summering here up the reach. We changed into terrycloth robes X had for guests and she made us hot chocolate while our clothes dried. And she served us brownies.

And then we sailed back to the yacht club, put the boat away and drove home. At some point along the way, I noticed that my eyes felt funny. We were also both laughing very hard at one another's remarks. I remember giggling quietly to myself when it hit me that we were both stoned and it was the brownies that had done it. I had never been before. I think my father had the same revelation but, being father and son we couldn't talk about it.

There were also things about Miriam that we both were thinking but that fathers and sons don't typically discuss. Of what we could discuss I remember thinking that, normally, Miriam was a type that my father would have made some critical remark about. Not a cruel or disparaging remark but a remark designed to make it clear that you wouldn't want to make the life choices she had made. He didn't because she was a successful hipster. She pulled that vintage look off so well and with such ease that you could only approve of her.

And what was her life like? She was ambitious. That is the important thing to know. She wanted a career and she eventually got one, and quite a successful one in, of all things, intelligence. I found her on the net a while ago giving a talk at a UN conference about counter-terrorism. And you could see that driving ambition in the things she talked about back then.

But she cared not at all for what might be called the realities of the marketplace. This really struck me because I, only two generations off the farm on one side and descended from victims of the great famine on the other, was already being urged to think of a university degree in terms of where the jobs were likely to be and not in terms of what I wanted to do. Miriam was all about what she wanted to be.

She'd finished her degree and then had traveled to Europe and stayed there as long as she could make the money hold out. I don't know this but I suspect that nice young men she met on her travels helped her along the way. And I suspect that she got to be rather good at playing at being the various types required to satisfy varieties of great-romantic-adventure-while -traveling-in-Europe they wanted.

When she got home, she gravitated back to the college neighbourhood because she could continue to live the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed there. She'd come home with the faintest trace of an accent. It suggested that it was the last remnant of an accent she was slowly losing and I kept waiting for her to tell us she was born somewhere else (she wasn't). That, along with her vintage look, played just enough of the harmony notes for every man to supply the melody to accompany his Eliza Doolittle fantasy, particularly Professor X.

She didn't push her sexuality in any overt way. No cleavage or thighs were visible, her clothes were not tight and she had minimal, if any, make up on. Her hair was not styled. One of the effects of this, of course, was to make it clear that she didn't need to do these things. The other effect was effortless grace.

Underline that last: if there is one virtue that hipsters admire it is effortless grace. Someone who can gracefully recover from a gaffe is more admired than the person who is so studied so as never to commit a gaffe in the first place.

Final point: she wasn't rich. For there have always been kids who had years of leisure because they were rich and went to Oxford or some such place and they weren't hipsters. Hipsters have to get a job someday, they just don't have to do it just now. The flip side of that is that they are painfully aware of the social status that goes with jobs. They want a job with the right amount, which is to say quite a bit, of social status or one with none. Better to be a barista than a dental hygenist because you can brush of barista with a good ironic posture but a dental hygenist is what you are.

To come back to the question from the top: How do I know she was really a hipster? If you prefer, you can call her a proto-hipster. Either way, I'd argue she had all the defining characteristics. The other thing, and this is all crucially important, is that she was a successful hipster. Hipster is always and everywhere a pose and you can succeed or fail at pulling it off. And most people will fail. Even now that hipsters are far more common than they were back in Miriam's day, there are far more failed hipsters than successful ones. The temptation to sneer at hipsters is understandable and it comes easy but meet a successful hipster and you will be impressed.

Let's talk about teenyboppers

It was in the 1950s when marketers first discovered "youth" as a specific market that teenyboppers appeared. Like "hipster" the word comes from the jazz world. "Boppers" originally meant people who were really into bebop. "Teenybopper" was applied to girls between roughly 11 and 17 years of age who liked to gather in private with one or two friends and listen to pop music. Years aren't very helpful here though: it's more helpful to think of the term as meaning girls in the years ranging from the onset of puberty until they become sexually active. Some start and finish earlier or later than others (and there will be considerable anticipation of the moment as well as a natural desire to prolong it too).

It's a time where a girl completely rethinks who and what she is. Up until this moment, her sexuality was defined in terms of outward trappings. She had all the necessary parts to be a girl to be sure but they weren't functional. And now they are. And that's just the beginning of it; there is a whole hell-of-a-lot-else that has changed too.

And you could write up a list of the characteristics of this new culture. Let's go to a really obvious and not particularly good source to begin: Wikipedia:

• the subculture is exclusive to young girls
• it is a "retreat and preparation", allowing girls to relate to their peers and "practice in the secrecy of girl culture the rituals of courtship away from the eye of male ridicule"
• serving as a retreat to avoid being labeled sexually
• it also allows young girls to participate in semi-masturbatory rituals
• it allows its members to define themselves apart from younger and older girls

I've cherry picked those. There are others that are just stupid or driven by heavy-handed ideology. There are some I'd tweak a bit but I think the set I've picked here is pretty close to right. Now all we have to do is move by analogy from that to hipster for hipsters are a similar phenomena. It's a girl-driven subculture and it has been made possible by a linear expansion of "youth". Teenyboppers sprang up when girls stopped being married off or sent into service but instead went to high school thereby creating a stage of human life where they were neither children nor adults. That delay of adulthood has now been prolonged for another seven to ten years by increased access to university and internships.

What strikes me as most right about it is that there is no "Storyville" and no "Buddy Bolden" in the story. That is to say, there is no supposedly authentic but actually largely mythical place or person at the source of the hipster subculture. And that shouldn't surprise us because it could not be any other way. Any cultural phenomenon has to be sown in fertile soil so our definition has to be in general cultural terms. It might have sprung up only in a specific place at a specific time, of course, but that is relatively unimportant. What is important is the subculture that spread and was easily adopted and not the "authentic" source for it it; that source is like Wittgenstein's beetle in a box, it doesn't matter whether it exists or not because it wouldn't help explain anything if it did.

The thing about being a hipster is that millions of people got it without needing an explanation. They saw the role, understood it and decided it was for them. Most importantly, when they took it up, they knew how to do it without anyone having to explain it to them.

Anyway, I promised actual content today and here it is. Every one of these based on the teenybopper definitions above:

1. It is a subculture defined by and for girls

There are, of course, hipster guys, but they are curiously nonsexual beings. They might, of course, be living out wild sex lives behind closed doors (although I rather doubt it) but publicly they lack all confidence to project any sort of sexual identity. Hipster girls, on the other hand, all project something sexual. They are often clearly lacking in confidence or painfully uncertain about their sexual identity but we can see this because they are out there. If hipster life is a recital, the girls are up on stage actually performing and the boys are hiding in the wings desperately hoping no one will notice them.

2. It's a retreat allowing hipster girls to practice being adult women away from scrutiny.

Instead of hiding in their bedrooms with their friends and their favourite pop songs like teenyboppers, hipsters use various ironic stances to hide in plain sight. The irony says, these clothes and the roles that you might normally assign to them—bohemian, rebel, trucker girl, sex bomb—are just a put on. Beneath the irony, though, these roles are picked because she wants to try something like them out. (Notice, by the way, that Hipster roles are always pulled out of an historical closet. The pre-existing identity that can be ironically adopted is the whole point.)

3. It serves as a retreat to avoid being labelled sexually.

As I've said before, these girls are supposed to be very experienced and "savvy" about sex but can't help but feel terribly inexperienced (sex and Christianity are  two human activities that anyone doing them honesty will always feel like a beginner). As a consequence, they feel like they have to improvise all the time because they somehow missed the meeting where everyone else got a script. They are terrified they are going to say or do something that will allow others to forever cast them in a part they don't want before they can even figure out what the parts are.

4. It also allows young girls to participate in semi-masturbatory rituals

Nothing to add here except that the whole point of the semi-masturbatory exercise is to visualize different kinds of sexual status that might be available to her. Unlike boys, just getting sex is not hard to imagine. Getting it under terms she can live with is.

5. It allows its members to define themselves apart from younger and older women

This is a key ingredient, a necessary condition. Hipster girls want to differentiate themselves from others in an era where every identity is a market choice. The Suzanne of the famous Leonard Cohen song wore "rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters" but if you want her look today you go to a boutique that specializes in that look. Hipster girls can't opt out of the market. They have only two choices, a) pick an historical hip look like gypsy girl. flapper or trucker girl or b) become so good at the fashion game that they can play at it ironically.

Those inauthentic hipsters that everyone who really matters hold in disdain

Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.

Notice the casual flattery aimed at you the reader. You are not one of these awful people. No! The writer, Christian Lorentzen, is kindly including you in the in group that he too, of course, is a charter member of.

That is what the people who hate hipsters have in common. They see themselves as an exclusive elite but not an economic exclusive elite. They hate the idea that some people should have special status by virtue of wealth  or political power. But they very much want to be elite themselves.

And they are in the elite. Make no mistake about that. Lorentzen writes for the London Review of Books and for a New York publication called N+1. N+1 comes up over and over again if you Google "hipster". They seemed to have had a bit of an obsession about hipsters a few years ago. I know, as opposed to me who seems to have an obsession about them right now. But the N+1 obsession was interesting in that they were obsessed with explaining hipsters away. They were sufficiently self aware to recognize that there was something odd about their wanting to do this (they seem to be painfully self aware about everything) but they couldn't stop themselves.

However elite this group may be, they argue in universal terms. Any member of a proper elite would simply dismiss those they felt not worthy, in this case hipsters, as "not our kind". But this new elite can't do that. Their political views are anti-elitist while their personal desire is very much to be elite. So they need an elite that is open to anyone who deserves to be in it. Yeah, that's it, our elite is different from all those artificial elites of the past because our elite is made up of people who ... well, who what. 

They can't say that it is a matter of merit, that their elite is a matter of merit. They are sophisticated enough to know that that never happens. Every elite tends to be at least a matter of contingency as merit. The only option that seems open to them is the hoary old whore of authenticity. And that is what we see in the bit I cited at the opening: hipster must die so "cool" can be reborn. What is cool you ask? Well, if you have to ask ... then you might just expose Lorentzen for the fraud he is.

The only way to save the mythology them is the Liberty Valance ploy. That is to pretend to be unmasking the myth while actually reaffirming it.

Which brings me to Mark Greif, the founder of N+1 and charter member of the elite:

Greif attended the Commonwealth School in Boston. In 1992, he attended a Telluride Association Summer Program. He received a BA in History and Literature from Harvard in 1997, after which he received a Marshall Scholarship, which he used to study British Literature and 19th and 20th century American Literature at Oxford through 1999. He holds a PhD in American studies from Yale.

That's Wikipedia and I cite it here only to make it clear that isn't your typical middle class hipster's biography.

Greif's smarter than Lorentzen though, and he grasps that pointing at some supposed genuinely authentic group as justification for attacking hipsters isn't going to wash. Greif's argument is that being a hipster is all about claiming taste as the justification for superior social status. And he makes some very solid points about how this move always fails but there is a huge problem: everyone says they hate hipsters, how can they be an elite. 

At every turn Grief forgets that he went to the Commonwealth School. He started out lucky and got luckier. He is a classic example of privilege and power pretending to unmask privilege and power elsewhere. 

Over and over again, he comes very close to stating what should be obvious: that the hipsters that "everyone" hates are not an elite but that they are pretty ordinary kids who aspire to a higher taste than what life has offered them.

But they aren't going to walk into a comfortable existence where they get paid to play taste games the way a privileged liberal arts professor and founder of a literary magazine like Mark Grief does. With middlebrow culture more or less destroyed, neither are they likely to find a path to higher culture. So all they can do is endlessly shift from one subculture to another.

Which, when you think about it, sounds an awful lot like what people like Mark Greif do these days.

Yeah, I don't know how much more time I want to spend on the spectacle of the snake of New York cool eating its own tail either.

I guess the point here is that in figuring out what hipster chick style is, we can pretty much ignore the cultural Brahmins. And I promise, starting tomorrow, I'll put some actual flesh on the hipster bones. And very nice flesh it is!

The cool guy who debunked the myth of Liberty Hipster

This is where I bore you by talking about historiography.

No, not really but I do want to talk about mythology and how it is often precisely when we think we are debunking myths that we are actually erecting them.

So bear with me (or don't, it's a big Internet if you don't want to) for a moment while I talk about the curious case of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. That's a movie, in case you don't know, and it's a western that shamelessly indulges every cliché of the western genre in a way that ought to have driven people from the theatres in disgust.

It didn't though. It succeeded by pretending to demythologize while it was, in fact, pushing the same lame old mythology.

Here is the story in rough. Jimmy Stewart, playing an aging senator and his wife, go to the funeral of an obscure rancher played by John Wayne. Why? So we can get a whole lot of flashbacks. The flashbacks tell us that Stewart's character once moved to this frontier town and set up shop as a lawyer. This gets him to fall in love with a lovely woman who is attracted to him because he can teach her how to read. It also put him in conflict with the outlaw Liberty Valance* who was working in concert with the ranchmen to defy the advance of civilization and keep the frontier open so that the way of life the ranchers loved would continue unchanged.

You need to stop right away and see that this is the classic western myth only with the lawyer standing in for the pig farmer. Now what happens next in the classic myth? Well, two things. There is a woman who loves the pig farmer, in this case, the lawyer, and there are two outlaws, one who also loves her, and, by loving her comes to love the civilized new west which is the only kind of west where women like her can thrive, and another who works for the ranchers to kill all the pig farmers/lawyers. At some point, the first outlaw sees that his kind has to disappear for that civilization to be possible. But the other outlaw (Liberty Valence!) stands in the way of happiness for the woman and her pig farmer and so a  showdown happens between the outlaw who can see the future and the one who cannot. The pro-civilization outlaw wins and then, realizing there is no place for him in the new civilized west, he rides off into the sunset leaving the pig farmer to enjoy the civilization and, not incidentally, the woman.

It's important to the myth that the big show down is not an act of justice. When Shane guns down Jack Wilson, he does so by provoking a duel that is just an excuse for cold blooded murder. That is why the good outlaw realizes there is no place for him in the civilization that he, in the myth anyway, makes possible. The myth tells us that civilization is wonderful but it takes a big, authentic man who is himself not part of civilization to get it going and he does this in a not terribly civilized way.

So what happens in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? Well, initially, we think Jimmy Stewart's character is the one who shot Liberty Valance. He is a guy who forced into a duel with the dangerous outlaw, a duel that he wins , much to his own and everyone else's surprise. As the movie goes along, we learn that this isn't true. We learn at the end of the movie that John Wayne's character was standing by and saved the life of Jimmy Stewart's character by gunning down an unsuspecting Valance before he could kill Stewart's character**. So the myth is restored.

But the movie pretends otherwise through a complicated double shuffle. It pretends to lift the veil to show you the secret only to show you a hoary myth underneath.

But ask yourself a question: How many of the myths of the wild west center around mild-mannered and meek lawyers who gun down mighty gunfighters? Because, if we take the movie at it's word, that is the "myth" it is debunking. And this in order to restore the "authentic truth" that John Wayne killed the bad guy!

There are a couple of things I think worth taking from this. The central notion behind this myth is that our culture depends on the heroic self-sacrificing of some outlaw-type. The role of others is to honour his sacrifice by maintaining the culture he made possible.

This is particularly interesting when we think of hipness because a racial twist gets thrown in then. The mythological version of any kind of hipness will attribute it's origins to brave, authentic blacks and make whites to be, at best, respectful posers who can never really do the thing quite right or, at worst, evil thieves who profit at the expense of the unrecognized creators of hipness. And there will be no approach to hipness wherein whites can be authentic or guilt free.

A similar problem applies to contemporary hipsters. The mythmakers aren't going to let them get away with it.  For the mythmaker, the real story is always about some more authentic type the hipster has stolen their stuff from.

The second aspect of the wild-west mythology is how it plays against male sexuality. There are two types here: outlaw and husband. And it is one of the odd quirks of the genre that the woman unfailingly chooses the reliable husband character over the outlaw with the big gun, which, as you may have noticed, is not what she unfailingly does in real life. But even if there is only one guy in the story, he has mixed feelings about things. Sometimes he looks at the woman he loves and thinks ... well, let's just say he thinks like a gun-slinging outlaw and less like a reliable husband.

And, if he is honest, he'll admit that he is unlikely to have ever fallen in love in the first place if the outlaw aspect weren't there. That's a pretty banal observation but here is the question: How would this mythology have changed if women had had more input? It's not that men don't recognize about the attraction the outlaw type has for women—if anything, we obsess about it. As I've said before, there is lovely moment in dramatic irony at the end of Shane when the innocent little boy wanting Shane to stay yells, "And Mama wants you too." What's missing from the story is an outlaw type for the woman herself to play at being the way any boy can play at being a gunslinger.

I'm sure you've guessed where that is going and it will continue to go there ...



* Whose name literally means a curtain or veil hiding liberty from us by the way.

**By the way, it's an odd quirk of the western myth that Stewart's character would have to follow the rules of an illegal and immoral gunfight to be morally justified.

A little light culture: I don't want to go to New York City, it ain't the place to be no more

I'm going to start with an outrageous claim: a necessary but not sufficient quality for a woman or girl to be a hipster chick is that she be comfortable in her own skin and is admired by others for this. That is what divides the successful hipster from the many wannabes. You can tell because the subject makes so many others uncomfortable and defensive.

Case in point, Julia Plevin writing in the Huffington Post:

I know I am not a hipster. I have spent the spring in San Francisco and the summer in Manhattan, two hipster hotspots. I shop at American Apparel, have an Apple computer, avoid Starbucks and other corporate conglomerate coffee, smoothie, and frozen yogurt places, and consider myself "unique," but I assure you I'm not a hipster. I don't think I know any hipsters, I don't even understand hipsters. Are they angry at the world? Are they cynical toward modern society? Are they artistic and blasé? Are they smart or plain lazy? To me, that all seems like a waste of time.

Regardless, the definition of "hipster" remains opaque to anyone outside this self-proclaiming, highly-selective circle. 

She forgot to add that, "Besides, those grapes are probably sour."

Paradoxically, while she knows that she doesn't make the cut, Plevin wishes hipsterdom was more elite. It grieves her soul to know that young girls who don't even live in New York City feel entitled to adopt the look.

But the look has gone mainstream -- tweens all over America, from the suburbs to cities, from public schools to prep schools are trying hard to be hipsters. Oh dear, can anything be done to stop them before it's too late?

I mean, we can't allow that some twelve year old in Kansas might be able to pull off a style that a bicoastal young adult who writes for the Huffington Post tried to do and failed at can we? If she can, then the style must, de facto have something deeply wrong with it.

To navel-gazers in New York and San Francisco it may seem obvious that everyone else in the world is imitating them but the equation has always run the other way around. These places have always depended on a constant influx of people bringing style with them. There is no style in music, theatre or fashion associated with New York that didn't originate elsewhere first. New York became important because it was the hub for these ideas in that it had to come there to get broadcast all over the world through the powerful media that was headquartered in New York.

And the reason New York is so over now is that the Internet has made it obsolete. Hipster style has a history in New York but it isn't a terribly important history. It didn't come to town and gel and then get broadcast to the rest of the world by the approved leaders in the media and fashion industries. No, it traveled by the Tumblr Express and went viral on YouTube while New Yorkers were still in bed.

Don't believe me? Look at this paragraph from an unintentionally revealing Time article on hipsters from 2009!

Though the subculture is met with derision in wider society, hipsters have been able to eke out enclaves across the country, chief among them the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Williamsburg. But now even that is threatened. The hip have been hit with a double whammy of economic reality (more are struggling to pay rent as parental support dries up) and population changes (the carefully gentrified neighborhood is gradually being infiltrated by squatters inhabiting Williamsburg's stalled building projects).

Hey, that's the premise for Girls three years before the show was launched. How did that happen? It happened because New York got bypassed. Here's the big secret, hipsters elsewhere didn't need enclaves. It fit right into the suburbs and high schools of most American towns and it's been sitting comfortably there for decades now. (When I arrived at high school in a Quebec milltown in 1972 there were already hipsters in residence.) Instead, it's New York city that is desperately struggling to find its own home-grown history of hipsters so that it can pretend to be relevant again.