Travel and Leisure magazine just came out with the top ten most hipster friendly cities, which got me reflecting on what is a hipster? what does that word mean? where did this all begin? Firstly, if you ask a hipster what a hipster is, they will describe with disdain a person who has ironic facial hair, tight jeans and a holier than thou attitude, while sipping on their soy latte and surfing Pitchfork on their MacBook pro. The actual definition is not really that elusive, its as simple as the definition for pornography "I know it when I see it" undoubtedly, many people who live in urban areas can point out a hipster when they see one but couldn't really give you a definitive definition.
Recently I re-watched "High Fidelity" staring John Cusack and Jack Black, and I realized that movie came out in 2000, at that time I was living in New York City, and Williamsburg was the birthplace, or origin of hipsterdom. If High Fidelity were to come out now, those people would be identified as hipsters, ten years before that they were slackers, around 1980 they were new wave or part of the Madonna or Jean-Micheal Basquit art and music scene in SoHo. If you go back further you can say the Velvet Underground were hipsters and before that Allen Ginsburg and his Beat Generation crew. My point being, its a counter culture, you have a mainstream and then you have those that are either a bit ahead of the curve as far as societal values or those that are outsiders to what they consider a bland, corrupt, or evil mainstream of politics, banks and corporations. In some ways they are right, but just like the hipster ethos will eventually become mainstream and co-opted by the corporations, you can look through history and see how this has happens with each counter culture movement along the way. This is nothing new, and once Hipsterdom is fully mainstream it will die out and be reborn as something else.
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