Yesterday I took my little sister to the mall to pick up a DVD and look for anything related to Alice in Wonderland. She’s really, really excited about the upcoming remake — and it makes me sad to think that this younger generation won’t be as critical of these so-called “films,” these CGI landfills. But I’ve complained enough about that, and I’m trying to be a good big brother. (Also, she has a stellar taste in movies overall.)
We went to FYE for the DVD and then to Hot Topic for the Alice products. I used to like Hot Topic in high school, but back in the ’90s it was quite a scarier place. Yeah, they still have the Slipknot t-shirts, but they also have Super Mario and Spongebob. And right now, the whole front section of the store is devoted to a Disney movie that hasn’t yet been released. Granted, it’s also a Tim Burton movie — but I doubt there will be anything too horrific about it.
This makes me think about our system of Capitalism, a topic that’s always poking my brain and, therefore, pops up on this blog quite often. I recently read an article by Douglas Haddow on Adbusters called “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.” I wasn’t familiar with the web publication before; I followed a link there from Twitter. According to one comment on the article, Adbusters is a magazine that only hipsters read. Go figure.
One thing that Haddow brought up is the way marketers and advertisers prey upon hipsters, or those with any hipster traits. The concept of “the hipster” is elusive, so I don’t want to use it as a short-cut. I’m referring to young adults in urban settings who strive to feel cool, unique, and/or important, while at the same time inadvertently making themselves into sheep, indistinguishable from the herd, copies of many generations of rebels who were perhaps more authentic, or at least more successful in their rebellion.
As Haddow explains:
…’cool-hunters’ will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.
Hipsterdom is the first ‘counterculture’ to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.
Of course the irony of this article is that it exudes the very style that it berates. Haddow spent more time on the “cool” tone of the essay than he did on the attempt to provide real explanations or solutions. Still, he makes plenty of interesting points — and the one I just quoted has stuck in my head the most.
When I visited Hot Topic, these words hit me even harder. I know Hot Topic isn’t a hipster store, but it’s growth was fed mostly by teenage angst, youthful rebellion, and vampire fetishes. Yet these days, Hot Topic feels kinda soft and pudgy. After browsing the Alice-ware, what caught my eye was a section of t-shirts featuring many characters from early ’90s TV shows. I’ve been saying for the past few months that a ’90s revival is imminent. The first signs were the neon glasses, bandanas, tights, and t-shirts at concerts and music festivals.
So I know this revival has begun, but it’s not building with the same momentum as last decade’s ’80s revival. Maybe it’s because ’80s music, on the whole, is a lot fucking cooler than ’90s music.
Walking into Hot Topic now, I feel like a ’90s revival is being staged on an automatic schedule. It’s as if the marketers and advertisers are simply working on a 20-year time lapse, hoping to manipulate the nostalgic tendencies within us all. Hot Topic had t-shirts, buttons, iPhone covers, and other trinkets featuring designs from many old cartoons, mostly Nicktoons (i.e. – cartoons from Nickelodeon). I saw designs from Rocko’s Modern Life, Rugrats (one shirt just showed Reptar wreaking havoc), and the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
But the best discovery of all was…(drum roll)…a Ren & Stimpy t-shirt! I may not have mentioned it here, but I’m obsessed with Ren & Stimpy. I watched it as a kid in the early ’90s, and now I watch it as an adult. I have seasons 1 and 2 on DVD, as well as seasons 3-5 in digital version. When I saw this t-shirt, I grabbed one immediately without any of my usual anti-consumerist twitches. I didn’t look at the price tag, and I didn’t check what country it was made in. I didn’t wonder what company was ultimately getting the profits, and I didn’t feel like I was being manipulated. But I did remember reading the article about hipsters, and I did consider that maybe it was a mistake to buy this t-shirt and allow this rather disgusting phenomena to thrive.
Then it occurs to me that I might deserve a break. It’s not like I hadn’t thought about Ren & Stimpy in 18 years. I watch at least three episodes per week — despite the fact that I’m 27. To reference another Nicktoon, I feel like Doug after the teen idol appropriates his style of clothes for a week. Doug looks like a silly dork when a new style arrives and he doesn’t conform, insisting that he had always worn those outmoded clothes and didn’t see any reason to change now. (Typing this adds so much dimension to that episode! Doug was a Christ figure in that story! He was crucified for standing against the crowd as an individual, a free thinker. He resisted the zombie mob as they chased down their fabricated coolness. He was an anti-hipster!)
Part of my thoughts here are influenced by David Foster Wallace (discussed here previously), and I haven’t even read Infinite Jest yet (though I heard Wallace killed himself in part because of the impossibility of a truly individual and unique life experience in the modern world). The point here is that Ren & Stimpy is an integral part of who I am. It’s insane, wacky, chaotic, and psychedelic — and I love it. (I even laminated a poster of the Space Madness episode, to salvage it from my bedroom decorations of youth, and displayed it in my room all throughout college!) And furthermore, I’ll probably still be watching it when the 2K revival begins and Spongebob comes back into style.
I don’t think I’m playing “the hipster” in this case, but the opposite argument could be made. I can tell you right now that this topic, the concept of modern rebellion in all its various incarnations, will dominate my thoughts and my work for years to come.
So while I can’t presently offer more explanations or solutions than Haddow did in the Adbusters article, I can at least suggest some food for thought. Is any kind of rebellion or revolution possible today? Were they ever possible? If we’re consuming these things because they’re sincere, genuine reflections of who we are, and not just superficial fluctuations in style and behavior — does that make it okay? Would it help to avoid mass culture, or to avoid outer culture altogether? If so, then how do we stop this Capitalist machine, which exists outside of us, and of which the hipster is so clearly a symptom (that’s the crux of Haddow’s whole article). The hipster is a side effect of the U.S. being a world superpower for nearly 70 years.
Maybe the solution lies in forging a future in which there is no world superpower. The trouble is that the only concrete change happens at the individual level. All attempts to orchestrate a large-scale agenda lead to political fanaticism and, naturally, zero net change.
But that’s enough for tonight. Hold onto your seats. I feel a torrent coming on.
