The evolution of the hipster

There's probably room to argue with Megan O'Rourke's essay-review on the book Up is Up and its topic, New York's early 80s Downtown lit scene. She admits the period produced a lot of bad poetry, but still decides to praise it for "an electrifying social energy that helped blast out an intellectual space for then-“transgressive” female and gay writers," which one could maybe argue is just a squirmy way to get around criticizing that community for mediocre artistic output. But O'Rourke certainly scores when she characterizes the differences between the edgy art/lit establishment of that time and the snooty, well-bred hipster scene of today:

“Up Is Up” drives home the argument that it wasn’t just rising rents but AIDS that brought this period to a definitive end. The age of outrageous play was replaced by an age of sex ed and condo conversions. The media may proclaim Red Hook or Bushwick the new Bohemia, but these neighborhoods simply don’t have the seedy charge of the East Village in the 1970s and ’80s — and contemporary hipster style, intellectual and sartorial, hardly has the same anti-authoritarian bristle. As little kids in New York in the 1980s, my brother and I were scared (I blush to remember) of punks’ metallic studs and mohawks; it’s hard to imagine first graders being terrified of a hipster in a trucker cap and expensive jeans.

Trucker caps are so 2002, but otherwise this is spot on. The artsy fartsy edge scene, whether in music or art or literature, has replaced unhinged rebellion and anger with reflexive cynicism and an all encompassing sense of superiority and disdain. Lashing out didn't work, so the scene evolved into a smarty-pants peanut gallery. We traded the everyloner's rage of Eric Bogosian for the sideline snarkiness of Jon Stewart and dry meta-cultural fluff like The Hipster Handbook. And while some, including me, may from time to time bemoan the lack of passion in anti-establishment youth culture, it's probably better in the long run. Those prone to such sentiments don't rouse as much rabble, don't terrorize the rest of society, but instead consign themselves to simply heckling it from their perch. In the process, they create what used to be known as counterculture but now is simply an alternative mainstream. The world, or at least the U.S., is big enough for all of it.