Old People Hate Hipsters, Kurt Cobain, and Justin Bieber, According to New Poll
Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning firm that’s normally one of the most accurate political pollsters around, sometimes has too much time on its hands. When it does, it takes national nonpolitical surveys of basically whatever the people running PPP think would be funny. In the past they’ve discovered that 62 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of Halloween, 47 percent think there’s a “war on Christmas,”and a surprising amount believe in all kinds of conspiracy theories.
This month, they polled over 500 Americans about music, famous musicians, and “hipsters.” Some resultswent up yesterday, and it turns out that voters like classical music and jazz more than other genres by a fairly large margin, are into Adele and Taylor Swift, dislike Justin Beiber and Chris Brown, and like Beyonce better than Jay-Z. Oh yeah, and they hate rap—50 percent of the voters polled said that it’s their least favorite genre of music, and 68 percent of them had an unfavorable view of it. Dubstep and Skrillex had bad numbers as well, but 47 percent and 54 percent, respectively, were “not sure” what their opinions of those entities were, which makes it pretty clear that a lot of the folks taking this phone poll had never heard of them.
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Fresh off the Boat with Eddie Huang - Bay Area, Part 1
Eddie’s first stop in the Bay Area is Oakland, where he hangs with a local biker gang that shows hipsters how to shoot guns and hunt for rabbit. After a few gruesome hours in the Oakland outback, they head back to the clubhouse to shoot the shit, throw back a few cold ones, and talk about the disconnect between people and the process it takes to put meat on their plates. Then they cook up a delicious meal of southern-style deep-fried rabbit.
It’s Time for a Hipster Joke Moratorium
So someone just showed me this video on YouTube, and as you can probably tell from the title, it’s basically one, big parody of the global hipster scene, full of jokes about bikes with no brakes, moustaches, and bands with obscure names. And just before I was about to reply with, “Hah, yeah, I think I saw this in 2008, dude,” I checked its publish date: June 10th, 2012.
Which means that, amazingly, this vein of humor is still a going concern, which is funny because I thought it stopped being a relevant cultural observation around the same time making jokes about rappers’ pants falling down did. But no, there are still people out there, toiling day and night, to tell the world gags it’s already heard a zillion times before.
So, I hereby propose a Hipster Joke Moratorium, in which the following “zingers” should be incinerated.
“Ironic” Facial Hair
If there’s one thing hipster haters find hysterical, it’s the concept of young people cultivating facial hair, of any kind. Under 25, live in a major city and fancy trying out a ‘tache for a while? You must be a hollow, human-shaped mollusk living your life under a heavy veil of irony, my friend. All those headmasters, Soviet politicians, and RAF pilots with moustaches? They were all bloody hipsters! Andy Murray? Hipster. Josef Fritzl? Hipster. Craig David? King of the hipsters. I don’t think it’s even possible to have “ironic” facial hair, is it? It’s just a natural bodily process. No one’s ever had ironic BO. Or an ironic orgasm.
Funny Band Names
All band names are funny, idiots. Even the most uncool, mega-selling acts like The Beatles and the Bee Gees have stupid names, it’s just that no one realizes because those acts are so culturally ubiquitous that they primarily exist to the masses on a subconscious level, like Scrubs or spaghetti. And “Dynamite Fuckstick” doesn’t sound anything like the name of a hipster band, anyway. They tend to have concise, conceptual names, like HEALTH or Girls. “Dynamite Fuckstick” sounds more like a Primus side-project.
Vegan Food
As anybody whose girlfriend uploads Instagram photos of trendy restaurant food knows, the favored cuisine of the hipster right now is not organic vegan food (as this video seems to believe), but expensive versions of classic American junk food. Go to Meat Liquor or Lucky Chip and you won’t be able to see your burger for iPhone flashes. The vegetarian fad, on the other hand, died out around the same time Moby hit the big time. If being a vegan makes you a hipster in 2012, then Woody Harrelson must be the new A$AP Rocky.
My NBA Hipsterism Problem, And Ours
In terms of how it gets used—which is often and poorly and carelessly enough to have legally assaulted “meaning”—the word hipster currently means something like “youngish city-dwelling white person with interests.” Though again, “meaning” is not quite the right word here. Hipster as it’s used refers to a specific type of person that likes a specific type of thing, and because Our Dumbest whites can’t stop giggle-shrieking the word long enough to figure out the type of person or thing in question, what we’re talking about is more less a word than mere sound. And anyway, once a term has become a laugh track cue on a B-grade sitcom—where it is used to rip on people who wear knit caps at seasonally inappropriate times (Kid Rock) and listen to Coldplay (your aunt)—it’s best to take it to the vet, say one last goodbye to the hobbling and slobbery old guy, and put it to sleep. All of which is to say that there is something faintly ridiculous about the idea that the NBA has a hipster issue.
1988. Hipsters in the communist days wore jeans and branded sneakers, which sailors brought back from the West, along with vinyl records that were duplicated on tape at an amazing speed.
Life in Communist Romania was Rough
