Monday 24 March 2014

Reverse hipster

No one wants to be a hipster.

I'm not sure what it is, but currently the main pastime of even the most vaguely 'alternative' people seems to be avoiding the label hipster at all costs (except for a small percentage of cardigan-wearing, moustache-twirling gin drinkers who quite possibly embrace the term, or equally possibly might prefer the term artiste).

Yeah you want to be individual, yeah you want to do your own thing, but hipster? HIPSTER? You'd whack the bastard who suggested that such a term might apply to you heartily in the face before reflecting on its possible truth, surely.


Wikipedia has this to say on the subject:
"Members of the subculture do not self-identify as hipsters, and the word hipster is often used as a pejorative to describe someone who is overly trendy or effete."


Yes, I myself have been accused of being a hipster, for the audacious crime of having a haircut. Why else would I be writing this?

So, what I'm currently doing to work against the hipsterism growing inside me - and I haven't planned this, it just happened - is I'm having a phase of "discovering" and liking music that was mainstream-style popular a few (say between 2 and 5) years ago. I like to think of this move as the reverse hipster (which also sounds like an appropriate name for a sexual position and I will gladly accept suggestions as to what it could entail).

For starters, have some waffles, made and buttered for you by the perfectly-haired Darwin Deez:



And then, of course, there's Grimes, an act who, though I was dimly aware of her, completely sailed past me when the album Visions was everywhere about 2 years ago - even when the album was playing at the office and a customer I was talking to on the phone noticed it playing in the background and interrupted his questions about a Teacher's refresher course to explain to me how awesome that album was.

So yeah, with two year's delay so no one can have a pop at me for being cool, have Grimes being awesome with her brightly coloured hair and her awesome slight lisp:



As I'm sure everyone now realises, what I've done here is to find an excuse to post the two most hipstery videos I could think of and still make it look like I'm totally not a hipster because hey, I did it after it was cool.

Made you look though.