What Was the Hipster? by n+1

Author:n+1 [n+1]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I WAS PARTICULARLY interested in the periodizing and analysis of a white ethnic or working-class aesthetic. Doesn’t it seem as if that working-class Pittsburgh ethnic, Andy Warhol, born “Warhola,” set us up for all of this irony about the trappings of mass-produced homogeneity in the early 1960s, with his Brillo boxes and soup cans? Surely he set us up for a way out, too — and that is also why I was surprised to see that the “white ethnic irony” question had been shorn of its own proper history.

This aesthetic had a surge in the late 1980s, in the Reagan years of highly unequal advancing wealth, framed by two recessions. At that time, the media tended to label it a “white trash” fad, naming the people who had been left behind in some dump of the American racial mind.

Some of the emblems and icons: plastic flowers, loud chunky costume jewelry. The trucker look, some trucker talk. Cajun and country western. Lots of old-school Southern redneck stuff; strenuously arch, often patronizing, while aiming for irony. “White trash” cookbooks and “white trash” guidebooks. Snarky movies like the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona and David Byrne’s True Stories. White ethnics showed up in quirkier, cleverer settings, where the aesthetic was often deliberately queer or complicatedly attached to “bad taste” and bids for freedom: John Waters movies, the clothes of Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, even the Boston Irish bar boys of Cheers. Italian ethnics got some irony and romantic comedy relief in Moonstruck. And Jonathan Demme had his cross-class and culture miscegenation movies, too, with Something Wild and Melvin and Howard. It was as if, with fears of Reagan’s capitalism sinking the whole ship of democracy, people were seeking fantasies about a more generous and diverse life at the bottom, to keep them warm.

All this was also happening, too, as whiteness studies was taking hold in the academy, and stirring up some shit. The basic quarrel, still unresolved: was whiteness studies really a critique of white power structures and ideologies motivated by Afro-American studies? Or was it a cunning way to reclaim center stage in the university from the multi-cultural reorganization set in motion by programs of black, Chicano, Asian, women’s and queer studies and cultures (no longer called “subcultures”)? Is there a contemporary testing of intellectual disciplines on the horizon that will unsettle us again? I don’t know.

There’s something worrisome, after all, in the persistent return of Mommy, Daddy, and childhood dream days, which the panel revisited. How much does this preserving of the adult world one knew as a child really set the boundaries (unconsciously as much as consciously) of one’s tastes and choices? I know this is a huge generalization, but that impulse truly did not characterize the ’40s and ’50s hipsters. They claimed — sometimes desperately, often clumsily, by no means always effectively — to be consciously separating themselves from the look, the sound, the artifacts, the sensory world of their parents as well as that social, political, and (sometimes) economic world.

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