My bible. Or at least that's what I used to say. Being a quasi sociologist (that is I thought about getting a minor in sociology) made me realize that most of what is written in this book is true. Or at least holds some truth. First off I'm actually in the book as the Loner. Or at least me in the past? Well the drawing looks a whole lot like past me-big curly hair, cat framed glasses, looking very pale and a "duh" face at a lot. Okay so maybe that may still be me, but I'm not that nerdy-though I do tend to over pluck my eyebrows (how did the writers know!?)
As obscure people try to be I think well you're not all that different from everyone else. You look silly, you sound silly and 'cool' is dead. It died when hippies started taking over. Punk was never cool but dirty. New Wave was a "clean" punk but never cool. Artists (visual, written, film) in the 1960s were the last of the 'cool'. And lets face it everyone should know the origin of cool comes from black culture. Everyone should know this. This is explained in John Leland's book Hip: The History. I couldn't read more than a chapter before getting really bored by it. It was too American-centric so it didn't capture my full attention.Point is I read this really good article a while ago called Hipster: The Dead End of West Civilization at Adbusters. It gave me a better reason why I really dislike going to Miami, and why I feel so empty and disillusioned when I go Miami, art shows, music shows-anything involving young people my age. The last paragraph pretty much sums up my generation:
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
BTW-I'm not a hipster...according to the Hipster quiz in the back of the Hipster Handbook. I failed it.
2 comments:
that passage from the book is honestly the stupidest thing ever and the whole "COOL IS DEAD CULTURE BLAH BLAH BLAH" - come on, are you that much of a cynic that u believe we are a "lost" generation? ive been to art shows and all that shit in miami and if anything it seems that culture is still alive and kicking and, like there's always been, the douchebags who surround it. if you want to say culture is dead now, you might as well say its always been dead.
I didn't say culture is dead, "COOL" is dead. Cool was once an idea that something is original, but nothing is really original anymore. We're just copying ideas from the past and ideas from that ideas from the past, which leads us further from the idea "cool".
Miami is kicking yes, but that doesn't mean it's actually good.
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