Hipster Youth

My friends and I play this game when we're out. We keep our eyes peeled for disaffected youth, clad in tight jeans and waistcoats, overbearded and bespectacled, or pairing heavy boots with tiny skirts. And when we sight one, we lean in conspiratorially close and whisper gleefully: 'Look at dat hipster!'

The phrase carries none of the snorting animosity of the internet tag LATFH - rather, it's a cry of muffled delight, mixed with, admittedly, a touch of superiority, but never bile.

The cafe I'm writing this in, incidentally, is ideal for hipster-spotting. The wait staff have asymmetrical haircuts and adorable fedoras. The customers ooze lower-Chapel Street cool, and congregate under the central courtyard sculpture constructed from gas bottles. And it began here, a few weeks ago, a fateful game of Look At Dat Hipster, when suddenly, four of us caught sight of ourselves in a mirrored shopfront, and with a start, realised that the hipsters were us. I appraised my reflection - wearing Doc Martens, an indian scarf, a leather jacket with Mickey Mouse emblazoned on the back from a Sunday market and an ink-stained bag because I never got around to buying another, and anyway, the ink made me look artistic - and the realisation slapped me lightly across the face.

The evidence rolled inexorably in. I work in a secondhand bookshop. I'm in a fringe theatre company. I own dozens of Popular Penguins. The last book I read was by Camus. The last film I saw was by Hitchcock. I mean, god, I'm a photographer who's procrastinating from her thesis in globalised puppetry by sitting in a cool cafe (so cool that you're still allowed to smoke in it), scrawling in a Moleskine an entry to post in my blog.

I think I'm a hipster.

I've been noticing the word a lot recently, usually finding it used in a derogatory sense. Because I'm a child of my generation, I wikipedia-ed the term, and found an article from Time Out New York by Christian Lorentzen, arrestingly titled 'Why the hipster must die.' It's essentially a rant decrying the Hipster Youth (ha) for being alarmingly uncool, but it had a neat little line in it: 'hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.'

Ah, authentic. It's a word endlessly evoked in Arts scholarhip (half my thesis is based on it), but when push comes to shove, it doesn't actually mean anything. Neither does 'cool.' They're both ideas, or states of being which, as soon as they are examined, are destroyed. They're mirages that seem solid until you step close enough to realise that they're ideas without a core. Cool people are always completely uninterested in the cultural cues that make them cool - take Tom Waits. He is at his coolest when he is drunk out of his mind, chuckling at the panicked confusion of an interviewer. Genuine cool never (or rarely enough, at least), arises from the desire to be cool. If you have to ask whether you're being cool, you're not.

So too with authenticity. The authentic doesn't fret over whether it is true, or natural, or organic, it just is.

So hipsterdom starts life with a profound disadvantage, inasmuch as the greater the fervour with which authenticity and 'coolness' are pursued, the further and faster they slip from reach.

But please don't think I'm merely pontificating on this issue without any subjective insight. I get it. God, I get it. If I could pick a subculture to belong to, it'd be the Beatniks. I long to wear dark glasses, a beret and a bob, snap my fingers at poetry slams and call everyone 'cat' and 'daddy-o.' I would love to be surrounded by people discovering Kerouac and Ginsberg for the first time, and realising that literature can be raw and painful, and can wrench parts of you which you'd 'til then considered forever private. I itch to speak a patois designed to designate inclusion, intellectual breadth and artistic sensibility.

But I can't. Because the moment I'd cross my legs nonchalantly, and rhyme a few too many words in a sentence, I'd draw eye-rolls and sneering glances like moths to the flame of my affectation.

It's a pity, really, that our contemporary youth culture is so accepting of purposeful aberration. Part of me wishes for the 50s, with its clearly defined mainstream, where all it took to shock and rebel was a haircut and some slightly too tight pants. Our youth culture now is a panoply of mainstreams, and we're running out of behemoths to rage against.

We are so saturated with culture that we feel like heathen. It's like those moments when it gets so loud that it's almost like silence. And the millions of middle-class youngsters who've replaced anarchy with apathy, whose feet have lost the pull of the undertow that anchors them to the drive, passion and flash-paper energy they imagine their forebears to have possessed - it's hardly surprising that they launch themselves so desperately on the books, the records, the ideas that last longer than they can. A novel weighs much more than its pages - it carries the gravity of generations who knew more, thought deeper and spoke more beautifully than we ever could.

That's where the constantly backward (and bookward) referencing of hipster culture comes from, I think - the vests, the winklepickers, the thoughtful moustaches and the hoarding of classic literature - it's not just a reaching for the physical stylings of the scholars of old, it's a longing for an age of something solid and true, and what greater constant is there than thought? In this age of sound-bites, where unfathomable tonnes of text are spewed at and from the internet, we are showered constantly with words, and it renders us strangely inarticulate. So there is a great comfort in turning a page in a book and discovering there, clean, succinct, and piercing, the words we cannot find.

Plus, daddy-o, it makes us look really, like, real.