Ich bin ein Hipster
July 25, 2012 7:25 PM   Subscribe

Who will win the vinyl spinning marathon? Who's favourite in the cotton tote sack race? Yes, it's wall-to-wall irony at Berlin's second Hipster Olympics. You've probably never heard of them.
posted by vidur (31 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
The first one was much better, really.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:35 PM on July 25, 2012 [11 favorites]


ugh

people took this joke seriously and fucking ruined it
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:36 PM on July 25, 2012 [1 favorite]


Uh, isn't the whole point of irony lost if it's not, well, ironic?
posted by anewnadir at 7:41 PM on July 25, 2012


Hipster. So played out, I want to invent real hipsters to mock it, and then embrace it.
posted by clvrmnky at 7:50 PM on July 25, 2012 [1 favorite]


I became a former Olympian when I threw out my hip.
posted by twoleftfeet at 8:00 PM on July 25, 2012 [1 favorite]


Irony is out. Earnestness is in. Like buying gluten free free range fair trade millet from the CSA to serve at a pot-luck wedding. Like enjoying a fine cask-aged ale or an artisanal rye while you play tapper.
posted by Ad hominem at 8:00 PM on July 25, 2012


God, I love irony. Or do I?
posted by Decani at 8:07 PM on July 25, 2012


So how come there is no way to play a 7 inch with an apple product. Some kind of motor and stylus that hooks up to a MBP or something. Someone should kickstarter that idea.
posted by Ad hominem at 8:11 PM on July 25, 2012


I think I preferred it when the upperclass twits wore suits and adorable little trilbys.
posted by ourobouros at 8:15 PM on July 25, 2012


I had no idea that the 'hipster' label was used outside of the U.S.. Man, I gotta travel more.
posted by benito.strauss at 8:16 PM on July 25, 2012


Ironically, in German the word 'hipster' also means a type of sweet deep-fried bun, popular in Berlin.
posted by Flashman at 8:30 PM on July 25, 2012 [1 favorite]


I'm trying to learn more about the nuances of the American dialect. Is a "hipster" the same thing as a "hippy"? In my town we had a Hippy Olympics, which seemed to involve a lot of pot smoking. I wasn't sure how they made a competitive event out of that, because most of the time they trained by sitting around and passing joints. I assume the joint is like a baton, which had to be passed from one hippy to the next.

Now that I think of it, maybe it wasn't an Olympics at all, but rather a bunch of people sitting around and getting stoned.

I don't know that much about sports.
posted by twoleftfeet at 8:31 PM on July 25, 2012 [1 favorite]


@ad hominem

too bad they're not any better when they're sincere
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 8:32 PM on July 25, 2012


So how come there is no way to play a 7 inch with an apple product. Some kind of motor and stylus that hooks up to a MBP or something.

I have a turntable with a USB cable that plugs into a compy. Plays vinyl very nicely. Even came with software to rip your LPs into digital files, though I just use it to play through.
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:05 PM on July 25, 2012


too bad they're not any better when they're sincere

In so many ways, making fun of people for being hipsters is a lot like making fun of a nerd for choosing to spend Saturday night in reading the hell out of a Margaret Weis and Terry Phillip's novel. I just don't see how it's not bullying.
posted by dubusadus at 9:07 PM on July 25, 2012 [2 favorites]


because part of being a hipster is having more money and social capital than everyone else
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 9:25 PM on July 25, 2012


I was into the hipster olympics in 2007. I'm way over them now.
posted by Blue Meanie at 9:49 PM on July 25, 2012


I'm sorry, those hipsters looked like they were having way too much fun, which makes them not hipsters.

Although it does make them fun.
posted by Curious Artificer at 9:55 PM on July 25, 2012


My theory about hipsters is that they are essentially just a breed of geeks who are more concerned with aesthetics than the average and who realized at some point that if they cloak their strange passions in a thin veil of irony then nobody will think to make fun of them for how deeply they are into comics and vintage menswear and incredibly earnest music and such. They're really generally very nice, nerdy people when you get right down to it.
posted by Scientist at 10:19 PM on July 25, 2012 [3 favorites]


I became a former Olympian when I threw out my hip.

Also known as "ironic recycling".
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:48 PM on July 25, 2012


because part of being a hipster is having more money and social capital than everyone else

Wait so does this mean you hate on everybody who has more money/social capital than you do? Or is there something about the hipster branding that exclusively gets them into your crosshairs?
posted by dubusadus at 11:17 PM on July 25, 2012 [1 favorite]


Wait so does this mean you hate on everybody who has more money/social capital than you do?

this is part of the human condition, yes
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 11:40 PM on July 25, 2012 [1 favorite]


Wait so does this mean you hate on everybody who has more money/social capital than you do?

Hate is too strong a word, but what it means is that making fun of those who are at a higher rung on the social/economic/power ladder is not bullying by default. Interns can make fun of CEOs without being called bullies, but it doesn't work so well in the opposite direction. Hipsters, in general, are not an oppressed socioeconomic class and are fair game for humour.
posted by vidur at 11:50 PM on July 25, 2012


Hipsters, in general, are not an oppressed socioeconomic class and are fair game for humour.

And here I was thinking that most of them are really poor college kids who dress fashionably. There is also something suspect about your analogy of the intern and CEO in that the gap between those positions is likely to be far greater than that between you and a hipster, not to mention that whole other can of worms with CEOs being symbols of modern corruption and interns being a symbol of the depressive, taken-advantage-of economy. You might be surprised to know that the cross section between unpaid interns and the people who'd consider hipsters is likely to be very high.

It'd be more apt, I think, to say that this is the difference between a mechanic and a white collar worker but, again, there's this whole other schtick about relating income disparity to jobs which, unlike the hipster criticism, has nothing to do with culture.

this is part of the human condition, yes

I thought comedy was about revealing the basic truths of an issue, not just dumbing stuff down so you could make a pithy remark.
posted by dubusadus at 12:31 AM on July 26, 2012 [1 favorite]


the problem with the word 'hipster' is that you can't use words like 'bourgeois' anymore unless you want to look like an asshole
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 12:52 AM on July 26, 2012


I had no idea that the 'hipster' label was used outside of the U.S.. Man, I gotta travel more.

Totally. Being provincial is very 2011-recessionista.
posted by MuffinMan at 3:17 AM on July 26, 2012 [1 favorite]


And here I was thinking that most of them are really poor college kids who dress fashionably.

Know all of the words but the meaning of the sentence escapes me.
posted by Splunge at 7:00 AM on July 26, 2012


And here I was thinking that most of them are really poor college kids who dress fashionably
To be honest, your hi-lariously cloth-eared defence of hipsters is so clueless that I worry it's a meta-commentary ironic ironic thing and the whoosh is over my head not yours.

Cakeception.
posted by fullerine at 8:56 AM on July 26, 2012 [1 favorite]




Some people start dressing like vintage hobos for whatever reason, and they look really cool! So people start imitating them, the thing starts to become widespread, and eventually the style is co-opted by corporations, which promptly distill the style to its most basic characteristics and start producing the cheapest shit that'll pass off as something vaguely similar to the original thing (e.g. H&M). And thus, a fashion is born, and everyone loves to hate on cheap, widespread fashion, because seriously, it's just cheap and ugly, and it's pretty much the opposite of individualism.

So the "cool" people move on to something else, to show how cool they are, and the cycle begins once again. So it goes.

Personally, i like hipsters, they're very picturesque, and as far as modern fashions go, i think they're one of the better ones.

And here I was thinking that most of them are really poor college kids who dress fashionably
To be honest, your hi-lariously cloth-eared defence of hipsters is so clueless that I worry it's a meta-commentary ironic ironic thing and the whoosh is over my head not yours.


Heh, seriously.

"What's the first thing a hipster says when he goes into a pub/club/restaurant? Christ, look at all these fucking hipsters!"
posted by palbo at 1:02 PM on July 26, 2012


Am I seriously missing something here? The people I know who go around calling themselves hipsters are the ones who do their damnedest to avoid UO and get most of their stuff from 'vintage' or at least esoteric online retailers. Like, yeah, there's a hipster aesthetic that's mass marketed and is kind of gross and tacky like most things corporately structured but to say that hipsters are what are advertised to us is a lot like saying that all geeks and nerds are semi-functioning Asperger's syndromers like on the Big Bang Theory or the IT Crowd. And as far as I can tell, none of this is true at the ground level and nobody, at least on Metafilter, thinks about nerds and geeks that way. So it just seems like a double standard or at least one of those weird circle-jerky lapses in conscientiousness to hate on the aesthetic and not the capitalistic post-spiral where there's a lot more of an obvious culprit to be found in the business major who capitalized on, like you said, the formerly good.

Maybe just blame it on like how much of a midwestern rube I am or the fact that I'm kind of slow when it comes to trendiness but I just don't understand why it's socially acceptable for adults to categorically judge someone based on their aesthetic when all that drama about hating on the goths/emo kids/straight edgers/etc is filed away into high school passe like one of those supposedly regretful things we're never going to do again.
posted by dubusadus at 10:05 PM on July 26, 2012


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