Oh, if I could be a black hipster.
I laugh at Portlandia, so maybe I’m close?
I’m already a black nerd, and there’s a fair amount of overlap in the nerd/hipster Venn diagram. (Such as using Venn diagrams.)
Sometimes it feels as I teeter on the edge. But I think that, at the end of the day, I’m likely too square to be a hipster.
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| Speaking of black hipsters… |
It’s as if I’m some kind of Hipster Two-Face, flipping a coin to decide how much cred I want to muster. New Wave music? ’80s culture-kitsch? Thick glasses? Corduroy jackets and poplin shirts? Cult TV shows? Vintage clothes and pin-up retro chic? Repurposed and upcycled clothing and furniture? Oddball rock and roll? Liberal-to-progressive politics?
Yeah, I like these things.
I’ve visited Seattle, Portland and the San Francisco Bay Area, and felt like I could uproot myself from the hardened Northeast and feel at home in any of those places. In my hometown Philadelphia, I spend much of my time in hipster-y neighborhoods and going to dive bars.
And then there’s Brooklyn, which feels a lot like Philly. So many of Brooklyn’s hipsters moved to Philadelphia, and vice versa, that in the 2000s The New York Times was calling Philly “the Sixth Borough.” Yes, my times in Williamsburg and Park Slope felt just like my Philly home.
But there are a lot of things about the overall hipster aesthetic where I keep opting out.
This affectation-laden embrace of crappy, unkempt mustaches and beards, for example. I love facial hair. I have done mustaches, full beards, goatees, Van Dykes (mustache and goatee), soul patches, chin beards, even Amish beards (no mustache).
But they all had one thing in common; I kept them groomed.
If you’re gonna do it, look sharp. Old-school hipsterology, of the 1940s-60s, jazz-listening and cocktail-swilling variety, demanded that you still look sharp.
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| For extra-sharpness, add a cape. |
It may also be a cultural thing. There is this semi-unspoken thing about black men wearing mustaches and beards as a note of authenticity. When my father told me about losing his mustache when he first went into the Air Force, he specifically tied it to his image of not just masculinity, but black masculinity.
That as the mustache declined in class value among white men, it increases value among black men.
Even Family Guy picked up on this in the episode “McStroke.” Peter goes through Cleveland’s “black guy mail,” and an issue of the upscale-looking Mustache Aficionado magazine sits alongside Grape Soda Today, Orange Soda Quarterly and The Fruit Punch Reader.
But when Peter grows the mustache, he starts wearing a denim tuxedo and talks about being uneducated. It becomes this ironic appropriation of things considered lower-class.
And I am tired of irony. Well, not exactly. I hate what we now take for irony. The true face of irony is tied to the fool, the jester, of taking the status quo to task in a manner that both entertains and bites. That can cloak a biting intelligence with lowbrow bluster.
We’ve lost a lot of that original Greek eiron, and replaced it with reverse-doing things. Wearing something ironically, or attending something ironically. Often in the name of striking against a perceived middle-class malaise. But often it becomes an inside joke of pretend-liking things. I dislike inside jokes. They’re rude. And I’ve got too many things I actually like to see, do, wear and hear to pay fake-attention to stuff I don’t like.
You want true irony? Watch Stephen Colbert every night. Or watch his performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Association dinner, which he turned into a ballsy roast of the George W. Bush presidency with all of them sitting right next to him.
Colbert looked right in the face of the Iraq War’s architects and said in his fake-conservative voice, “I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.”
The next year, Rich Little worked the dinner, just as he had in 1984.
Colbert, that was smart. And not put-upon smart, which I feel happens sometimes in the hipster circles.
I get it, hipsters. You like philosophy, or bugs, or James Joyce novels, or National Public Radio, or Godard films, or Walt Whitman poetry, and feel the need to bring it up at every conversation and party.
When witty banter becomes a contest, or non-mainstream music or sports is equated with sophistication, then I gotta get away.
It’s the adoption and publicizing of “nerdy” interests.
Being smart isn’t a hobby. It’s just a way of life.
Being smart isn’t about doing things seen as smart, but about being able to take in information and see where it all fits. Some kind of smarts put those pieces together in an awesome logic that makes life a little easier or more thought-out. Other kinds of smarts put those pieces together in an unconventional fashion that reveals a new meaning.
But chess? It’s a hobby. And collecting hobbies that are seen as smart doesn’t make you smart.
Mathematics and science take a lot of smarts, but those same mathematicians and scientists can dig a monster truck rally and the Kardashians as much as Phillip Glass compositions and Jonathan Franzen novels. I know we equate high-brow with intelligent and low-brow with stupidity, but they aren’t one and the same. Not really.
But hey, maybe it’s just me.
Perhaps I’m really bemoaning the lack of opportunity for people to pick up so-called smart hobbies. And I tend to keep my smartypants hobbies more like underwear, but that’s my issue.
When it comes down to it, I guess I’m not really a hipster, despite how much they have come into my space of interests and hobbies, as much as I walk into their spaces. I got the graphic T-shirt and the Alabama Shakes CD to prove it.
I’d be better off as an old-fashioned hipster. Hell, I’m listening to jazz-harp music right now.
But every so often, I, as all of us do now, step into the modern hipster world that surrounds us and I wear the clothes, so to speak.
Except for skinny jeans. They come up to my knees, and then give up.
