Meet Hector, exhorts writer Dayo Olopade on TheRoot.com. Hector skateboards, wears neon T-shirts and stovepipe-slim jeans.
And, of course, the apparent raison d’être. “Hector,” Olopade writes, “is black.”
Oh, boy. And so begins the latest entry in the obsessive field of youth-culture anthropology. Hector, and many like him, Olopade reports for the black culture site, are “blipsters” – young black people adopting in number the cartoon aesthetic of the mass-culture species we’ve come to identify as hipsters: urban under-30s, most recently fond of a recycled ’80s aesthetic of Day-Glo leggings, skinny jeans, Converse All-Stars and outsize spectacles with popped-out lenses.
They like indie rock. They like irony. Oh, and let’s not forget, Olopade writes: Hipsters, by and large, are white.
This is, needless to say, a simplistic definition, and Olopade seems to be drawing a boundary only to give his subjects something to cross over. The thesis, rendered without mercy, seems to be: Today’s black kids like some of the things white kids like. So?
In the rapidly forming latte-coloured future many of us have hoped for, the premise seems like little more than a teased-out non sequitur, or a thinly veiled parody.
Unfortunately, it appears to be intended as neither. But there’s a history here, one Olopade seemed not to know, or at least, didn’t engage. If there’s a point of interest to this “trend” – and let’s not give it quite that much credibility – it’s a pivot point in a half-century-long story of one-way cultural appropriation.
In 1957, Norman Mailer jarred mainstream America with his essay “The White Negro,” arguing that hipsters (disaffected, overwrought, rebellious, largely middle-class white suburban youth – sound familiar?) were borrowing second-hand angst from black America in a deeply disingenuous quest for authenticity.
In post-slavery, pre-civil rights America, this turned out to be a seismic claim.
“In the wedding of white and black, it was the Negro that brought the dowry,” Mailer wrote. “The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: Live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger… The cameos of security for the average white: mother and home, job and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes. They are impossible.”
Mailer chastised the hipsters for culture-shopping the black experience for their own superficial needs – “the overcivilized can be existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it just as quickly for the next chic” – as he describes the visceral world of black America with near-reverence.
“The Negro,” not privy to the luxurious complications of choice plaguing the hipsters, Mailer writes, “kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.”
When you put it that way, who wouldn’t want to day-trip in that world?
And so our culture did, for years – through Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, a global landmark of jazz released in 1957, on through Motown in the ’60s and Blaxploitation in the ’70s, through hip-hop in the ’80s and ’90s.
Along the way, black culture was fetishized and appropriated in the most superficially commodified ways, from Afro wigs and bell-bottoms – remember Soul Train? – to the highest levels of Madison Avenue, where the rush of Black=Cool became a central trope in the selling of virtually everything. For an abject lesson in exactly this, you can see the work of the artist Hank Willis Thomas right now at the Georgia Scherman Gallery in Toronto: Willis took ads from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and removed their logos and copy, leaving only the black-stereotype images behind.
Black culture ended up integrated into the mainstream as an entertainment, a fashion statement, or a sales pitch – the hallmarks of hipsterdom writ large – but there was nothing authentic about it.
Donnell Alexander must have had this in mind in 1997 when he wrote his seminal meme-like essay, “Cool Like Me: Are Black People Cooler than White People?” (Subtitle: “Dumb question.”)
“Cool is all about trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents,” wrote Alexander in Might magazine. “It’s about living on the cusp, on the periphery, diving for scraps. It’s an elusive mellowing strategy designed to master time and space … it’s finding the essential soul while being essentially lost. It’s the nigga metaphor. And the nigga metaphor is the genius of America.”
It’s hard to imagine any of those qualities being ascribed to middle-class white kids, then or now. But to be fair, in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s or even the ’80s, a generalized experience based on race was a little easier to assume. Which brings us back to hipsters.
Hipsterism has always borrowed the signifiers of another culture, adopting its authenticity in an attempt to self-validate. And in so doing, more often than not it has sucked them dry of meaning.
So what happens when an “authentic” culture takes up these eviscerated symbols for themselves? More important, who cares?
Writing in response to a New York Times story last year about a surging African American “blipster” fan base in indie rock, a reader protested the term. “Hipsters everywhere are all about art, music and fashion,” he wrote.
Too true. If there really is a “blipster” phenomenon to be described, it’s less about black appropriation of white culture than it is monocultural dominance obliterating difference effectively enough for youth cultures to eventually coalesce into a single, amorphous blob.
In other words, in the aftershock of the culture wars, there’s something poetic about a common passion for superficiality uniting us all.
But that passion is a luxury indeed, one that traditional hipsters have always enjoyed.
For them, it fits as snugly as the rattily ironic cardigans on their backs; for so-called blipsters, it puts a fine point on an old saw: free at last.
© 2009 Torstar Syndication Services. Displayed by permission. All rights reserved.
