{"id":202,"date":"2007-10-14T08:58:18","date_gmt":"2007-10-14T13:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=202"},"modified":"2015-01-07T14:11:05","modified_gmt":"2015-01-07T18:11:05","slug":"simon-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=202","title":{"rendered":"Simon Says: I’m a Hipster?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dang. I think Simon just referred<\/a> to my blog as “hipster chatter.” Them’s fightin words, Reynolds.<\/p>\n

I mean, I’m sayin, I only own one belt and maybe 3 pairs of sneakers, tops.<\/p>\n

For serious tho, I’m very curious to know what constitutes hipsterism — for Simon and for others — at this moment in time. What makes a hipster a hipster? What value does the term retain if we begin playing fast and loose with it, if we begin labeling a rather wide variety of practices and perspectves as hipster-ish?<\/p>\n

It’s clear that the value of hipster<\/i> today is one of racial\/class critique — that is, we usually use it to describe a certain kind of privileged (i.e., white) fascination with \/ appropriation of black culture. (Of course, how that applies to “chatter” about jumpstyle<\/a> — which is about as far from “blackness” as we can get — is another question.) The term hipster<\/i> has become, almost exclusively I think, a pejorative. (Are there any self-identified hipsters out there? I don’t think so.) And the meanings of hip<\/i> and hipster<\/i> have clearly changed quite a bit over the past 50 years, as Joe Twist pointed out<\/a> a little while ago (see also<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I wonder about these questions not just for navel-gaze-ish, anxious reasons, but for intellectual and activist reasons too. I wonder about both what is problematic and what might be productive \/ progressive about hipster engagement, hipster practice, hipster ideologies. Indeed, this is something I’m really trying to wrap my head around at the moment, for I’m working on a paper that deals with what I’m calling “Global Ghettotech and the Postcolonial Hipster” — basically, trying to make sense, with some self-reflection no doubt, of the circulation of nu-whirled music<\/a> in the blogosphere and beyond.<\/p>\n

Toward that end, I would be grateful to any readers who care to add their two cents to the discussion. Allow me to pose a few possibly provocative questions:<\/p>\n

1) Do you think I’m a hipster?<\/p>\n

2) Do you think you’re a hipster?<\/p>\n

3) Do you think Simon Reynolds is a hipster?<\/p>\n

4) What is a hipster — and is hipsterism an unmitigatedly bad thing?<\/p>\n

Curious to hear what people think, and the reasons why —<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dang. I think Simon just referred to my blog as “hipster chatter.” Them’s fightin words, Reynolds. I mean, I’m sayin, I only own one belt and maybe 3 pairs of sneakers, tops. For serious tho, I’m very curious to know what constitutes hipsterism — for Simon and for others — at this moment in time. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,4,1,7,25],"tags":[410,401,106,69,404,412,424,57,116],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-af-am","category-blogging","category-uncategorized","category-hip-hop","category-internet","tag-af-am","tag-blogging","tag-europe","tag-ghettotech","tag-hip-hop","tag-internet","tag-nation","tag-race","tag-whirledmusic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8664,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/8664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}