I did an interview with Molly Atlas for More Intelligent Life’s blog, about this book
MIL: Part of the frustration with hipsters seems to be that they say something very complicated about privilege, in particular about the privilege of the early “millennials” who came of age in the boom years. I mean, in most instances, aren’t we dealing with the white upper-middle-class?
DT: I think so—or if not strictly white, mostly white. In his piece for the panel discussion Jace Clayton asks what we’re not talking about when we talk about hipsters, and the role of race and socioeconomic status in this phenomenon is undoubtedly the biggest elephant in the room. But while I think a lot of the ill-feeling toward privileged white twenty-somethings who have the luxury to try out “being an artist” in a city like New York is warranted—hipsters, especially disaffected hipsters (a redundancy?), seem to lack perspective when griping about their problems, claiming to be ‘poor’ because they have bedbugs in their renovated three-bedroom apartment in Bushwick—I also sympathise with the hipster. Being a hipster looks like it really sucks: I would hate to be living in an overcrowded city, sublimating my artistic impulses into tacky freelance graphic-design work, going to the same bars every weekend with the exact same white people who look just like me, posing for the Cobrasnake. But it’s a pattern that’s been established, so I think a lot of young people reach for that lifestyle when they don’t know what to do with themselves. Part of it, apolitical as it may be, seems to be a resignation to living in the socio-economically stratified, over-commercialised world of late-capitalist America.
Of course young people could do other things—not move to New York, for example; not take fancy internships; not spend all their money on clothes—so the hipster doesn’t deserve too much credit. But I also think it’s incredibly aggressive, and ultimately a cop-out to refuse to identify with the hipster in any way, for the same reason that it’s an aggressive cop-out to refuse to understand, say, the Tea Party. It’s a way of divesting yourself of your own era, as if doing so frees you of all the ugly and unjust aspects of the culture you live in. If you really have a problem with it, you should try to understand where it’s coming from, and go from there.
