You just reminded me about this guy, although his purview was hepcats, not hipsters. At one point I gave my dad a copy of The Jives of Dr. Hepcat; hopefully he’s still got it. (Cab Calloway published a dictionary years earlier, though.)
But are you authentically tired of the term ‘hipster’ or is it the affectation of disinterest, a sprezzatura to disguise the fact that you’re really annoyed that some people don’t take dilettantes seriously?
It sounds really white. I can even hear a college male mansplaining (blah blah blah blah) and in a separate conversation, a young woman verbally eyerolling…
I’m actually desperately hoping that nobody knows that I am the biggest hipster there ever was.
I think I’m going to start a movement of choosing whoever leasts fits the gestalt/amalgam defs of hipster in a given setting, and relentlessly campaign that that person is a hipster.
I’ll call this movement “reverse-hipsterism”.
You mean a certain kind of white?
I’ve been in rural restaurants that don’t sound like that.
I’m a freelancer, and I have freelancer friends who are baffled that I don’t do my work on a laptop at local coffeeshops; they say “having a roomful of people talking is invigorating and keeps me focused”.
Personally, a roomful of chatty people makes it impossible for me to focus. My soundtrack? Wordless ambient new-agey music.
Yes, admittedly a preppy, young, urban, slightly brittle, white.
Shitballs! That exactly describes my experience attending an open-space elementary school. (It probably didn’t help matters that I was one of the chatty people.)
I usually don’t listen to anything at work – for me it would be like bringing a book to work, opening it to the page where I left off, then leaving it sitting like that in the background while I work. I like to immerse myself (to the degree possible) in whatever I’m hearing (even if it was something like ambient), so that means I do almost all of my listening either in the car or on walks, or when everyone else is asleep or not home.
(The exception is chores, I can work with music while I do that but it depends on what the music is, usually something with vocals.)
(YMMV)
Pretty much. Most of my work deals with making words look pretty on posters and things, so having someone talking or singing while I work is like adding up my checkbook while someone says random numbers in my ear. But if I’m doing a large tedious Photoshop project, vocals are awesome.
Don’t forget overuse of the word “artisanal”, it is an essential part of the identity.
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