Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Quest for Aesthetic Authenticity


It started with a clever, if depressing ADBUSTERS article by Douglas Haddow entitled Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization. I don’t need to summarize, the title spells it out well enough. Read through the article and you will be treated to a particularly scathing denunciation of this current pop culture phenomenon. Haddow provides many tasty and well aimed quotes like:

…We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum…

And:

…While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have (a) youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society…

And:

…the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it… We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us…

Whoa. Pretty harsh, no? As much as I enjoyed the author’s analysis, I can’t help but note that this condemnation is awfully reminiscent of previous youth culture critiques. After all, Punk wasn’t heralded by anyone outside the few who actually “got it” back in the seventies. And at it’s inception, it certainly wasn’t a “movement.” More like an anti-culture, if you’ll indulge my turn of phrase. It’s only through hind sight that Punk’s angry rebellion is now regarded as having significant cultural value.

But that’s not my point…

Aside from the wanton shelling of hipsters, what I found most interesting was the suggestion that this particular youth “movement” added up to nothing more than a consumer trend – one that has little to do with anything truly cultural or rebellious. To quote Haddow:

…Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion…

It always comes back to money, don’t it? Has it always been like this? Sadly, yes. However, the scale does seem to be unprecedented.

But don’t stop yet, there’s more…

What really made me pause – in a related blog post titled: Cheap Beer. Why Do Hipsters Drink PBR?” - was the story of how a good old fashioned corporate façade (Pabst Blue Ribbon beer) managed, literally without any effort on their part, to become the de facto symbol of today’s youth counterculture. I know, I know, its too ironic to be true. Yet…

Did you know that Pabst (and parent company) has severed all ties to its Milwaukee heritage? The only thing linking it to the former brewing capital is a P.O. box address. Did you know that years ago, it completely eliminated its blue collar work force and outsourced all production (of Pabst and 29 other brands including Schlitz, Carling Black Label, Falstaff, Olympia, Stroh’s, Lone Star, Rainier, Old Style, Colt 45, St. Ides and Old Milwaukee) to another corporation based in South Africa? In addition to staff involved in the battle over the denied retirement benefits of former employees, Pabst is now just a company full of salesmen. In the post, Dennis E. Garrett, a marketing professor at Marquette University (in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is quoted:

“…PBR’s blue-collar, honest-workingman, vaguely anti-capitalist image-image attached to it by consumers-is a sham. You really couldn’t do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding.”

I’ve heard it said, not sure if it’s true, that my city, Portland, Oregon consumes more Pabst Blue Ribbon per capita than anywhere. Go figure. I find the beer too sweet, myself. But the point is…

…What was the point? I don’t even remember. Maybe, the point is that it’s waaay too easy to make fun of hipsters - no one would dare consider themselves one anyway. Maybe, its that all this “corporate vs. authenticity” bullshit is our own damn fault because we place too much importance on things that speak to who we are as individuals - but in the end is only stuff. Everything is for sale and only has value if value is attached to it. My Converse All-Stars are now made by Nike. My Pabst is now no different than Budweiser… What can I buy that is authentic anymore?

Maybe, we have all become too individually focused.

If everyone has their “own personal brand” that defines “who I am” by saying “this is me, I’m unique” then we’re all going to be uniquely similar in our parallel quests for individuality. Along the way, we’re going to end up doing some questionable things… Like drink Pabst because we think it’s blue collar and anti-corporate.

We could end up going a step further and start believing all the things that get posted online, accepting every entry (including this one) as valid and meaningful.... Or, we could post every hope, fear, dream, nightmare, exploit (and rant), every minute of the day - putting our psyches on display in a raw attempt at cultivating some sort of celebrity (who me?)…. Maybe, we will someday allow our whims to dictate what holds value and let our over stimulated and underdeveloped impulses take charge in the name of self expression and aesthetic originality, doing things…that really don't…make…sense…at all… even shooting ourselves in our proverbial feet (or worse) because everything cool has already been done…and just not authentic enough

Hello, in case you’ve just joined us, this is me ranting. It was just a (clever, if depressing) article in ADBUSTERS…

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've enjoyed some healthy discussion of that Adbusters article. Everybody hates "hipsters" it seems, though I notice no one is ever really able to define exactly what one is, except "young people." hmm.

My take is this: Youth culture has always been simply that... youth culture, and has therefore always and will always be correspondingly vapid & self-centered, slightly distracted/pre-occupied with getting laid, and relatively bad at distinguishing (due to lack of experience and/or depth) what out there is actually real/original/authentic. Also there is the eternal paradox of young people wanting to define and individuate themselves, yet also desperately wanting to fit in. And since they basically haven't lived enough or done enough yet, they don't really have that sense of self yet. SO they resort to buying it. There is virtually nothing you can buy that is authentic.

As a rebuttal to the Adbusters article I also pointed out that past youth movements haven't changed the status quo one bit. They all failed. So why look to a bunch of dipshit 23-year-olds to lead the revolution? Let them party.

M.Farina said...

If anyone wants more hipster bashing via syndicated publication, check out this Time Out NY article: http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/features/4840/why-the-hipster-must-die

Frank said...

Wow, beer is the topic? I'm about to waste a bunch of time here . . .

Beer is something I can relate to. Sure I like good wine, but holy crap, I can't afford $50+ for a bottle of the stuff that's really good (Willakenzie - it's sex in a bottle).

But a pint of beer I can handle.

I know ton's of people that drink Pabst, and they usually say it's cheap n' what not. But the problem is that, sure, it's cheap, but you gotta drink twice as much to get the buzz of a "better" beer. So the price negates. Plus, the Pabst buzz sucks - it's an empty, hollow high that goes out as quick as it went in.

But drink a nice hearty local beer like (about 300 beers in Portland alone) and it actually tastes good while you're drinking it, and doesn't inspire you to puke in someone's purse and hit the Taco Bell.

My philosophy is "small is good". In my experience, the bigger, the crappier. I will always pick a small local company over the big 'uns.

Companies that don't have marketing divisions have to rely on quality to distinguish themselves. Here in Oakland, I tried a beer the other week that was made from redwood tips - the little sprouts coming off the new spring growth of redwood trees. It was a little too sweet for my tastes, but it was nice to support a local company that was trying something different. I only had one pint, but I got to try it. If I had gone in asking for Pabst, I would have had a pint of beer made in a 10,000 gallon steel tank in South Africa(?) with more money spent on advertising than on quality.


On the "Hipster" front, I find it funny that hipsters are always people other than oneself.


I think hipster has become the new hippy, most often it's someone that's cashing in on the trend of the day - like a suburban dressing gangsta or girls pretending to be porn stars.

Hip people should be cutting edge, but it's been co-opted by those more interested in getting laid than having a conversation.

None of this is new . . . back to the hippy reference - in the late sixties, all one had to do was grow their hair, wear some jeans and maybe go to a protest, and they considered themselves cool and different. But they were already succumbing to mass culture. Big guy says x is cool, so do x and you're cool.

But cool is doing what you (not they) want. Cool is being/doing what you want, regardless of what others say or think. That's really cool.

Of course, I'm a dork that no one's heard of, and I don't have any money.

Anonymous said...

I have drunk Pabst, and many cheap yellow beers. Mostly I find them interchangeable, but I admit that the Pabst mystique, and perhaps even something I like about the coloring on the label, has allowed it to corner about 50% of my cheap-yellow-beer intake, and maybe close to 80% roundabout 2003 when I was too poor to buy any other kind of beer. I still drink cheap beer, mainly because of its resemblance to, content of, and/or similarity to, water. It's the beer of choice when it's time for some serious "quantity" (not quality) drinkin'. Watery, easy to drink, won't bog you down trying to, you know, taste it. Yeah it does sometimes give heartburn, being a "corn beer" -- namely a beer with a lil' sutn-sutn besides barley in there. Which I think helps give it its simplicity and/or take away its complexity, depending on your viewpoint. In short, it's cheap mass-produced crap just like we've been saying. When it's time for "good beer" or "something new" obviously you stay the hell away.

The political/economic side is an eye-opener... South Africa, WTF? Well don't worry about that, it'll soon cost more than local beer, as petroleum production continues to taper off.

As for the hipster value of it, like I said there's almost nothing you can buy that's truly authentic. Making it yourself is just about the only way. Though I remember a time during the early days of the micro-brewing explosion when home-brewing was just another annoying trend too. But still, self-made is the only "authentic." Note the similarity between "author" and "authentic." Not to mention the prefix "auto-" meaning "self." All from the same Latin (& previously Greek) root.

Next most authentic would be striking up a sincere relationship with someone else who produces whatever it is. Next would be relating with a small-scale vendor on a strictly commercial basis through not-very-many middlemen, e.g. buying a good local beer. And at the bottom is the big vendor in South Africa.

Porn stars... THANK YOU for that. I've always thought the "hipster look" was basically just trying to look like extras from Boogie Nights. That shit sucks.

M.Farina said...

No doubt! Since when did porn become hip and cool? Actually, there is a section in the TONY article ("Why the Hipster Must Die") that sums it up pretty well.
"...they feed from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures: vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates."
Yep, porn stars, too.
Not that I have anything against porn...