I am in my early thirties. I have a great professional job, two degrees and I hate to admit it but I own two cars. However, one does not work. I have chunky artsy glasses, wear sweaters with elbow patches and listen to way too much Bon Iver. I like vintage bikes and pretentious designer coffee shops. I spend my time in Vancouver on Main St. NOT Commercial, however I do LOVE Commercial Dr. but I feel I have outgrown it. I DO have a beard but it is NOT unkempt. I use a Mac but my parents didn’t buy it for me, my job did. I DO like dark raw denim jeans BUT I can get mine on without the use of a shoe horn. I BUY my music and have NEVER been seen in public holding a can of PBR.
If you have not grasped it yet… what I am getting at is the tension that I find myself in, torn between the label of hipster and…?
When peers and co-workers who do not self identify with many of the social signifiers listed above call me a “Hipster” I can understand why and I am not offended. However, after many discussions with close friends in their early thirties, who, like me, cringe at the label “Hipster” when applied in their direction, but also own and wear all of the items that would be found in the Hipster Handbook (thank-God this book does not exist…yet) I find myself searching for a new term to define this set of individuals who are as culturally mislabeled as myself.
“STOP”, you say, “We don’t need labels!”.
May I suggest that as much as each of us may despise a label being affixed to our individual person we all relish using them on others. Therefore, who am I to deny someone else the self-satisfaction of labeling me? Let us be honest folks, deep down inside we all know who and what we are. It’s why we shop where we shop, eat where/what we eat and wear the same clothes as most of our friends. (A co-worker of mine and I have to co-ordinate so that we don’t look like twins on most days of the week. “Ok, I’ll wear my brown cardigan on Monday and you wear your grey one on Wednesday”) I do not desire a label but I am not about to fooled for a moment into thinking that one will not be created for me. Therefore I would at least like to suggest an appropriate one that I feel accurately defines me and most of the company that I keep.
Therefore, I humbly present to you the label “YuppSter”, not because I like it but rather because I believe it is TRUE.
If you can not fathom where the term finds its roots you are probably not reading this post. The label is a clean and simple combination of the original 80’s moniker Yuppie and the presently popular and drastically overused title Hipster. Like any modern individual born in 1980, who has a firm grasp on the use of the internet and a healthy respect for online information, I feel it is only fitting that I turn to, your friend and mine, Wikipedia to support what I would suggest should be the new term that would classify others who find themselves in my not-too-overpriced-vintage shoes.
Here is a basic synopsis of the identity of these two terms, that I would like to suggest, when married create something more than the sum of their parts. For those of you who would be even quicker to rise to strike if called a Yuppie rather than a Hipster, I have taken the liberty of highlighting some of the key adjectives that I feel define you, Me and this new cultural brand. And now for your consideration…
Yuppie:
“Yuppies are made fun of for their conspicuous personal consumption and hunger for social status among their peers. Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever, has remarked, “When people were denouncing yuppies, they had considerably lower incomes than yuppies, so the things yuppies spent their money on seemed frivolous and unnecessary from their vantage point.” Pro-skateboarder and businessman Tony Hawk has said that yuppies give “us visions of bright V-neck sweaters with collars underneath, and all that was vile in the eighties”, and he has also remarked that a “bitchin’ tattoo cannot hide your inner desire to be Donald Trump. Author and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson has written: ”Yuppism… is not definable entirely by income or class. Rather, it is a late-20th-century cultural phenomenon of self-absorbed young professionals, earning good pay, enjoying the cultural attractions of sophisticated urban life and thought, and generally out of touch with, indeed antithetical to, most of the challenges and concerns of a far less well-off and more parochial Middle America. For the yuppie male a well-paying job in law, finance, academia, or consulting in a cultural hub, hip fashion, cool appearance, studied poise, elite education, proper recreation and fitness, and general proximity to liberal-thinking elites, especially of the more rarefied sort in the arts, are the mark of a real man.” - Wikipedia
This does not need much explaining and does the job of making my point quite nicely. The one change that must be made to update this term for my purposes is to this description, “generally out of touch with, indeed antithetical to, most of the challenges and concerns of a far less well-off and more parochial Middle America.” In the present day incarnation we need simply to make a slight change and addition so that it reads, “completely in touch with, yet oddly antithetical to, most of the challenges and concerns of a far less well-off and more parochial Middle America.“
and now for the second half…
Hipster:
“A subculture of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with musical interests mainly in alternative rock that appeared in the 1990s. Other interests in media would include independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media.
Hipster culture has been described as a “mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior[s].” Christian Lorentzen of Time Out New York argues that “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic” elements of all of the “fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge,” and draws on the “cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity,” and “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.” Others, like Arsel and Thompson, argue that hipster signifies a cultural mythology, a crystallization of a mass-mediated stereotype generated to understand, categorize, and marketize indie consumer culture, rather than an objectified group of people.” - Wikipedia
The defenition of the Hipster is not as concrete or obvious as that of the Yuppie. May I suggest this is because hindsight is indeed 20/20 and we are not yet far enough removed from the present incarnation of the hipster to define it. However, I am sure we can all make a long list of the cultural and physical signifiers that scream hipster. If you are not quite sure what I mean I would like to point you to two wonderful media representations thanks to YouTube.
Confessions of a Hipster: http://youtu.be/6eKnSGn914M
and
Hipster Playlist by Harvard Sailing Team: http://youtu.be/o8G3T-E4rYU
I think that by this time my point has been made quite clear. I would love to wax eloquent about the similarities and differences of these two supposedly clashing subcultures, or argue why I should or should not belong to either of these classifications, or explain a thesis on how the one is really simply the step-parent of the other. However, I do not have time because I need to: finish my Tumblr post, update my status on facebook, write in my journal, create a lesson plan, talk to my girlfriend on Skype, listen to some new postmodern-new-wave-folk and pick out which one of my six pairs of dark jeans to wear tomorrow with my not-quite-lumberjack-plaid shirt.
To all of you who empathize with me, don’t fear it, embrace it. You are a YuppSter!
* This was written while sitting in my sunroom listening to the rain, while my 50lb bulldog Roman snored in my lap.
