Welcome to Ain’t No Hipster. My name is Kirk. I’ll be your tour guide on this adventure.
This is a website where I will write about music. I chose the name for a very good reason. As the title suggests, I’m no hipster. I don’t see myself as cool by the popular definition of the word. I think skinny jeans are stupid on men (and quite often on women). Chuck Taylors are uncomfortable, horn-rimmed glasses should be worn only if you have a prescription requiring them, and cigarette ash is just annoying.
But I do love music. I love to listen to it, I love to play it, I love to go see it live. And this is where the thing that I love intersects with the thing I hate: hipsters.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate anyone just for being. There are plenty of nice people who participate in any social gathering. But, I hate what I am defining as hipsters for a very specific reason. They clog my bars and concert halls, pretending to be all about the music scene. In reality, these folks want to be associated with a band for its cool factor, not for any actual love of music. They come to shows to socialize, to smoke, to be a part of a scene. And really I have no problem with this in theory; in practice, they’re also there to judge. I hate showing up to a show wearing a button down and jeans and being looked at like I don’t belong.
Because, dammit, I belong as much as that hipster douchebag does. Probably more. If I lay down money to watch a show, I am either truly excited to hear new music or in love with the artist playing. I don’t want to have to put up with somebody staring me down while I order a Newcastle because I’m not a part of their crew. This might sound like hyperbole, but this crap happens, even in Memphis. some would rebel by trying to fit in; it just makes me want to dress like a frat kid and start a fight (which would perpetuate a stereotype but also be immensely funny in my head).
Editor’s note: I do not dress particularly ”fratty”. This was just an image I evoked to counter that of the hipster.
I realized how much I hate scenesters in August of 2008. My bachelor party took place all over Memphis. Around 3 am on a Sunday evening (Monday morning), we wound up at Earnestine and Hazel’s, a bar known for it’s late-nite Soul Burgers and legendary jukebox. A friend and I were enjoying beers and skimming the selections on the box when a busload of New York’s finest hipsters rolled in (no lie, they came in on a bus — it’s a Memphis thing). Immediately, a guy with long curly hair wandered up beside us, looking like a Strokes roadie. The uniform was undeniable: skinny jeans, t-shirt one size too small, Chuck Taylors on his feet.
The kid proceeded to make fun of everything on the jukebox. “Who the f— is Syl Johnson? Otis Redding? What the f—?” He then went on to complain about how there were no great artists on the jukebox and provided a list of names that would make Pitchfork blush.
If you make fun of old school soul, and then name a half dozen bands who wouldn’t exist if Lou Reed had never deconstructed that music, you are a moron.
Hipsters, ultimately, are not people who dress a certain way. Hipsters act a certain way. And I will never be one of them.
Because I love music.