Hipster is a slang term that first appeared in the 1940s, and was revived in the 1990s and 2000s often to describe types of young, recently-settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture, particularly alternative music, indie rock, independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media. In some contexts, hipsters are also referred to as scenesters.
“Hipster” has been used in sometimes contradictory ways, making it difficult to precisely define “hipster culture” because it is a “mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior[s].” One commentator 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 “gay style”, and “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.”
The name itself was coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene.[4] Although the word’s exact origins are disputed, some say it was a derivative of “hop,” a slang term for opium, while others believe it comes from the West African word “hipi”, meaning “to open one’s eyes”.[4] Nevertheless, it gradually morphed over time into a noun, and “hipster” was born.[4]
The first dictionary to list the word is the short glossary “For Characters Who Don’t Dig Jive Talk,” which was included with Harry Gibson’s 1944 album, Boogie Woogie In Blue. The entry for “hipsters” defined it as “characters who like hot jazz.” Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely black jazz musicians they followed. The 1959 book Jazz Scene by Eric Hobsbawm (using the pen name Francis Newton) describes hipsters using their own language, “jive-talk or hipster-talk,” he writes “is an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders.” However the subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene attached itself to the movement. Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg were early hipsters who made up the majority of the Beat Generation. Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as “rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality.” However, it was Norman Mailer who gave the movement definition. In an essay titled “The White Negro” Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death — annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity — and electing instead to “divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”
gógle nie gryzie po pindolu, tempy chuju.
a truposz ma generalnie rację. większość z ruchających twoją starą to hipsterzy. reszta to zwykłe pedały.
