Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2004 1:20 pm
Posts: 7730
Location: Portland, OR
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http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3375
Classifying hipsters in the wild can be a tricky business to neophytes. To the layman, all hipsters look the same: they dress in stupid clothes, they dye their hair, they listen to awful racket, and they’re always having sex with each other. However, the trained naturalist will tell you that there are limitless varieties of hipster, each with his or her own distinctive plumage and mating calls. We hope that this excerpt from our entirely unscientific and fairly insulting guide illuminates the differences between several of the more populous species of North American hipsters.
Punks
Identification:
You may think you’re the punkest sonofabitch in the state, but you’ve probably never even seen a real punk in the wild. Fake punks aren’t just kids buying Blink 182 t-shirts and pre-ripped denim jackets at Hot Topic. Almost all punks are fake punks. Real punks are usually in their forties, they dress like slobs because they don’t care about being cool, and they hang out at concerts hitting on girls half their age. The difference between a real punk and a fake punk simply comes down to lived experience; teenage gutter-punks think that their stories of living in a car for two months when their asshole dad kicked them out are the most righteous tales of punkness in history, but it only takes a real punk thirty seconds to live in a car for two months.
There’s no cut-and-dry way to reliably tell a real punk from a fake one. You might see an old guy in sweat pants and a plaid shirt hitting on a pretty young hipster and mistake him for a real punk, but he might just be an old loser (although if the girl goes home with him, he’s probably a real punk). The most reliable way to figure out whether someone is a real punk or a fake punk is to listen to his stories. Use this handy guide:
Fake Punk: One time I hung out with Rollins after a spoken word show. He was a really awesome guy, he even bought me a beer, and I was only fifteen!
Real Punk: Did I ever tell you about the time me and Richard Hell set Nancy Reagan’s car on fire?
Fake Punk: When I was seventeen, my best friend died of a heroin overdose. It really made me stop and think about what everything means, you know?
Real Punk: One time I was awake for six weeks shooting up amphetamines, and I finally just blacked out from exhaustion. I woke up two months later in Anton LeVey’s walk-in freezer.
Fake Punk: Hey, you should come check out my new band, we’re gonna play the Veteran’s Hall on 12th Street next Friday.
Real Punk: I used to be the drummer for X, but I got kicked out after I fucked Karen Carpenter.
Musical Taste: They have a great affection for punk classics, of course, but they usually have bizarre reverence for some totally weird style of music. You’ll show up at a real punk’s house and see a bunch of Frankie Yankovic albums on the walls, and he’ll say to you “yeah, I have probably the biggest collection of polka records in the state.”
How to Tame a Real Punk: The hardest part is finding one. Once you do, listen to his stories with appropriate reverence without seeming like a phony. Hold up your end of the conversation. Drag him back to his house after he passes out. Let him hit on your girlfriend once in a while.
Benefits of Friendship: Once in a while he’ll call you up at 3AM and ask if you want to do something insane, like steal Hasil Adkins’s corpse or fly to France and piss on Jim Morrison’s grave. You can also sleep on his couch indefinitely, because he has no concept of private ownership. He won’t ask you for money because he’s inexplicably well-to-do, even though he dresses like a hobo and you’ve never even heard him mention work.
Drawbacks of Friendship: You’ll feel like a hanger-on. Your girlfriend will either be afraid of him or have sex with him (maybe both). His idea of a “prank” is to blow up your car (and he loves pranks). He has no sense of responsibility, and will get you fired from your job due to constant tardiness caused by all-night benders.
Emo Kids
Identification:
To refer to emo as an entire subculture centered on being vain, melodramatic, pathetic, self-absorbed, and emotionally histrionic would be unfair. There’s more to it than that. There’s also all the terrible music, stupid haircuts, and fantastically complex MySpace profiles. While we can all conjure up a mental image of a stereotypical Emo kid, with a tight sweater, hair dyed black, tiny jeans, and converse with “deep” lyrics Sharpied on, it can be difficult these days to tell emo kids from any other scenester morons. Asking vanilla hipsters and emo kids to list their favorite bands would net similar results: a list of bands you’ve never heard of. However, an emo kid’s band list would contain telltale patterns. First of all, watch out for bands with melodramatic, complete-sentence names, like “I Die in Agony” or “His Heart is Sour.” Secondly, the list of bands will quickly transmogrify into a diatribe about how the emo kid doesn’t really want to be there because he or she is feeling very depressed over a girl/boy and Hawthorne Heights really helped him or her out during tough times and maybe you’d like to go back to his/her place and see his/her zines and maybe make out a little bit, no big deal. The great thing about emo kids is that they’re both promiscuous and emotionally crippled (except for the weird Christian ones).
Musical Taste: A broad banquet of crap. Some emo kids hate the other emo kids because they listen to new fake mall emo instead of the “good” stuff which was by bands from twenty years ago who never actually released any albums but were quite good nonetheless, according to third-hand recollection. Other emo kids listen to the fake mall emo and love it. I’ve met quite a few who never actually admit that they listen to emo: “oh, they sort of used to be emo, but they’re basically just indie pop now; oh, that’s not emo, it’s just sort of slightly emo-ish hardcore.” Jesus, you idiot, if you listen to six hundred bands that skirt the borders of emo, you basically just listen to emo. Fuck.
How to Tame an Emo Kid: Leave them flattering comments on MySpace. Listen to their problems. Be a member of the opposite sex and reject them (they love unrequited love more than most people love sex, so they’ll hang around you for-ev-er).
Benefits of Friendship: They’ll listen to your problems (for about three minutes, before turning the conversation back to their own problems). They’ll write you really bad poetry if they fall in love with you, which you can share with your sane friends for a classic chortle.
Drawbacks of Friendship: They are really, really into the terrible music they listen to. This is true of any hipster subculture, but a lot of emo kids have absurd tunnel-vision taste: they listen to only their shitty little niche of emo, and you’ll never get a moment’s respite from it. Regular hipsters will turn off the Wolf Parade once in a while and throw on some David Bowie, but emo kids will offer no such breaks: it’ll be straight from His Dying Words to She is Cruelly Dying to This is My Pain Area to He Cuts Me Deep.
Pop Nerds
Identification:
Pop Nerds have an abiding love of everything canonically agreed upon as great by their peers, none of whom they respect. Their own taste is unimpeachable, and everyone else’s is dead wrong. They know more about bands they hate than you know about your favorite band. They know what label Jesus was on. They are torn between hating Rob Sheffield and secretly wanting to be him. They read books about books about music. Pop nerds are much more likely to be male than female, because boys have a far greater tendency toward wasting their lives in the pursuit of meaningless trivia. They fancy themselves as John Cusack from High Fidelity, but really they’re a perfect mixture of Jack Black and the effeminate bald guy. They can be tough to spot in the wild, because they never leave their houses. The most effective way to identify a pop nerd, should you encounter one in the wild, is to ask him if he’s heard of a made-up band. While any non-liar with nothing to prove would simply say “no,” any nerd worth his salt would try to bullshit their way out of it (as I have expertly detailed in my “How to Fake It” article).
Musical Taste: They all like The Velvet Underground, unless you accuse them of liking the Velvet Underground, in which case they bust out their contingency plan about what a pathetic poseur Lou Reed was.
How to Tame a Pop Nerd: Say something bad about a specific rock critic. Walk up to a pop nerd at the vinyl bin of your local ultra-hip record store and say “Greil Marcus is an idiot.” The pop nerd will take it as a cue to explain why he himself knows a million times more about everything than Greil Marcus ever will.
Benefits of Friendship: Access to record collections that often border on obscenely decadent.
Drawbacks of Friendship: Never, ever mention anything about music to them, unless you’re agreeing with them or intentionally setting them up to win an argument and boost their ego. In the rare instances in which a pop nerd becomes interested in a girl, he will ultimately fail in the pursuit and you’ll have to hear about it. He’ll make you listen to heinous crap that he has tricked himself into considering great, like Scritti Politti and Einsturzende Neubauten (which he can spell without looking it up).
Indie Fans
Identification:
Although far more subdued and tasteful that emo kids, indie nerds still clothe themselves in thrift-shop vestments, dishevel their hair, and slap on an annoyingly knowing smirk for maximum Malkmosity. They hate every band anyone else has heard of and hate every band they haven’t heard. They’re allowed to like a band that another indie fan likes, provided that they heard it before the other guy did. They loved The Shins until Garden State came out. They don’t dance, unless they’re dancing to hilariously ironic C+C Music Factory tunes (their music of choice, of course, is to be taken seriously, and should not be marred with the savage iniquity of dance). They have radio shows on college stations, and they do NOT take requests. They share a genus with the pop nerd, but with a narrower focus, an active social life, and a girlfriend. After fake punks, they’re the most likely hipster breed to be in a terrible band. But the indie fan’s band isn’t “terrible,” it’s “avant-garde.”
Musical Taste: The latest 7-inch from Bumfuck Records.
How to Tame an Indie Fan: When he’s raving about some great new band, pretend you haven’t heard of them, but that they sound really interesting to you. They love that. Let them make you a mix tape, and be prepared to give notes on it the next day.
Benefits of Friendship: Science has yet to reveal a compelling answer to this mystery.
Drawbacks of Friendship: Being friends with an indie fan is the only reason you’ll ever have to hear the words “Pitchfork Media” not immediately preceded by “boy do I ever hate…” Also, be prepared for some ill-conceived rants on “selling out” and “authenticity.”
Local Scene Idiots
Identification:
Even if you live in the wilds of the Yukon, there’ll be at least one shitty local band and at least fifty idiots who turn up at all their gigs and nod along to the music (the “beers in both hands” dance). In larger towns, there will be dozens of shitty local bands, and the scene will be bolstered by all the members of the shitty local bands turning up to see all the other shitty local bands when they play shitty local gigs. The local scene idiots will be at every show, fervently yelling out requests for songs that only members of their pathetic little stratum will ever hear. Coming from a small and sceneless town, I’ve experienced firsthand the horror of a primordial music scene oozing out of an extremely shallow pool of talent, and it’s a horrific, Cronenbergesque sight. The teenagers in this dead-end town, with no outlet for being hip, were forced to wrangle their sensibilities into enjoying some truly horrific music.
Local Scene Idiots are only cool to each other. If they go two towns over, they won’t get much mileage out of knowing all the members of Butt Attack personally, because Butt Attack’s rusty van can’t make it that far afield without overheating. In minor markets, local scene idiots can never rise above “big fish/small pond status,” but that’s enough for them. “Someday,” they tragically think, “when Butt Attack gets huge, I’m going to say I knew them when.”
Musical Taste: Butt Attack.
How to Tame a Local Scene Idiot: Just start a band. It doesn’t matter how god-awful it is. The local scene idiots will be clamoring to interview you for their ‘zine or their pirate radio show before you can say Jack Robinson. Either that, or just be bored enough to go to some terrible local shows. After you lower yourself to attending a few, your scene idiot friend will call you up whenever some miserable local event is happening.
Benefits of Friendship: They’ll get you out of the house. Even if they bands they love are crap, even if the local clubs are terrible, and even if the house parties they drag you to are lame, they’ll get you out of the house, and you’ll always love them for it.
Drawbacks of Friendship: When you’ve seen every band in your town fifty times and they’ve shown no signs of improvement, you might begin to curse your local scene idiot friend for dragging you out of the house when you could have been watching Hard Copy in your underwear.
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