Hipsters Down Through the Ages

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

- Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956)

The passage quoted above was how the father of the beat generation described the inhabitants of the bohemian scene of his day in a manner so condensed that only a poet could produce it. It took Kerouac and Burroughs full length novels to expound on this simple summation.

The emergence of hipsters can be traced back to the rise of the urban metropolis. Cosmopolitan London and Paris in the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries with their quaint coffee shops which apart from spawning revolutions produced dandy writers like Charles Baudelaire who elevated aesthetics to a living religion. It was he who coined the term modernity to depict the fleeting, ephemeral quality of life in an urban setting and made it the artist's role to capture its essence.

We're baaaack!

Hello there, dear scenesters,

Ready for another dose of your favourite bedtime stories?

Yes, that's right. The Scenester, the zine that stole a thousand hearts and sent many a reader groping for their spectacles to see if what they thought they had read was actually printed on the page, is now finding its way back into public view.

After french exiting the scene back in the late-90s, we have re-grouped. Seeing that no one had really filled our shoes whilst we were gone, as if having woken up from a deep slumber (rather like a coma is more like it), we find that, horror of horrors, things are exactly the way we left them!

Although much of our once quaint "indie" ethos, ideas and tastes have become much more widely accepted within the broader community (whereas once we were vilified, ostracized and caricatured as elitists for espousing them), the same type of scenester-like-cum-hipster behavior pervades, which we now take as our cue for doing what we do best.

To those who do not know what we are talking about, we invite you to read our inaugural piece, How to Be a Hipster (soon to come out). This should act as a primer. As far as our regular readers are concerned, this site though sparse at the moment will soon be packed with the stuff you came to love (to refresh your memory, visit our Print Issues page). For those young initiates who are coming in from the cold, you can catch-up on what went before by checking out Our Story.

We invite one and all to be engaged with the site. We look forward to your reactions, comments, liking, dissing, lingk-ing, finger-pointing, navel-gazing, rhapsodizing, ranting and overall engagement with us.

Whatever the shade or color of your beliefs, whatever your creed or tribe, whichever dialect or language you speak, whether you refer to us as Der Zhinester, Les Scenesterables, Da Sin-stah or just plain The Scenester, we welcome you (back) into these pages.