I was a hipster before hipsters were born

As I make my way through the barren land of hipsteria in today's urban jungle, I cannot help but notice the recurring patterns that once adorned my world resurfacing and amalgamating themselves in seemingly new cultural landscapes. Have I returned to the place I once began my journey only to recognise the place for the first time? It was nearly two decades ago when people laughed at me riding my Japanese surplus bike, with a beat up basket in front, to my favourite bar/cafe in Malate to hold poetry readings or to my favourite bakeshop/patisserie in Ermita to get loaves of French bread. How they mocked me then for riding instead of driving my way through traffic congested Malate, putting my life at risk, dodging speeding jeepneys and crazed cab drivers back to my one bedroom apartment on A. Mabini. Today, those same people who mocked and laughed at me are themselves riding their own bikes through the city of Makati. Heck, one of them even owns a bike store! Then there are the people who used to make fun of the fact that I didn't even have the budget to refurbish my apartment. They were weirded out by the fact that I had no lamp shades, that I had exposed light bulbs hanging from my high ceilinged American colonial period apartment, and hooked on to the pipes in my bathroom. Nowadays, the mark of any truly hip bar, you know the kind that serves grass-fed beef burgers, artisanal pizza and craft beer, is the presence of the now ubiquitous exposed light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Heck, this makes me feel not only that I was decades ahead of my time, it makes me want to accost the hipsters I encounter on the street to pull their ears close to my lips to say "I was a hipster before you were born, mate!" And that is why I can look any bearded, skinny jeans wearing, fixie bike riding hipster with a feeling of pride knowing that this person is only but a faint echo of my former self.

Hipster Apocalypse: The Dangers of Going Out

The popular Australian show Rockwiz airs on Saturday nights. To get people to say home and watch it, it plays on the fears and frustrations of many, namely of running into a bunch of hipsters, when going out in a novel way. It calls today's scene the Hipster Apocalypse.


Rockwiz (hipster apocalypse) promo from Sean Bell on Vimeo.

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.