Friday, October 29, 2010

We'd Look Like Revolutionaries

"We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us.

We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Dawn breaks and the last of the after-after-parties begin to spill into the streets. The hipsters are falling out, rubbing their eyes and scanning the surrounding landscape for the way back from which they came. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, "If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.""

-- Douglas Haddow

1 comment:

G said...

this is really interesting. I just followed the link and read the whole article. I mean, the whole thing's ridiculously bleak and pessimistic... 'the end of western civilisation' and whatnot.. but he has a point to an extent. But surely as time rolls on it DOES become harder and harder for 'the youth' to find new ways to shock and be different, which, in essence, is what any youth culture intends to do. There's a really interesting comment on the article where someone writes 'the problem with hipsters is that their coolness relies on an air of apathy. there is no room for passion'. I think this is true of the 'true' hipsters, but in a way, can any of us get away from being branded as a hipster? Haven't we got to the stage where anyone who isn't a chav basically IS a hipster... I mean, even sloanes are TRYING to be hipsters these days, so... I wouldn't consider myself to be a hipster, but that's mainly because I don't think I'm cool and aloof enough to be one. But someone in the street might say I was hipsterish.. Unless they said I was sloaney. Which is a far bigger insult in my book. Gahhd, I dunno. I suppose originality is dead anyway. Oh well. Thanks for the article, i found it really interesting.