Girls, Season One: Intimations of Reality

“Act like my life is real. Because my life is real.” This line from Lena Dunham's Girls, delivered by a young man to the girlfriend who's broken his heart and then seduced him into getting back together, while she's straddling him in bed, is not a good example of realistic dialogue, but it is thematically central to the show. The white, middle-class, liberals arts-educated modern Emma Woodhouses of Girls, who've reached their 20s with very little to distress or vex them, are monsters of narcissism, which the show plays for laughs and shock except in the rare, differently shocking moments when they and the viewer become momentarily aware of another (usually male) person's reality. The girls of Girls are so selfish, competitive, and critical in their friendships and so obsessed with maintaining the upper hand in their interactions with men that it's difficult to feel much sympathy when things go wrong for them, but if we can't feel it for them, we can occasionally feel it for their victims.

Not that the recognition of another person's reality always takes the form, in Girls, of a flash of empathy from someone whose life you've been treating like a game. Something similar occurs when Jessa, the most unapologetic predatory sociopath of the group, suddenly decides not to go through with seducing the married man she's been babysitting for, although her recognition that his life and his wife and children's lives are real is preceded by a different kind of recognition of his reality: her reaction of revulsion when he starts sobbing on her shoulder, overwrought from their adventurous evening, in the course of which she got him beat up. Dunham's acute interest in and fascinating treatment of sex is what distinguishes her most clearly from bleak, self-conscious male comedians she resembles, like Woody Allen, Larry David, and Louis C.K., and one of the ways in which sex permeates Girls is that the characters are (like their creator) pornographic fantasists who, however, are constantly confronted by a reality that does not perfectly assume the shape of their desire. So Hannah offers to fuck the boss who's been groping her only to have him demur and point out that he's a married man; or a venture capitalist picks up Marnie and Jessa in a bar and persuades them to come back his apartment, only to have them refuse to let him join in when they start making out.

The fabric of Dunham's universe is made up of this constant tension between the characters' fantasies and the stubbornly independent existence of other people, their lives, and their contrary wills. It doesn't matter whether your boyfriend is peeing on you in the shower in a mistaken belief that you'll find it funny instead of a bizarre violation, which happens to Hannah in one scene, or whether he's loving you when you're not ready to be loved. The latter situation occasions an hilarious exchange where Hannah tells her victim, as a lame excuse for ducking out of living with him, “I didn't think you were into that,” and he replies sarcastically, “Into what? Love?” Love can be a bizarre violation in the universe of Girls. Hannah might want it in theory, but she doesn't necessarily want the responsibility that goes with it, the heaviest part of which might be the responsibility to love back.

The girls of Girls veer between shrinking from a reality that's too demanding or too unresponsive and trying desperately to make their lives more real to themselves. To that end, Jessa, realizing that her career as a femme fatale is a dead end, suddenly gets married to the “venture capitalist,” whom we last saw flipping out when she and Marnie spilled wine on his priceless rug and lecturing them hysterically on the hard work through which he's achieved his material success. He's a real, grown-up man with a real job and grown-up money, representing everything that Jessa has rejected and thinks, for now, that she needs, and the joke is that this attempt to achieve stability is Jessa's wildest move yet. No matter how hard she tries to start living a real life, it just turns into a more elaborate game. Growing up doesn't involve learning how to treat other people's lives like they're real; it involves starting to treat your life, too, like a game.

How the Wall of Sound Came Down: Indie, Hip Hop, and Musical Equality

When I was writing my posts on the death/defence of the hipster, in my research on the hipster background I learned that hip hop and punk both sprang up during the 70s in New York, and started to ponder and speculate about this. The issue of race and music that forms part of the (Anglo world) hipster “debate” (if you can call it that, because it largely consists of suspiciously hipsterish magazines, from Canadian Adbusters to New York Magazine to the slightly more balanced, or just more ironic, British Pigeons & Peacocks, hyperbolically attacking hipsters) was what originally inspired me to make a post about the hipster phenomenon. Because happening concurrently with the hipster's rising profile were frequent press attacks on indie music for the crime of being too white (notably by the – of course – white New Yorker critic, Sasha Frere-Jones); and then Christian Lander sealed the deal by starting a blog-to-books in which “white people” was used as a euphemism for “hipster.” 

Like Frere-Jones, I wondered how we'd reached this impasse in popular music/culture, and I went about answering the question by tracing the origins of indie music back to punk, since the indie scene was one of the sources of the hipster, and it was hip hop and indie that stopped talking to each other (until recent developments). I came up with the tentative hypothesis that hip hop and punk didn't need to talk to each other, because they were parallel developments. I didn't bother posting about this, though, because it would require a lot of research into the history of popular music that I didn't have the time for.

Conveniently, however, the BBC has done that research for me, and put it into an entertaining documentary, Once Upon a Time in New York: The Birth of Hip Hop, Disco and Punk, which I only just found out about by pure accident on Twitter. The narrative of the doc is very much like the one I pieced together from my casual online research and previous sketchy understanding of the trajectory of pop music/culture history, although it also filled in details I was unaware of, particularly about the origins of hip hop.

First, there was The Velvet Underground, whom Warhol brought to attention. (Warhol provides the transition from studio-era Hollywood glamour to the new music-based popular culture of youth, fashion, and rock. Oh yeah and drugs, drugs, and drugs.) Then came The New Yorks Dolls, who inspired the CBGB bands. At the same time, disco was invented (apparently by white, though not WASP, DJs) and benefited from the new atmosphere of gay rights and visibility – and pre-AIDS hedonism – after the Stonewall riots. This culminated in the rarefied, elitist, decadent ongoing party of Studio 54. But while the beautiful people partied it up at Studio 54, over in the economically deprived South Bronx, disco turned into hip hop. It was then transported over to the arty (white) scene of the CBGB bands via graffiti artists – which the New York art world (notably Warhol, again) took up. Which led to the first popular rap song, Blondie's “Rapture,” by a CBGB art band-turned-disco.

To summarize: the New York gay scene contributed to both art punk (the Warhol drag queens) and disco. Disco led to hip hop. Hip hop culture then influenced the New York art scene (as pre-Stonewall gays previously had). But it was art punk and hip hop that were the "parallel" movements, as Chris Stein of Blondie put in so many words his reaction to being introduced to the hip hop scene, which he saw as being similarly "destructivist/reconstructionist". One was largely the creation of students/artists who were inspired by the outsider inclusiveness and permissiveness of New York, as exemplified by the Warhol Factory scene and the Dolls. One was the creation of the economically deprived, trying to find a creative solution to the injustice, hardship, and violence of their lives, and a positive outlet for their rage and frustration.

The most obvious thing that punk and hip hop had in common was this rage and frustration, although this was more evident in UK punk and in the hardcore, political American scene (which the BBC doc doesn't deal with) than in the art-punk bands (and the doc didn't include Iggy and the Stooges, I guess because they weren't New York-based). From what I glimpsed in the doc, the early hip hop of Zulu Nation also had a positive social message very different from either the angry, punk-like political hip hop of Public Enemy or the gangster chic that would ensue. (Please be aware, my knowledge of hip hop is scanty indeed.) What punk and hip hop also had in common, though, was their disaffection from an increasingly commercialized music industry that rewarded polished musical virtuosity. As David Johansen boasts in the doc, “We single-handedly lowered the standards of an entire industry.”

In my potentially racially insensitive/uninformed unposted ramblings about the origins of the hip hop/indie divide, I speculated that we conceive of black and white musician “artistry” in different terms. To sweepingly generalize about it, black musicians are considered artists as musicians (and dancers). White musicians are, in contrast, considered artists as artists; since punk, musicianship is a decidedly secondary concern, at best, and in some versions, musicianship and “authenticity” exist in inverse ratio. Black musicians make music that is art; art-punk and post-punk musicians make art that happens to be music.

I further speculated that this was because the original art-punk musicians (The VU through the CBGB bands) drew on an avant-garde European tradition, whereas Africa-American musicians drew on their own tradition, in which artistic expression was primarily in terms of music and dance (and in which an avant-garde could appear in the course of the development of a music genre, as happened to jazz... which inspired such precursors of art punk as Captain Beefheart). My guess about the art-punk tradition, at any rate, was supported by comments in the documentary, such as Chris Frantz's of The Talking Heads: “We thought of ourselves as artists who happened to be musicians as well.” Interestingly, this perception of oneself as artist as something prior to, or in addition to, musician, could coincide with being an accomplished musician, as in the case of David Byrne or John Cale. Just as Picasso “knew how to draw,” so the art-punk musician could be an anti-virtuoso in approach despite being musically knowledgeable and gifted. And what “being an artist” seems to mean here is having a conceptual, cerebral approach to music-making; even if in some cases (like Patti Smith) this was combined with a love of the instinctiveness, immediacy, and animal magnetism of rock and roll. Occasionally, black performers, such as Grace Jones, have adopted this cerebral/conceptual approach. But it's been rare enough that when Janelle Monae recently did it, it seemed revolutionary, especially in a pop music landscape in which “what is black” and “what is white” had become so rigidly defined.

When white critics or fans complain that rock music, as indie, has become “too white,” they need to take into account that rock was always white. By definition, it was a white interpretation of R&B. With punk, which was anti-rock, “rock music” started all over again; a violent, critical break with the past comparable to Modernism in the Western high art tradition. Or to some kind of popular music Reformation. Early punk/art rock had all kinds of R&B, jazz, and funk influences (found in bands/artists from Beefheart to Iggy to The Clash to The Talking Heads). But the reason we're in a “post-rock” era now is that punk rejected rock and hip hop, like its parent, disco, never had anything to do with rock.

Rock was white people inventing a form by appropriating black music. Punk was white people making their own music. (We of course don't like to think of white people making “their own” anything, for fear of immediately arriving in white supremacist territory. But I'm going to let that sentence stand as a neutral observation.) In individual cases, the bands comprising this broad “movement” had black music influences, but unlike rock, it wasn't by definition a white interpretation of a black musical form. And once the punk ethos was in full swing, there was no reason anymore for white musicians to appropriate black music. Punk and hip hop could respect each other, but they had very little to take from each other: they were both anti-corporate rock and radio pop; they both expressed the anger and aggression of outsiders of one sort or another and revelled in anti-bourgeois “urban realism.”

“Indie” was simply what post-punk came to be called. It has been defined in a lot of ways, some of them contradictory: it's the trad-rock set-up of singer, guitarist, bassist, drummer (e.g. The Smiths, the Britpop bands, The Libertines, The Strokes); or it's the post-rock group that rejects that set-up or its traditional sound (e.g. later Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors). Either way it's often associated with the “twee” sensibility of the sensitive, cerebral, elitist college students that listen to and often create it (even though Morrissey and Marr, the creative duo behind seminal indie band The Smiths, who were precursors of the twee “genre,” were never college students). Even in non-twee instances, like Nirvana, with its hardcore punk and art-punk (Pixies) influence, “sensitivity” was cultivated as a virtue, and “passivity” perceived as the net result. Indie and hip hop broke into the mainstream at the same moment – the early 90s – and the lines were firmly drawn: college students (perceived as white) listened to white boys whine; everybody else (perceived as black or “the wrong kind of white person,” with credit to Christian Lander) listened to rappers brag. Who knows what people who were neither white nor black listened to, because apparently nobody cared: the legacy of rock was going to be fought over in these terms. Sometimes the issue got a bit confused, since Eminem did quite a bit of whining, while Morrissey – though no one seemed to notice – did quite a lot of bragging. (The first time I heard “I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving / England is mine, and it owes me a living,” it took my breath away with its arrogance.) (For that matter, Morrissey can make “I've never had no one ever” or “I am the son and the heir / Of nothing in particular” sound like brags.) But this didn't stop the generalizations, of course.

Since black musicians and white musicians each had their own thing to do now, it's hardly surprising that indie got more and more “white.” It was made by white guys whose reference points were white guys (punk and art-rock musicians), whose concerns were white guy concerns. (And when critics talk about indie music in general terms, they're always talking about guys. Partly because a “white guy” is more demonized, in liberal contrast to a black guy, than a white woman would be, and partly because, as I argued in my second hipsters post, the “decline” of the white guy is of greater symbolic importance to Western culture than whatever's happening with white girls. Especially to white leftist critics and commentators.) Likewise, hip-hop artists (also with exceptions, notably the eclectic Outkast) were mainly interested in other hip-hop musicians and a rich, thriving tradition. And yet ironically, as I argued in my original hipsters post, even as this pop cultural divide rose to greater and greater prominence in guilty white liberal reflections on the rising popularity of indie, in the same decade, the 2000s, more and more efforts were being made to bridge the gap from both sides of the hip hop/indie divide. And the audience coming of age now is one for whom both-sides collaborations like Gorillaz were seminal.

By the end of the 2000s, hip hop and indie were so well-defined, and had attained such a level of cultural influence (indie for the hipsters, hip hop for “everybody else”), that they were forced to take notice of each other and consider whether mutual influence would be rejuvenating. This is something to celebrate, and not just because it would end “musical segregation.” Arguably, there was never any reason to fear that the segregation of “black” and “white” musical styles would lead to segregation of audiences (and hence music dividing rather than bringing together white and black youth), since overwhelmingly, white kids wanted to listen to black music – even if it sold even more when it could speak directly to their white lower-middle-class suburban concerns, as Eminem did. It's something to celebrate because these two healthily-developed, separate traditions, which both originated Once Upon a Time in New York, now have plenty to say to and learn from each other, precisely because they've developed separately for so long and reflect different cultural experiences and approaches to art and music. And because both could be accused of losing their “soul” in the process of this segregation: hip hop by going pop and mainstream (and therefore blanding out), indie by getting further and further from the R&B origins of rock (and therefore blanding out).

Hence Beyonce (although R&B pop, not hip hop), in a July interview in Dazed and Confused, turns the white liberal perception of indie upside down by proclaiming indie-rock concerts “just so soulful.” I don't think you have to be an indie snob (and I'm not; the only Grizzly Bear song I've heard is the one Donald Glover rapped over) to question whether it would be advisable for Beyonce to make an experimental album (although I would like more hit singles like “Crazy in Love” and less like “Single Ladies,” Beyonce, if you're reading and taking notes). But at least theoretically, the creative situation for both black and white popular musicians is far more favourable now than it was at the birth of rock and roll. Nobody needs to appropriate from, conform to, or imitate anybody, because there are two well-developed, visible traditions with large, influential audiences and roots in two different approaches to art and music, and with – in their most interesting expressions – a joint commitment to experimentation that looks beyond the rock tradition, mainstream pop, or even the conventional song. That they're curious about each other, from both a creative and a cultural perspective, is only natural.

And for the first time, there's a “white tradition” that's there for black artists (like Monae, with her Ziggy nods) to claim as part of their musical heritage. Any white liberal commentators wanna whine about that? Instead of looking back with longing on the days when only white musicians could have success playing black music, and comparing that to "integration" (or "miscegenation," as Frere-Jones saucily preferred), we should appreciate the present situation, when black and white musicians can come together and influence each other as creative and commercial equals. 

A Defense of the Hipster

I nearly aborted Part 2 of my hipster post, but after chatting with loyal reader Elly, I'm thinking that I need to give a bit of explanation of why I'm sympathetic to the hipster

It seems to me that hipsters are mainly hated for the following reasons (not including their own self-hatred, which is uninteresting university-indoctrinated white liberal guilt and familiar bourgeois self-loathing):

1. Their elitism (they're better than you, smarter than you, have better taste than you, and are “above” consumerism); this also ties in with the perception that the hipster is white (middle-class and privileged – with or without a trust fund)
2. Their combination of loose affiliation with multiple subcultures and, in apparent contradiction, rampant consumerism (i.e. they have no strong counter-culture position or beliefs, but they're wearing the fashions of previous movements, and in some cases spending a lot of money on them)

The first reason I'm sympathetic to the hipster is that I have never had any problem with superficiality. Allow me to explain. When I was in high school, lo many years ago (the late 80s/early 90s), I first attempted to find my identity by joining the “alternative” scene (which, incidentally, you weren't supposed to call that, since they didn't like “labels,” which even at the time I thought was hilariously self-important). Its comforts were many. First, these people seemed cool, and I wanted to learn how to be cool. Second, they had a uniform (all black), making the agonizing decision of what to wear (since anything you wore had a social meaning and consequences) easy. Third, there was security in numbers. It meant I'd be accepted by a group.

Pretty soon, I realized the essential hypocrisy of “rebel” subcultures: we were supposed to be “different,” but there were strict rules about what you could and couldn't wear, listen to, like, and think. Notably, you couldn't wear colours and couldn't have any fun because then you wouldn't seem angsty and depressed. I was probably clinically depressed at the time, but I thought that never joking and laughing was probably the worst way you could react to it: presumably, the point was to stop being depressed, not to stay depressed.

So, I broke free of that group of friends and went on a new identity construction quest. Having been introduced by them to thrift-store shopping, I went on a giddy spree of buying whatever looked interesting to me, including things they wouldn't like and that would also serve to protest preppie blandness. This largely involved colourful floral old ladies' blouses and clashing peasant skirts. I retained a couple of alternative signifiers, so my basic allegiance would still be clear: black tights (all-year-round), black skinny jeans (because I could never go back to blue denim and retain my self-respect, although sometimes I'd wear my dad's bell-bottom blue jeans from the 70s, with giant holes in the knees, over ripped black tights), and the pale face/red lipstick/black eyeliner combo. Otherwise, though, my colourful thrift-store fashion aesthetic ended up looking a lot like the rummage-sale aesthetic of early Morrissey (not an influence, since pre-internet, in Canada, my only “visuals” for The Smiths were occasional nostalgia photos in the NME). (Of which we got one copy per month in the downtown mall Coles.) I interspersed it with early 70s discoveries from my parents' storage closet: psychedelic minidresses, pinstripe suits (to play Thin White Duke), square metal-framed Lennon sunglasses.

This, I'm pretty sure, was one of the beginnings of hipsterism: “arty” high school students coming out of the alternative scene and rejecting the fashion and music that was marketed to them, but also the “rules” of specific subcultures, in favour of a fun thrift-store aesthetic that naturally emphasized retro fashion. Soon I became friends with a large group of similarly-inclined kids, most of us lower-middle-class in an upper-middle-class school, who represented many of the various strains of subculture influence that would later get lumped together as “hipster” taste, such as hippie-beatnik and hippie-environmentalist/multiculturalist. Most of us liked to express ourselves creatively through our fashion choices (and tended to use either thrift stores or, if we had a bit more money, such as by getting jobs, independent boutiques) and almost all the members of the core group were involved in the arts (poets, playwrights, actors, singers, dancers). There was some crossover in music tastes (and anyone who liked things that were uncool, like metal, had to be either tutored or keep it to themselves), but more discrepancy of the “my bands are better than yours” kind. (Another important point in common: most of us read books. On purpose.) But differences in taste were well-tolerated. As long as you didn't have mainstream tastes, you were obviously a bit “off” (you might, for example, be severely medicated, or insufficiently medicated), and you were unconcerned about the high school Holy Grail of “popularity,” you were accepted. Later I learned that in many cases these kids were extremely insecure and, before finding this loose alliance, had in fact been worried about popularity and been victims of cruelty. I didn't know it at the time, because I really wasn't insecure in the least. Not, anyway, about my high school social status. You had two choices, basically: you could either continue to suffer it out on the fringes of the “popular crowd,” or you could kiss them goodbye and join a group where the worst you'd get was some mild teasing for having redneck music tastes.

Within our group (from my own perspective there were about half a dozen core “members,” including my two closest friends, plus about half a dozen others), I'm pretty sure I was the one most concerned about what was “cool.” In fact I distinctly remember the day I saw the Spin “Cool Issue” (back when Spin was still an alternative music magazine) and had the epiphany: “Yes! That's what I want to be! Not popular – cool!” I didn't take their advice on what was cool, except when I already agreed with it (e.g., The Ramones). I did take their advice on not taking their advice but rather figuring out this mysterious, elusive thing, so closely associated with rock for so long, on my own. Cool, of course, meant original above all. You couldn't copy it, and there was no sure way to achieve it. That meant if you hit it right, you were some kind of genius; in a way that may be evident only to you, since no one else might be cool enough to appreciate your cool. Which made it even better, because you didn't have to rely on others for affirmation (except in your own mind, where their congenital inability to appreciate you made you feel smugger).

And I did value originality. So that when Nirvana hit in '91 and suddenly friends who'd previously exhibited the “creative” retro thrift-store aesthetic were dressing in drab plaid and slouching around literally overnight, I was disappointed to discover that they were just trendy after all. Of course to the external eye the thrift-store aesthetic of “not looking like anyone else” probably looked like just as much of a uniform, and that's certainly what it became: the hipster look. I saw it happen, as trendy boutiques in the arts areas of our city bought up the “coolest” retro items from the general thrift stores in order to sell them at jacked-up prices, presumably to solvent young urban professionals. I refused to shop in those places (with the occasional exception, naturally) not only because I couldn't afford them but also because buying thrift-store clothes at expensive prices ruined the principle. So did having the choice of what was cool made for you, rather than determining it yourself.

As the pickings got slimmer (now I'm picturing this as an indie movie, with a recurring scene of the girl on a thrift-store hunt, at first tentatively, guided by cooler friends; then enthusiastically, on her own; and then forlornly, the treasures gone), and the choice retro items were snatched up, I had to get more creative. One day all I could find that was unusual was a lace shirt, yellowed with age. I thought, “But dare I? I'd be violating every last punk principle.” And then I had another of those epiphanies. I took it home, cut off the sleeves, and wore it as a punk statement on femininity that was also a punk subversion of punk. A few months later, I saw Courtney Love on a magazine cover for the first time, in her baby doll gear. Around this time I started to get obsessed with the idea that simply by following my instincts, I could predict fashion, and believed, probably delusionally, that I was seeing the “trends” I “started” everywhere in the media. Mark Greif's snark in his NYMag attack on the hipster, “The hipster is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of rapidly cycling consumer distinction,” would have been taken as a compliment by me, although it may give the hipster too much credit: what's really characteristic of the hipster is not that she's able to predict trends, but that she's obsessed with being able to do so.

But I had excellent historical and philosophical justifications for this obsession, so read on.

Hipsters and the Gay Male Subculture

One of the reasons I was the member of my group most overtly concerned with fashion and “coolness” was that I had done my research into gay male culture. It started, as it does for many hipsters, with an obsession with David Bowie when I discovered The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by complete accident. (I was 13; my grandparents bought a new second-hand car and gave the abandoned 8-track collection to me; I had also inherited a record player with 8-track; these contingencies converged to provide the soundtrack that literally enabled me to survive puberty.) Even before that, though, I'd discovered Oscar Wilde, also by complete accident (I saw a photograph of the early dandy Wilde in an unreadable New York Review of Books article on Richard Ellmann's biography of Wilde, which I did read). (Wilde wore a hat and a cape. How cool was that?) I read a bio of Bowie and researched his influences, particularly Andy Warhol. When Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae appeared, I got over the media portrayal of her as an anti-feminist when I looked in the index and saw that it included both Wilde and Bowie – and at the time, it was radical for a work of scholarship to incorporate pop culture references, which is exactly what I was looking for: someone to bring together the traditional arts and pop culture, my two branches of interest, which I'd never seen as separate. All of this took place for me between the ages of 13, when I discovered Wilde, and 17, when I read SP.

While I was parading around my high school in sloppy, clown-coloured retro thrift-store clothes, listening to indie music (mostly The Smiths), reading teenage hipster literature (Kafka, Naked Lunch, On the Road), and writing plays (one of which would be produced when I was 18 and win a national award), I thought of myself all the while as a Wildean aesthete. I appreciated fashion, knew its history (Cecil Beaton was among my idols), thought that the “authenticity” prized by other counterculture elements was a preposterous pose, and enjoyed tweaking these elements by emphasizing my superficiality. And, in line with another frequent accusation against hipsters – that they're more interested in cultivating the artist persona than in making art – I definitely thought that this was the way an artist should be. Artists should be colourful, eccentric, playful provocateurs. And, if possible, sexy. As a teenager, the main way in which I got interested in writers was through their photographs: Wilde, Colette, Truman Capote, Jane Bowles, Joe Orton – they all knew how to pose (which made an obvious point of connection between the writer and the pop star in my mind). The artist, I believed, should be a poseur. And they should never assume the drab pose of self-important seriousness: that was bland and middle class. The artist was trickster and imp. Obviously, I did take my writing seriously (although, significantly, my subject was still the artist), and I was surprised when in my first major interview with a local newspaper I was described as having “the pose of the writer.” The same arts critic, anyway, decided that I delivered the goods when he reviewed my play, but I didn't understand how my appearance (let alone my vocabulary) was setting me up with something extra to prove in the first place. Of course I had the pose of the writer – that's one of the things, besides good writing, that I believed a writer had to deliver!

The playwriting career, obviously, didn't take. And by my early twenties I had learned to admire writing and writers for reasons other than their subversiveness or sexiness. By my mid-20s I'd stopped wearing thrift-store clothes, even though my clothing budget wasn't any bigger, because I thought it was undignified, although I couldn't bear to adopt the standard university student costume of hoodie, blue jeans, and ponytail. My elitism was unwavering, though mild, and if in high school I'd consciously defined myself against Gap and other brand-name preppies, in university I more casually defined myself against the prevalent Canadian prairies aesthetic. Without a clothing budget, I bought clothes as little as possible, but now and then I did need a new pair of pants, and wasn't surprised when the only other girls I saw in the same ones were Asians (easily the most fashion-conscious university students in my city to this day, when they've far outstripped me at my advanced age).

What does surprise me is that in all of the media coverage of the hipster, no one seems to have noticed how much this sociological group has borrowed from what used to be the gay male subculture. That subculture seems to have lost a lot of its coherence and influence, whether it's because of the LGBT bid for mainstream respectability or because, as my friend Mark Simpson suggested in a piece of writing he let me read, the older generation of gay bohemia that survived into the 80s was decimated by AIDS. Paglia talked it up a lot as one of her main influences: the 20^th century subculture that adopted the dandy persona from Wilde; that developed taste into a fine art; whose impassioned interest in art and beauty was reflected in career choices such as fashion design, stage and costume design, interior decorating, and, at the lower end of the economic spectrum, window decorating (like pre-fame Warhol) and hairdressing; and which was famous for predicting trends with their taste (e.g. Japanese art and interior design). It was this trend-predicting “savant” ability of the gay bohemian that made him so useful to pop stars who acted as conduits between the avant-garde and popular culture, like Bowie in the 70s and Madonna in the 80s.

Greif calls the hipster “that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual – the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student – who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two” (which is just bewildering, since Greif has a Yale Ph.D., and therefore was at one point a graduate student: is he really delusional enough to believe that his academic Marxism protects him from “alignment with the dominant class,” or is it like the literary theory loophole where all text is subject to ultimate indeterminacy except the text you're reading now that's telling you this?). But only recently, the gay man was that person, and liberals (well, anyway, Sontag and Paglia) considered his role of conduit as being of vital cultural importance – despite the fact that this 20^th century subculture produced aesthetes and commercial artists rather than, for the most part, major fine artists (the only exceptions I can think of are Warhol, Bacon, and maybe Mapplethorpe). Which is exactly how Greif dismisses the hipster: because they're not producers, they must be consumers (there's no other role you can serve in life, and that magic word, “consumer,” obliterates all credibility with no possibility of appeal); and to the extent that they do produce, it's not “major art,” but rather artisan art (tattoos and T-shirts).

Hipsterism and the Post-Feminist Male

But even as gay bohemia, although perhaps still existing in some pockets, had lost its vital influence, its traits were spreading throughout a much larger minority of heterosexual youth – right down to their humour, snark, which (especially in its highly-developed online form) is gay male bitchery and liberal-baiting* as practised by gender-bending, bi-curious heterosexuals, many of whom had their lives changed at some point by reading Judith Butler in a Gender Studies course and/or picking up a copy of Sexual Personae. This post-gender, post-sexuality hipster is, most importantly, post-feminist: one of the main sources of the twee movement in hipster art that Greif identifies is Smiths-era Morrissey (whom Greif doesn't mention), who surprised me in early interviews (which I read late, on the internet) by mentioning 70s feminist theorists, to which I believe he was introduced by his performance artist friend Linder, as an influence on his rejection of rock machismo. If the hipsters didn't have Morrissey, they had an undergrad women's studies, gender studies, or queer studies course, or a girlfriend (or boyfriend) who took one or several of these. (And yes, there are gay hipsters – lots of lesbian ones, or maybe those are just the ones I know – since “hipster” in the broad sense just means a certain kind of youth culture, including youth from the LGBT community.)

Because “hipster,” at least in one of its meanings, refers to a large, loose affiliation of youth subcultures whose subculture affiliations are also loose (or they couldn't be part of the “hipster” melting pot), there's a tension within it, which I detected even within my small high school group of arty kids, between fashion-conscious superficiality (the trait held in common with the gay male bohemian) and punk/hippie authenticity. And if you want to deconstruct the hipster – which apparently everyone does – you can declare this an “aporia” (another magic word, but only English students care) that renders the entire project incoherent. The hipster is not only (arguably) the first youth culture figure to have her counterculture tastes marketed back to her instantly, in order to transform the rebel into an obedient consumer; she's also the first youth culture figure to be subjected to Cultural Studies-style pseudo-sociological analysis, which is apparently the exact same thing as Reefer Madness-style pseudo-sociological conservative analysis, except practiced by leftists... with Yale Ph.Ds. Or by hipsters themselves, graduate school dropouts who funneled their Cultural Studies-style education into more lucrative careers as satire bloggers. (What was SWPL but the nailing of a trend... the hipster trend?)

In the early 90s, Paglia called for several things from de-ethnicized middle-class youth, and the university student in particular: to reclaim their aestheticism from p.c. academe, recognizing that taste is elitist, something that can be cultivated but not taught**; and to learn something about life outside the university by getting menial jobs and having some experience of being poor. Well, hipsters did that. And the process got kicked into high gear after the recession made it obvious that a humanities degree was not, for most, a ticket to the middle class, but rather a one-way ticket to a career in retail, where, incidentally, full-time jobs were also scarce. Hence the two great contradictory meanings of the hipster: on the one hand, he's despised for his symbolic privilege (white, male, middle class, highly educated); on the other hand, he's despised for symbolizing the defeat of that privilege (he lacks any socio-economic power: he's not middle class, he's not working class, he's not anything, he's just ridiculous).

And make no mistake, it's the male hipster who's the symbolic point of contention: turn-of-the-millennium, cerebral, deliberately eschewing masculinity (metrosexuality arrived right on schedule to give the twee persona more of an urban, cosmopolitan touch for those who wanted it), he looks to everyone, himself most of all, a helluva lot like Wells's Eloi, and there's not a thing he can do about it.

As for the stigma on people in their 20s or 30s continuing to get financial assistance from their parents, that one's just plain baffling: since there is no such thing in 21^st century Western culture as the extended family (at least not for white people) or the middle-class private income, what exactly are young people supposed to do if they are not interested in immediately starting a lucrative career and focusing their energy on advancement? Is that really what we want all youth to do? And I know plenty of young “hipster” workaholics, but they have careers as things like hairdressers, chefs, or retail managers, all of which I assume Greif would scorn. Some of them work several jobs and live with their parents. I can't tell you why: maybe so they can be better consumers, or maybe because many people in their early 20s aren't emotionally ready to leave their families. Which makes another damned-if-you-do-or-don't: hipsters can't both be mega-consumers (one criticism) and slackers (another criticism), unless all of their parents are paying for everything... and they're not.

If we all agreed to define the hipster as “that young person, student, or ex-student who professes vaguely counterculture tastes and sentiments while doing nothing but mega-consuming corporate-marketed trends on their parents' dime,” I would readily agree to jump on the condemnation bandwagon, although I still wouldn't get excited about it. (Why? Because some of these people at least look cool and have good taste, and the world needs more of that. The ones that look like idiots I could do without, but they at least provide entertainment.) But that is not every young person, student, or ex-student who professes vaguely counterculture tastes and sentiments. In fact, I don't know anyone who meets this description. But then, I don't live in a major metropolitan centre.

From Camp to Kitsch

What the hipster represents to me, in line with the role they've taken over from the gay bohemian, is one major strain of the turn-of-the-millennium aestheticization of reality. I remember the moment when I realized that youth counterculture had taken over camp: when I saw Ghost World (2001) in my mid-twenties, and recognized that the young people who were extending the retro/thrift aesthetic of my teenage years had developed a particular aesthetic attitude to the world that strongly resembled Sontag's classic definition of “camp” (poisonous, and deadly hip, New York conduit as she was between the gay counterculture and the trendy liberal intelligentsia). The middle-class teenage “counterculture rebels” of Ghost World were attempting to reclaim kitsch – including the politically- charged kitsch of pre-p.c. racial stereotyping – as camp: as something of aesthetic/humourous value. As something cool. I have to admit that I was a little disturbed that the word “camp” never appeared in the film; and disturbed again when a similar issue comes up in the second episode of The Burg, and again, no mention of “camp” appears. (“Retro,” yes; “camp,” no.) Are hipsters really so ignorant of the gay subculture they so closely resemble, and to which they owe so much philosophically? There's a vague allusion to camp in the second Burg episode, when the hipsters' new roommate, the yupster Ryan (he has a job on Wall Street and naive enthusiasm for the “creativity” of hipster culture), seeing a decorating trend of such potential gay iconography as a Russ Meyer poster and an absence of signifiers of traditional masculinity (such as other posters of sexy women), asks one of them if they're gay, to his consternation – even though the less uptight Ryan thinks it would be cool or even “hot.” So maybe the male hipster (in some versions) did have to dissociate himself from homosexuality, considering that to the outside observer, it's hard to tell the difference between his taste and gay taste.

The Middle Class, Now Purely Symbolic

Lest we add the “appropriation” of gay culture to the list of the hipster's sins, however, it's important to note that Wilde appropriated the dandy for gay culture (after Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance permanently associated the aesthete with male homosexuality).*** It was Baudelaire who appropriated the dandy as the ideal persona for the avant-garde artist, because of his aristocratic disdain for the bourgeoisie; even though this disdain was now purely symbolic, with no basis in real socio-economic power: the bourgeois was in, the aristocrat was out. Much like the situation of the hipster now, according to its critics: the de-ethnicized bourgeois is out, the ethnicities he has historically oppressed are in. For the symbolic disdain of the dandy, which refused to bend to mass taste (the origins of kitsch), substitute the symbolic knowingness of the hipster. And with Baudelaire's appropriation of the dandy's symbolic elitism for the existential stance of the modern artist came the separation of the practice of art from the cultivation of the artist persona: for the first time, being an artist meant pissing off the bourgeoisie not only with your art but with the way you looked and acted. There had been many artists like this before (and the Romantics really dug it); but now it was a programme. By the time Wilde took it up, he thought the best way to piss off the bourgeoisie was to make that the main duty of the artist, of much greater importance than creating major artworks (which he managed to do almost by accident, and only once or twice). And to this day, it seems like the best way to piss off as many people as possible is to assume the pose of an elitist artist, or “artistic type,” which artists themselves seem reluctant to do, maybe because that persona (and their cultural influence) was taken over by the rock star. Well, nowadays everyone has learned how to be their own rock star, on Facebook or walking down the street. Except now it's not the conservatives getting riled up: it's the liberals and leftists, for whom “consumerism” is the only issue of the day, to the point where the once-trenchant critique is becoming meaningless. Conservatives are too busy worrying about youth developments that have little overlap with hipster culture, like teen pregnancy and single motherhood. Liberals, it seems to me, are a little bit too distracted by fashion on this one. 

*Hipster humour is a strange phenomenon. It's unusual for youth culture to be associated with a specific (or any) type of humour; we don't hear about punk humour or hippie humour. Or, if you want to suggest hipsterism as an art movement (which no one does, yet they somehow, like Greif, end up doing it anyway, if only to argue against it), it's not usual to associate those with humour either; Dadaism is the only exception I can think of. Fuelled by white liberal guilt and bourgeois self-loathing, hipster humour has paradoxically converted these things into a self-deprecation that's reminiscent of ethnic humour. That may form another source of frustration for the hipster's critics: if you come to youth with the expectation of punk rage or hippie love, and instead get snark, you are liable to perceive, humourlessly, as dispassion what is in fact a way of looking at the world from a viewpoint not only of aestheticism but of absurdism. (The humourless hipster, on the other hand, is just a fashion victim, like any other.)

**The hipster critic would reply to this that hipster taste is taught, and that's the point: it's taught at university, and its main signifying function is that you've been to university. Cutting class-based argument that this is, it's extremely attractive; unfortunately, it's not borne out by my experience. I picked up my hipster (or indie) taste in high school, and many of the “hipster youth” I know have never been anywhere near a university. If they ever plan to do so, it's not necessarily in the humanities. While it's true that some late-blooming hipsters only learn indie taste in university, it's sure not from their classes (mandatory listening to OK Computer or Funeral or viewing of HBO dramas is not part of the core humanities curriculum, at least not yet); as in high school, it's from their peers. The middle class, ranging from lower to upper, is currently faced with a choice: declass yourself by aligning yourself with elitist taste, or declass yourself by aligning yourself with populist taste. Either way, it's not your class (parental or personal income) that decides your taste, but your taste that decides your (symbolic) class.  

***Thus associated, "aesthete," like "hipster" (damningly associated with the white middle class) became uniformly a term of abuse, from which only a few brave souls have tried to rescue it. I'm one. I called myself an "aesthete" and defended aestheticism as often as possible throughout university, which didn't affect my marks (disappointing my  pretensions to intellectual martyrdom), but did get me into plenty of arguments with the professors who liked me best. Obviously, "aesthete" is no longer a term of abuse for its association with homosexuality, but for the implication that values exist that are independent of social constructs or materialist reductions. 

Beyond the Pale: The Rising Profile/Declining Relevance of the Hipster

It would appear that the hipster is officially dead. This is how I know:

1. In the mid-00s, hipster awareness hits the masses. Or at least, the small portion of the masses with  hipsterish tendencies. In 2006 a creative team from Williamsburg, Brooklyn produces the web sitcom The Burg about Williamsburg hipsters, with the tagline, “Who Says Gentrification Isn't Funny?” Although I only found out about that show a few days ago, I'm fairly sure that 2006 is the same year I start using the word, in such sentences as, “Oh my God, I'm SUCH a hipster.” I probably started using it in theatre school in Montreal, but when I returned to Regina, Saskatchewan, in the Canadian prairies, in 2007 – so, hardly a major metropolitan centre – it was in use in hipsterish circles. I have no idea where I first heard it, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in an article or on TV. It's much like that other amorphous, all-purpose term that was tossed around in the 00s and with which “hipster” has developed much overlap, “metrosexual,” except I know I did discover that term in an article. (From 2002: Mark Simpson's "Meet the Metrosexual." Mark has taken the occasion of the start of new decade to review the metrosexual's influential 00s trajectory in the just-released collection Metrosexy.) Like metrosexual, it was one of those terms where you instantly recognized the phenomenon (probably with a giggle) and understood its application even though you couldn't define it in less than 5000 words. Also rather like that all-important but all-subjective/all-contextual distinction of the online era, nerd vs. geek, which was gaining currency at the same time.
2. In October 2007, New Yorker popular music critic Sasha Frere-Jones bashes indie in the article “A Paler Shade of White” for being, you guessed it, too white, apparently unaware of the Unfortunate Implications, whereby you can't stereotype white people (i.e., mainly guys: they have no balls, rhythm, or “vigour”), however fair game they may be, without stereotyping black people (again, mainly guys: figure it out). Indie fans such as myself feel butthurt, but are also pretty quick to accept that they're bland, boring, and, of course, secretly deeply racist. And this despite the fact that Frere-Jones's thesis is reflecting perception more than reality, since during the 00s, there's been more indie/hip-hop collaboration and crossover than ever, what with the efforts of Danger Mouse and the critical and popular success of Damon Albarn's Gorillaz and M.I.A.'s art school hip-hop. Perhaps the British don't count.
3. In January 2008, Christian Lander creates his Stuff White People Like blog, a sort of rewrite of Theory of the Leisure Class as satire, but less snarky, and it instantly becomes a phenomenon, with a book deal. People love it, hate it, or love/hate it. It's widely recognized in the blogosphere that Lander is not talking about “white people” per se but rather hipsters. More Unfortunate Implications ensue, and the Great Cultural Divide between elitist hipster culture, middle class and apparently exclusively white, and white trash culture (e.g. reality TV), enjoyed by “the wrong kind of white people,” as Lander puts it, and all of their ethnic working-class friends, becomes apparent. No one knows what black people think about the uncool implication that if they have hipster taste it “makes them white,” which is what this tortuous form of white liberal guilt has resulted in by contorting itself into pretzely shape. Even though white people have been praying that having “black taste” (i.e., appropriating hip-hop culture) will make them black for, like, over a decade. Hipsters appear to be the only white people left who realize that they are hopelessly white, no matter how many ethnic foods they try.
4. Catching on to this trend rather late, in July 2008, and making up for it with hysteria, hipster magazine Adbusters declares hipsters the dead end of Western civilization. The article attracts a crapload of comments, most of them telling Adbusters to chill out. Adbusters might have avoided the uproar by specifying that they were describing the wrong kind of hipster – the kind who reads Vice. (First I'd heard of it. Is it like Mad magazine was in the 50s, or something? I mean, it sounds like the Futurists fighting the Dadaists, or some shit.) It becomes apparent that hipster self-loathing is an unprecedented intensification of the self-loathing that Marxist sociologist and art critic Arnold Hauser dryly identified as uniquely and bizarrely characteristic of the bourgeoisie, hence giving rise to the avant-garde (i.e. the ultimate roots of counter-culture and thus hipsterism). Obviously if Arnold were alive now he'd have a satirical faux-sociological blog instead of, like, massive tomes that I still haven't read all the way through.
5. Around this time, the hipster debt to indie makes me nostalgic for my youth, so I start wearing skinny jeans for the first time since I was 16. Luckily, as a recent graduate with an MA in English, I'm so poor that I'm thin enough to more-or-less get away with it for the first time since I was 16. At some point I also sport an ironic mullet, but grow afraid that no one in my city, where the wrong kind of white people are barely recovering from the non-ironic mullet, will realize that it's ironic, even though a co-worker at the bookstore drops a Karen O reference. I manage to resist every other hipster fashion movement because, frankly, they're as hideous as the hip-hop clothes. Trucker hats? Ironic vintage tees? (Funny for five minutes.) 80s sweaters – again? Designer nerd glasses? (Okay, if I'm honest, I would get those if I could afford a nice pair.) Neckerchiefs? You do know you look like a complete tool, right? Also, I'm in my mid-30s now, which puts me just outside the upper range of the hipster demographic, so I've got to watch it.
6. A little later, I go to browse in an HMV outlet and notice a table of books (since I work in a bookstore, I've always got my eye out for any undercutting by non-bookstores) whose theme appears to be counter-culture and which includes some of the subversive, underground books I read as a young teenager, which one found out about from word of mouth or researching David Bowie – notably Naked Lunch. When I next see my 20-year-old hipster sister, I share with her my shockhorror, declaring, “They've got a marketing table of hipster literature at HMV!!!!” But where was Story of the Eye? I mean, if Naked Lunch is no longer beyond the pale, what is? And what are the kids going to read now to shake up their middle-class sensibilities, now that The Man is selling the horror-porn milestones of counter-culture to them (and not Lou Reed's Man, either)? No wonder hipster youth is commonly characterized as jaded.
7. In the summer of 2009, the unthinkable happens: Jay Z attends a Grizzly Bear concert, then blogs that he hopes indie will “push hip-hop.” Indie music critics rejoice, since there's nothing to make something okay for white people like black people acceptance, and also because this seems to be a move in the direction of even more indie/hip-hop integration. Jay Z was apparently dragged to the concert by Solange Knowles, a high-profile black hipster – which, as we know, according to the definition of hipster made explicit by Lander, should be logically impossible. After all, if there's no such thing as an intellectual (assuming: hipster=faux intellectual), since intellectualism is always only class snobbery in disguise (you mean someone went to grad school and got indoctrinated with p.c. theory?), and, according to the guilty white liberal mind, black people can never be guilty of class snobbery, not even if they're middle class and over-educated like their white hipster brethren, ergo, black people can't be hipsters. Unfortunately for Lander et. al., it appears that hipsterism, rather than hip-hop, is the up-and-coming youth movement, and young black hipsters (born circa the mid-80s) are getting in people's faces about it. Another example: comedian Donald Glover, writer for 30 Rock (never seen it: too hip for me), actor on Community (just the right amount of wrong hipness: seen it, like it), member of web college humour sketch troupe Derrick Comedy (seen it on YouTube, funny), and nerdcore rapper under the name Childish Gambino (from his 2010 mixtapes: “Ima make my street cred stack up / I mean I'm rapping over Grizzly Bear, what the fuck?”).
8. And then, in spring 2010, indie critics expire with joy when Janelle Monae releases The ArchAndroid (I'm not kidding: the NME review actually made reference to Jay Z's blog remark), an uncategorizable hybrid album that embraces the entire history of 20^th century black American music while also overtly laying claim to the European avant-garde conceptual approach for popular music by black musicians. Suddenly, hipster recycling of the past (which has also, simultaneously, characterized underground hip-hop and dance) isn't dead-end, unoriginal pilfering but scintillating eclecticism. Whatever: as a YouTuber put it, at last, a female pop star with clothes and talent. If this is the future of post-rock, I can handle it.
9. Which brings us to summer of 2011. First, a few days ago I found myself using the term “hipster” in a positive sense for the first time ever. A hipster that I became friendly with over Doctor Who (note the hipster-geek overlap; also, in North America, the right kind of British pop culture is always hip) while working in the warehouse of my bookstore (note the hipster working class cred) – he works in the affiliated coffee shop, and we met when he'd take the garbage out through the back – told me he had a new job as a chef in a new restaurant. I asked him if it was a hipster joint. He said he thought it was going to be. And I said that in that case, I'd have to come and check it out. Note (because I have to spell it out) that this exchange took place without irony. It might have been the same day I observed in a memo from a publisher that “hipster” is now a literary marketing category, apparently identifying a strain of “literary fiction” that people actually read; not, obviously, because it's good, but because it's hip (mainly by guys: Palahniuk, Chabon, Franzen... is this the first time marketing has told the strict truth?). (No Logo – remember that? – author Naomi Klein was thrown in as the token chick.)
   
   
   COMING UP: In Part II of this post-mortem, I ask, “Who Was the Hipster?” (Unsurprisingly, NYMag already declared this death in the fall of 2010, but hey, even in the online/global era, trends take a while to reach Regina from New York. Anyway, my definition of “hipster,” and most people's, is probably a bit broader than the one they use in, excuse me, New York.)
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   (I googled “Who Was the Hipster” to find out whether to capitalize the “was.”)
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Notes on Hipsterism, Loser Culture, the New Failure Focus, and the Mysteriously Enduring Popularity of the Hardboiled Detective

It turns out I can't make the artificial distinction between pop culture, literature and amateur sociology. But I'll tie it into literature by the end of the post and also, I'm sure, in future posts.

A Loser, Baby

As an idle zeitgeist-watcher, I've developed over the years a theory of how slackers became losers, on the one hand, and hipsters, on the other. You remember "slackers," that censorious boomer term for people in their early 20s, who, it was thought, had no ambition or work ethic. Its introduction to late 20th century pop culture was accomplished, as far as I know, by the 1991 Richard Linklater film Slacker, and the same period, the early 90s, also saw the introduction of the term "loser" into pop culture, with Radiohead's "Creep" ("I'm a creep, I'm a loser / What the hell am I doing here? / I don't belong here") and Beck's "Loser" ("I'm a loser, baby / So why don't you kill me"). Between them, the two songs, ubiquitous on the radio throughout the 90s, heralded, with Nirvana, a new era of depressive, self-deprecating youth, whether you were emo (also known as "what people with no sense of humour thought The Smiths were") or a hipster, two strains of youth culture best characterized by their relationship to irony (total absence or total saturation).

I was in my late teens (sixteen and on) when all of this happened, and I remember being insulted by the term "slacker" even though I wasn't one of the twentysomethings being implicated: it still seemed like the old people were unfairly branding my generation. I don't recall noticing the Radiohead or Beck songs until the late 90s, though, when I was approaching my mid-20s and getting divorced. Maybe it was because they spoke to me then (I was also going through career failure), or maybe it took me so long to notice them because I never listened to pop stations and rarely watched MTV. The sentiments of "Creep" repulsed me, while "Loser" made me laugh. I did, however, like Radiohead's "Just," which was as masochistic as "Creep" but more vigorous. Anger works when humour fails.

Loser TV

The loser appeared on TV a little ahead of his pop music emergence, in the person of George Costanza on Seinfeld. No one had ever seen anything like George before: physically unremarkable (balding, short, tubby), mentally unremarkable, neurotic, browbeaten by his parents, unable to hold down a job. George was a born loser with self-sabotage added for good measure, and no one had seen a TV character like this before, someone you couldn't either identify with as a fantasy or look down on and laugh at. Instead, you looked down on George and identified with him at the same time.

Loser TV flourished in the UK as well, initially with the series Black Books (2000-2004), with the loser mantle taken up by Peep Show (2003-present). Black Books, created by and starring Dylan Moran, centered on the misanthropic, chainsmoking-and-wine drinking Bernard Black, owner of a tiny bookshop, his flunky Manny (the tricky slave to his senex iratus, in Frygian terms: from Fawlty Towers on, British sitcoms like to stay close to the classic template), and their neurotic friend Fran. As if their (unusual) interest in books disqualifies them for reality, not one of the main characters is capable of real work (the bookshop itself doesn't count) or a relationship, and Bernard and Fran constantly engage in the un-p.c. self-destructive behaviours of smoking and drinking. Fran is a Bernard who guiltily tries to better herself, but by the third and last season she has all but given up and accepted that she is just as unfit for normal life as Bernard. In the characterization of her college friends from the climax of her character trajectory, the devastating episode "Elephants and Hens" from season three, Fran is a "crazy spinster" only fit to hang out with the bookshop "freaks."

Whereas Black Books seemed to express the personal vision of its creator (namely, that the modern world wasn't worth living in and it was much better to hole up with a book, cigarettes and wine), Peep Show seems more like a generational commentary. Mark and Jez are odd couple roomies in their thirties: Mark the uptight nerd and Jez the laidback slacker. Despite being opposites, however, they're united in their complete lack of equipment for success by the same old standards of measurement: career, money, relationships, raising a family. Between the two of them, they can just about manage work and sex respectively, though not very well. Mark can hold down a dull office job and takes work seriously enough to want to get ahead in it, but unfortunately he has no talent, and when by a miracle he does start to rise, he naturally screws it up. Jez has nothing but scorn for the "straight" world of work, thinking he's going to make it as a musician, but he, too, is hampered by lack of any talent. Although Mark seems comparatively "mature," in fact both are boys, curiously stunted in the development of their life skills and emotions, and their growing co-dependency (as in Black Books) makes it worse. As the series progresses, viewers watch and wait for time to take its course as the characters get older without getting ahead and grow more desperate all the time.

Peep Show maybe proves that you don't have to be a bohemian with acute mental illness to be desperate. It's enough to be an ordinary person unable to figure out (or, deep down, to care) how a dull life works in a culture obsessed with youth, so that you go from being young and carefree to being a pathetic loser by exhibiting the same behaviours and maintaining the same level of success in your thirties (and forties, and fifties) as in your twenties. Turning thirty (the age of the fictional Jonathan Ames in Bored to Death) seems to be the gunshot that starts the race, after which every second that passes without accomplishment decreases your social status and increases your existential desperation. Like the gunshot of turning twenty for an unmarried Jane Austen heroine.

The Loser and the Recession

The mighty Curb Your Enthusiasm, starring the real George Constanza, debuted the same year as Black Books. Trust the Irish and the Jews to know a thing or two about losing. I have to admit I've never watched more CYE than a few seconds of the first episode, so sick was I of the Seinfeld hype by that time, and also going through a period (my entire twenties) where I "didn't watch TV" (meaning I watched very little, mainly Buffy), until the advent of DVD availability and the HBO and Showtime era seduced me back (so now I watch a little more). Nevertheless, in my casual, totally subjective overview, if the 90s introduced the concept of the loser as a pop culture identification figure, the concept truly flourished in the 2000s, after which it may have gradually fizzled out if it weren't for one thing: the recession.

The global recession of 2007 gave the loser a new lease on life and retroactively justified the slacker attitude. Once, young people rejected their boomer parents' materialism; now, we discovered we would never get ahead if we tried. Once, we refused to mature and become bourgeois; now, we discovered that the social symbols of maturity (house, car, family, career advancement.... leaving your parents' house) would either be unavailable to us or come very late. Once we thought we might like to live like bohemians not only in our twenties (which still gives you time to become bourgeois on schedule) but into our thirties; now we learned that we could be living that way into our forties, or fifties... or permanently.

The Loser and the Hipster

At exactly what point did the defining term for the post-boomer generation change from "slacker" to "hipster"? As notoriously elusive as Sontag's camp, the condition of being a hipster is defined both against mainstream culture (the trash culture celebrated by reality TV) and bourgeois culture (i.e. corporate culture, whose promises of success for the individual are ever-decreasing since the recession).  The hipster was consolidated as a cultural figure by the time of the publication of Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like in book form in early 2008, although Lander participated in a common confusion by making "white people" (i.e., hipsters) refer to both the new, young, post-boomer middle class in their thirties who have disposable income to spend on consumer products geared towards bourgeois bohemians; and what he calls the "poor by choice," namely arts grad students, who will for the rest of their lives exhibit a comical disparity between their overeducated snob tastes and their poverty. But although the media has tried to account for low-income hipsters by pointing to the glutting of urban centres by the sons and daughters of the middle class, you don't, in fact, need either to live in a major urban centre or (contra Lander) have a university education to be a hipster. If you were anywhere between six and forty when indie music crossed over into the mainstream in the early 90s or have passed through adolescence since that event, you, too, had the option of becoming a hipster without ever going anywhere near a university. Really, hipster taste is just urban taste, and in the era of global marketing and the internet, nothing is easier than to acquire urban taste even when you're miles from a major urban centre.

In recessionary pop culture, the hipster and the loser dance around each other without completely coinciding. The recession and its economic fallout have confirmed that post-boomers are losers, and hipsterism is the most recognizable form of post-boomer youth culture, and, like the also urban dandyism of the latter 19th century, can be supported even without any income, because its focus is taste, not property - a superior state of being rather than a superior state of having. But you can also be a hipster without being a loser and a loser without being a hipster. Take the cast of Community: the only hipsters are Jeff and Britta, who are also the only "white people" (under 60) by the show's implicit definition. (In another sociological perceptual filter, Annie, who is Jewish, might be "white" and/or a hipster, but here she is "ethnic" and a preppie nerd.) They're two different, mutually hostile varieties of hipster, too: Jeff is a metrosexual hipster, a narcissistic womanizer; Britta's a hipster's hipster, a white liberal guilt-tripper who scorns Jeff`s metrosexuality as vulgarly retro. Although by the show's definition, which coincides with Lander's hipster definition of hipsters, non-"whites" can't be hipsters, they can be hipper than the hipsters (like Abed) or cooler than the hipsters (like Troy: you're automatically cooler than white people if you're black unless you're Christian, like Shirley, and the white people are implied agnostics or atheists - Community is easily the most overtly secular, or rather specifically anti-Christian, mainstream show I've ever seen, also reflecting trends within the young hipster demographic it seeks). Meanwhile, the show itself is a hipster comedy (due to its self-reflexive pop humour and mixture of liberal inclusiveness and cheeky post-p.c. "edge") about losers (adults and other failures attending community college). The undercurrent of class warfare was most apparent in the episode where Jeff and Britta (who, as white people, are the most sensitive about their social status, since after all they belong to the social group that's losing ground, as Lander records) get involved in a battle with some obnoxious high school kids who mock them for being unsuccessful adults. The hipster-loser viewer can't help but cheer when the show plays to her prejudices in the climactic food fight by providing legends that identify the moronic, infantile teens as future Ivy League graduates and Supreme Court justices.

Bored to Death is likewise a hipster comedy about losers, although the set of reference points is literary-hipster rather than pop-hipster (although the boundary is hazy, since the hardboiled detective character is pop-literary and comic books are both a pop and a print medium). Pre-recession, the loser isn't a failure so much as a fuck-up: there is no conceivable universe in which George Constanza, Bernard Black or Mark and Jez could get ahead. We identify with the loser's inability to navigate ordinary life but recognize that our own incapacities are comically exaggerated in these characters. In recessionary loser comedy, in contrast, the loser has failed not due to obvious, gross incapacities but because "failure" is normal (even if it hurts white people's egos) or the odds are so stacked against him or her. Both Community and Bored to Death are - in their different ways, at moments, in between the comic hijinks that are the main point - about learning how to negotiate failure, which is also re-understanding what success is. A borderline loser in the first season, by the start of the second season "Jonathan Ames" is a confirmed loser: his second novel has been rejected, he's teaching writing (the seal of death for most writers' careers unless they're already famous) at night school, and George can't help him out with assignments because of budget cuts to his magazine. By the anxious standards of the early 21st century, Jonathan is, as he worries out loud, "washed up at 30." Of course as George, in his role as sage, tells Jonathan, that's completely absurd. A thirty-year-old is a child (as the casting of baby-faced, adolescent-voiced Schwartzman emphasizes), and life still holds decades of experiences and surprises. And even if Jonathan is never a success as a writer or anything else, as George tells him in a later episode, how can he be a "failure" when he's a writer and a detective - two pleasurable occupations that make life more interesting?

The Writer and the Detective

Why, anyway, the hardboiled detective - whether you're Jonathan Ames or Roberto Bolano, who teasingly claimed in the last interview before his death that he would rather have been a homicide detective than a writer? If I recall correctly from my early teenage reading, Camus liked the hardboiled detective too, that lone, lonely figure who lived by his own code. In the secular, relativistic early 21st century, only the fantasy of being as cool, iconic and in control as the hardboiled detective can survive the scrutiny of the ironic postmodern/hipster eye (in which regard he is to us as the dandy was to Baudelaire). The fantasy of being a hardboiled detective is, after all, is, like the fantasy of being a writer (however dreary and demoralizing the reality may be), not only a leap of faith that life might, after all, be more interesting than it appears, but a fantasy of oneself being interesting. Like the Quixotism of Emma Bovary or, for that matter, of Quixote. Except that the Quixotism of "Jonathan Ames" is more gently entertained, at least in the show's first two seasons, as though what the late Western capitalist/recessionary/corporate world of the eternal bottom line could use is a little more whimsical fantasy, not less.