Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
K-pop correlation
How can you decide you don’t like K-pop based only on your perception of K-pop fans?
2NE1: Even you, Mr. Cool Kid
Dear Hipster:
I was talking to a coworker of mine the other day. You can safely assume he (or she) qualifies as a real hipster. I can’t remember exactly how we started talking about it, but the conversation somehow turned to K-pop, which isn’t something I would normally talk about at work. I actually think I made a K-pop joke about something, which might or might not have been funny, considering I don’t know all that much about K-pop. Before we got too deep into the conversation, my coworker said something like, “Ugh, I can’t stand K-pop. It has the worst fanbase.” I don’t understand that correlation. How can you decide you don’t like K-pop based only on your perception of K-pop fans? Is there some kind of weird, hipster reverse “sins of the father” dogma going on here and I didn’t get the memo?
— Dallas
This is totally a hipster thing, but it’s not solely a hipster thing, because it comes from an all-too-human sense of tribalism. If you do a little bit of asking around, you can easily find people who will leap at the opportunity to cast aspersions on fans of Star Wars, Starbucks, or the (formerly Oakland) Raiders. As humans, we naturally fabricate superstitious connections or divisions between ourselves and others based on arbitrary categories of information.
At one point in time, these were probably much more literal criteria, like “People Who Live in the Hills and Eat Mostly Plants,” as opposed to “People Who Live by the Sea and Eat Mostly Fish But Also Have Tans.” Fast forward a couple of thousand years, and we have become a lot more inventive in our ways of sorting people into otherwise meaningless groups based on things as random as a preference for one caffeine vendor over another, or dressing like impoverished Juggalos during NFL tailgate parties.
The particularly hipster twist on this fact pattern admits of two elements. First, hipsters define their sense of identity, both collectively and on an individual basis, largely in terms of being “not” affiliated with people, things, or ideas. Much like so-called “burning mouth syndrome” (the most obviously named idiopathic medical condition in existence, which I promise you is a real thing), hipsterism is primarily a diagnosis of exclusion. Second, the categories from which hipsters strive to exclude themselves are almost all things that mainstream people consider fabulously trivial. The average hipster would be absolutely devastated by insinuations he was a secret BTS fan, and merely nonplussed by suggestions he might be a communist or a libertarian.
Normally, I champion hipster stuff, but I can’t really defend this one. It’s not so much the need to distance oneself from a particular pop cultural phenomenon that bothers me. I’m all in favor of being an inveterate snob. It’s not even the need to prioritize seemingly meaningless personal entertainment preferences over more substantial stuff. I think the world would maybe be a better place if we all cared more about bacon and less about foreign policy. It’s the collateral damage of writing off a group of people that bugs me. Hate The Big Bang Theory all you want, but hate it because it’s a terrible show, not because you want to prove you’re better than the people who watch it. This is one of the few hipster trends I can’t get behind.
Here's something you might be interested in.
K-pop correlation
How can you decide you don’t like K-pop based only on your perception of K-pop fans?
K-pop correlation
How can you decide you don’t like K-pop based only on your perception of K-pop fans?
2NE1: Even you, Mr. Cool Kid
Dear Hipster:
I was talking to a coworker of mine the other day. You can safely assume he (or she) qualifies as a real hipster. I can’t remember exactly how we started talking about it, but the conversation somehow turned to K-pop, which isn’t something I would normally talk about at work. I actually think I made a K-pop joke about something, which might or might not have been funny, considering I don’t know all that much about K-pop. Before we got too deep into the conversation, my coworker said something like, “Ugh, I can’t stand K-pop. It has the worst fanbase.” I don’t understand that correlation. How can you decide you don’t like K-pop based only on your perception of K-pop fans? Is there some kind of weird, hipster reverse “sins of the father” dogma going on here and I didn’t get the memo?
— Dallas
This is totally a hipster thing, but it’s not solely a hipster thing, because it comes from an all-too-human sense of tribalism. If you do a little bit of asking around, you can easily find people who will leap at the opportunity to cast aspersions on fans of Star Wars, Starbucks, or the (formerly Oakland) Raiders. As humans, we naturally fabricate superstitious connections or divisions between ourselves and others based on arbitrary categories of information.
At one point in time, these were probably much more literal criteria, like “People Who Live in the Hills and Eat Mostly Plants,” as opposed to “People Who Live by the Sea and Eat Mostly Fish But Also Have Tans.” Fast forward a couple of thousand years, and we have become a lot more inventive in our ways of sorting people into otherwise meaningless groups based on things as random as a preference for one caffeine vendor over another, or dressing like impoverished Juggalos during NFL tailgate parties.
The particularly hipster twist on this fact pattern admits of two elements. First, hipsters define their sense of identity, both collectively and on an individual basis, largely in terms of being “not” affiliated with people, things, or ideas. Much like so-called “burning mouth syndrome” (the most obviously named idiopathic medical condition in existence, which I promise you is a real thing), hipsterism is primarily a diagnosis of exclusion. Second, the categories from which hipsters strive to exclude themselves are almost all things that mainstream people consider fabulously trivial. The average hipster would be absolutely devastated by insinuations he was a secret BTS fan, and merely nonplussed by suggestions he might be a communist or a libertarian.
Normally, I champion hipster stuff, but I can’t really defend this one. It’s not so much the need to distance oneself from a particular pop cultural phenomenon that bothers me. I’m all in favor of being an inveterate snob. It’s not even the need to prioritize seemingly meaningless personal entertainment preferences over more substantial stuff. I think the world would maybe be a better place if we all cared more about bacon and less about foreign policy. It’s the collateral damage of writing off a group of people that bugs me. Hate The Big Bang Theory all you want, but hate it because it’s a terrible show, not because you want to prove you’re better than the people who watch it. This is one of the few hipster trends I can’t get behind.
Comments