The Hipster | My Melancholy

I am really excited to see Medicine for Melancholy. It is known as the black hipster flick by Barry Jenkins, set in San Francisco between two unicorns and it opens in Los Angeles tomorrow. I saw Ernest Hardy’s review of it and put that ish on my calendar.

In the meantime I’ve been thinking about hipsters. I have been this way for about a month now way after the backlash. I feel like Mexico still wearing acid wash jeans and fauxhawks. I’ve been thinking about hipsters of color. And when I put those two together—hipster and of color—the divergence between those terms appears far, wide and laden in clarity. Oxymoronic? I don’t want to have to go into making keywords for theory here but put simply I believe that what bugs most people about hipsters is the hipster’s blatant disavowal of economic justice. Whereas a self-determined modifier such as of color announces itself to be fully aware of the historical implications of the societal context it finds itself existing and enduring. You know, consciousness. Not just a Black Star album, but having the lights on in every part of the house so you can see exactly who and what is coming in and going out, socially speaking of course.

Of course I have also been thinking about white hipsters. I feel so passé admitting this but you can’t have a concept like hipster of color and not go to the source of contention. So different yet on some levels it ends up being the same—is a hipster always a hipster? Or is the grating of our political nerves struck differently at different political timbres? Do white hipsters bug you the way black and brown ones do? Is it all class-based?

There is so much hipster hatred going on right now in the many worlds I inhabit—both blogosphere and the physical, critical and creative communities made up of the artist-activist-academic peoples—the humble, broke-ass kind. Many hate the hipster’s entitlement over our gardens and taquerias. Immigrants and their kinship networks have suddenly fanned their own isolationist impulses against spoon-fed outsiders. A bad scene, everyone's fault.

(And when I say hatred I mean it in the hateration sense, not any hate crime sense—but you knew that, right?)

Anyway…


It began to crystallize here—a few weeks ago I caught the Danny Hoch Taking Over show here in Los Angeles in one of the city’s western pockets called Culver City. The show was basically hip-hop theater’s most prominent hustler, Danny Hoch, telling the audience that the changes in the last twelve years in all of New York and its (un)real estate development is ruining an otherwise economically depressed yet thoroughly authentic Williamsburg (a neighborhood where Hoch owns property). A solo performance about gentrification—get it? Hipsters are ruining everything. They’re cannibals. They attract families with children and the authenticity of poor and working class folks of color gets siphoned into the outer suburban areas.

Now I know—a big theater touring production that breaks down the ills and powerlessness against gentrification is a positive contribution to educating theater patrons, the kind that can afford to drop a wad of cash to nod off in the middle of the show. But what I can’t get with is Hoch’s equal assailing of white and black hipsters. Somehow he thinks they belong to the same branch of evil. But white hipster is not a black hipster is not a brown hipster.

What bugs me about that is that I get the feeling that hipsterism is somehow an indicator of whitewashing—that somehow the person of color engaging in hipster-like activities is somehow less authentic than someone participating in hip-hop culture. And that a neighborhood’s coolness depends on the authenticity of its inhabitants of color. It feels like you’re less a person and more cool-kid accoutrement for those trying to pass as urban and down.

I have my own gentrification narrative and feel somewhat self-conscious by all things hipster, simply by the way I have been consuming music, politics and culture for the last fifteen years. They have always been around me in different degrees—some have politics, others want to know what’s up in music, cheap eats, new designers, etc. They linger like carrion birds, waiting for bits of flesh. For the most part a lot of them I’ve known through art and music, but back then I used to identify these people as scenesters. But because we have inhabited similar spaces for so long I sometimes feel compelled to be a cultural broker between scenesters and those whose spaces they encroach upon. What a burden, especially because most of the time they don’t want to be bothered. That’s when I realize that I’m progressive and they’re liberal. They only like Animal Collective and Glenn Branca. I like Animal Collective, Glenn Branca and Chavela Vargas and Betty Davis. They’re never going to go the extra mile.

My self-consciousness also comes because I know I operate under a mix of hipster trappings, such as the actual aesthetic I impose upon my own brown queer female with alternative gender presentation to the world. I, of course, could never be a hipster—I’m too stocky, too butch, too brown. I get mistaken for the nanny. I translate for janitors. I’m too goddamn earnest. I wear Dickies and thrift-store clothes but have been doing that since I was a kid, going shopping with my mother. How stoked was she that she didn’t have to spend money on me when I wasn’t wearing a catholic school uniform. I do understand from experience and from reading practices that there are lots of people of color that choose to overlook identity particularities or not engage them actively.

Like M. Ward for instance. Homeboy's from Ventura, Califas and born of a Mexican mother but does he engage child of immigrant angst in any of his intelligent folk music? No, he doesn't have to and that's what bugs. Sure his music is cool but when you're a listener bringing in your own context politicized as a person of consciousness. It's hard to not feel some level of alienation considering that the artist in question doesn't have to--I guess that's what makes the hipster litmus test.

So a film like Medicine for Melancholy seems like a nice and complicated counterpoint to the reductive reads of black and brown kids listening to rock as being byproducts of self-loathing. Here are characters self-conscious about those trappings. I feel of course very strange and conflicted about growing up liking punk and indie rock and most rock, a lot of it by white artists. I ride a bike and eat organic, watch indie films and all that other cliché stuff that for the last fifteen years hasn’t felt like a cliché but just choices in consumption. I feel somewhat entitled to it all since I’ve worked hard to access independent circuits of cultural production but I’m also down to watch an hour’s worth of Nancy Grace and the latest Will Smith flick with my parents and extended family.

(the author as a young queer, circa 1994)


But, what about me? I already know about the ills of gentrification. I have been concerned with it for a long time. I moved out of my parents’ Bell Gardens home in 1998 when I was 22 to move to a neighborhood that was not West Hollywood, where I could be Latina and into queercore and riot grrl and dykes and music and musicians, pay cheap rent to boot. I lived and learned and loved on Bellevue and Benton for five years, in an apartment being vacated by two fifty-something white coupled working class lesbians that were moving near Lake Tahoe to have a little piece of the world with their names on it. The window on the door had a decal with a unicorn encircled by a rainbow back before that shit was ironic.


I patronized all the queer Latino establishments—Dreams on Sunday at Spaceland, Club Nayarit for their Klub Fantasy nights, Escandalo at the Axis in West Hollywood, Le Barcito for a night out with the queens, Silverlake Lounge and the Garage Sunday nights, Tempo on Santa Monica Boulevard, Little Joy’s way back when, Jalisco Inn when The Smell became unbearable and Woody’s before it became MJ’s. I’d go here when the cute mod girls only dated other cute mod girls. It became impossible to be singly and mingly at hetero-dominated clubs like Café Bleu and Velvet.

I worked in a range of surreal music industry jobs and having my consciousness raised thanks to music; made friends with community based artists and organizers, particip ated in youth-centered political projects, and was conflicted about musicians with big label forlorn. I worked and then quit my full-time job as an “e-commerce coordinator” for an online music label right as the Internet bubble was about to burst and returned full-time to college, getting a degree from Cal State Northridge in the lovely San Fernando Valley. And this whole time one of my three roommates that shared the 2-bedroom, paid less than $435 a month from a mostly data entry job.

You could make music, see poets, buy chapbooks, make a nice little DiY-community, and there was one around the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhoods. Café Luna y Sol was possibly at the epicenter for a while there, when I lived just a block north of the 101. I caught Manu Chao’s midnight acoustic performance secret show there with fifty other Xicanos, as well as Jerry Quickley’s open mic night every other Wednesday. It was a time when tofu tacos inspired you to do a double take.

In 2003 I moved from Silverlake to New York for one year to pursue a shot at academia, wondering if all my denouncement of corporate structures could translate into grad school idealism. This is how I would serve the movement—as an intellectual.

A year later, I found myself returning to that very neighborhood only to find unaffordable housing with an entry-level job’s salary. A job I have been at for four years and my salary hasn’t changed much. Did I mention I work at a private university? It’s funny in that embittered kind of way but my working in the penumbra of the intellectual industrial complex mirrors my music industry working period—I pursued these jobs to be close to entities I love: music and theory.

Hey, I have an idea to counter my growing feelings of powerlessness against gentrification! Let’s do queer performance! I saw Vaginal Crème Davis open for the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at 18 at Jabberjaw, I know what I’m doing! And that doesn’t make me a hipster—that makes me a tragically jerky fanatic, Jack Black’s Barry from High Fidelity, if you will.



And I like and will take my theater uncritically in most instances consuming the catharsis the way I would a Tommy’s chiliburger—I know it’s bad for me but it feels pretty damn good because it is so easy. So I wish I could be totally hipster about it and embrace Hoch’s inhabitation of character of color, but I can’t. And when I am not reducing my critical metaphors to Barry’s self-righteous outburst about Mitch Ryder vs. the Righteous Brothers in the clip above, I am actually engaging in an act of resistance against a white person professionally performing people of color on stage.

I can’t get with that—call it a difference of political opinion if you can. I cringe because there are so many black and brown educated young theater and spoken word cats that I see at his show nodding their heads in approval.

Oh man. But that’s not even my beef!