No. 355 - It's Square to be Hip

Are you drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon with your ill-earned trust fund money, a flannel shirt tied around your waist, blabbing about your latest philanthropic cause and your vegan lifestyle astride a fixed-gear bicycle, or perhaps a scooter? Are you wearing an ironic trucker hat and an American Apparel long sleeved shirt? Do you look down your nose at anything anyone else likes, but secretly covet it?

Does your second-hand-esque wardrobe clash with your $100 haircut that gives you a permanent disheveled bedhead? In your strenuous attemps to look "thrown together" and act like you don't give a damn, do you actually take heavy stock in what people think about you?

Yes to all the above, you say? Well then, you, friend, are a hipster douchebag. That's correct: it's a scientific fact and a well researched topic, from the mouths of culture's greatest thinkers; they say hipsters, who don't really have an identity, are destroying our very idea of a counter culture. It's a manufactured, prefabricated personality, as insincere as it is strangely appealing.

Hipsters have strangled some of the finer things in our society and mashed them into a two-dimensional self-caricature, cannibalizing bits and pieces from longstanding counter cultures into one disingenuous identity that makes hipsters more like uniformed drones than intellectual outsiders who have the "in" on every cool style, movie or band.

In fact, if you happen to be a hipster, you are most definitely too cool to be reading this. Your coolness meter is so in the red that even if you do think something is cool, you'll go to your grave never admitting it.

One exception we'll make in our skewering of hipsters is Wes Anderson, whom, we feel is more pre-hipster. In fact, hipsters likely attached themselves to this master of cinema regardless of how he felt about the assimilation. Wes Anderson is genuine, swept up in the hipster movement in the same manner that Kurt Cobain shunned the grunge moniker. Same goes for indy rock. And PETA. And Greenpeace. And scarves.

We must be rid of hipsters at once; inaction is tantamount to guilt for being a part of hipsterism's growing influence. Hipsters are infesting our best restaurants and nightclubs, even overruning Salvation Armys across this great land. They're ruining literature and art, blurring the lines between brilliance and crap, kitschy and just plain dumb. They're yuppies in vintage clothing.

We shall not be overcome by this societal scourge. We are burning our horn-rimmed glasses in effigy. And then we'll burn all of our Decemberists albums and cook a big steak over the fire.