merchants of cool: outside the machine??

Even a decade later, the documentary Merchants of Cool is still very relevant.  One aspect of it I want to discuss is the cooption of "outsider" culture by the "machine" of consumerism/media, and the way in which this happens constantly today.  The example that Merchants gave was of this rock group whose members dressed like killer clowns and whose lyrics promoted hate toward women/homosexuality; apparently, people joined its fan base because they wanted to rebel against society, to exist on the fringe.  Less extreme is "hipster" culture today -- hipsters were originally people who, similar to the clown band, resisted conforming to the mainstream, and created their own alternative, counter-culture.  They were typically outsiders and anti-establishment, with unique, progressive world views and non-conventional lifestyles. 

However, today, it seems like everyone and everything has been coined "hipster," and it's a title that people readily embrace.  Honestly, the term is about equivalent to "basic" now, which is funnily enough the exact opposite of what hipsters aspired to be.  I personally noticed this trend begin around seventh grade, when the #urb saw its peak.  #Urb was an adjective to describe people or pictures on social media that, essentially, were hipster -- flower crowns, dream catchers, images of running through uncut fields, posing by graffiti with a beanie, wearing tie-dye, etc.  Suddenly, all of my peers, including myself, wanted to be this mainstream and contrived version of hipster.  #Urb was one of the biggest compliments you could receive, along with "OMG that's so hipster!!"  There was a glorification of "Tumblr girls," or model-like teens who took high quality, aesthetically pleasing, creative #urb photos, such as them blowing bubbles among wildflowers or laying on abandoned train tracks.  And me? I got a Canon camera for my birthday, and my free time was soon consumed with taking #urb shots of my Converse, dead flowers, etc.  I even had some photoshoots with friends in Old Sac and in random parks. 

a seventh grade attempt to be #urb by urs truly!!

The new "hipster" clothing was basically anything from PacSun, a store that masquerades as being rough and uncut but is really very consumerist and very mainstream (honestly I still shop here so I am guilty of this).  The most "in" shirts were ones with pictures of the moon on them, along with denim shorts that appeared to be hand-made, hats with little aliens on them, and patterned shawls with fringe.  A place one can easily spot a conglomerate of all of this is any music festival, like Coachella or Outside Lands.  Here, people dress as "hipster" as possible (often this is self-proclaimed), supposedly going to listen to indie bands that are outside typical pop culture.  But those "indie" bands have, largely through these festivals, gotten as caught up in the media machine as any others -- Coachella is not an event that people go to solely for the love of music anymore, it's to dress up in hipster outfits and take cute pictures.  Popular clothing lines have celebrities going to Coachella to advertise their "hipster music festival" line, and the previously on the fringe, counterculture bands are more or less well-known.  The words "hipster" and "indie" have been so coopted for this purpose that they're hardly matching up to their original meaning. 

I'm just as much a part of this media machine as everyone else -- like I said, I shop at PacSun, and I still want to go to Coachella someday, if not only for the clothing aspect.  I still enjoy taking #urb photos (even though that hashtag is now a thing of the past), and listening to the now mainstream indie bands (yes, that is an oxymoron, but it's the best way I can describe it.)  But I guess the point of this was just to recognize that Merchants of Cool was right -- in today's world, attempts to exist external to pop culture is very difficult, since the mainstream media is so pervasive that it eats anything in its path. 

xoxo, elyse