By
Jay Fox
Brooklyn,
NY, USA
Nostalgia,
it can be said, is universal and persistent; only other men's
nostalgias
offend — Raymond Williams
It's surprising to see that
“hipster” is still used to denote essentially the same type of person it was
meant to describe ten or fifteen years ago. On the one hand, it's surprising
because it means styles haven't changed that much. On the other hand, it's
strange that it still doesn't refer to anything specific—just a general
attitude that people find bothersome and pretentious.
To me, a hipster has always been
someone who seems to manufacture their
eccentricities and has a condescending
attitude towards those who don't appreciate their aesthetic choices. Hence the
contempt for hipsters. Ostensibly, another reason so many despise this group of
people is because they claim to be ahead of trends, which requires extensive
research that normal people can't do.
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| Jay Fox |
There are several potential
readings of the subtexts in this reaction, but I would like to focus on two for
now and return to another one later in this essay.
The first is resentment based on a
presumed privilege of the other—i.e., I would also know about all of these
trends before they became trends, too, but (unlike the hipster) I have to spend
too much of my time making a living to do so. The second is a desire to
distance oneself from the hipster in order to ingratiate oneself to another
person or group of people. The more one appears to be akin to the hipster in
the presumed eyes of the desired person or group, the more vehemently one
denounces hipsters. Seen this way, to condemn someone as a hipster is both to
identify that person as privileged and to renounce what could be the
discernible signs of privilege in oneself.
I've touched on this in other
essays. This is because I used to live in an area where it was generally agreed
that a lot of hipsters resided—the northern Brooklyn neighborhood of
Greenpoint. Hipsters were an everyday part of life. Shallowness abounded, but
the beer was cheap, inhibitions were hard to come by and you still occasionally
found yourself crashing a party in a loft that didn't look like it had just
been featured in Brownstoner. It was not the New York City of the
Ramones or even GG Allin, but there was still some grit. McCarren Park was not
ringed by towering condos, there were still blocks that seemed best to avoid
and the trickle of yuppies from Manhattan into Williamsburg had yet to turn
into a torrent.
However, once I moved a few
neighborhoods away, I began to have far fewer interactions with hipsters. Even
the word “hipster” began to kind of fade from my vocabulary. The people with
whom I associated the word didn't disappear, but they ceased to be a group with
whom I seriously concerned myself. They fit rather comfortably into another era
in my life. The word lost some of its pejorative teeth. I eventually came to
believe that it was silly for someone over the age of 30 to even bother
thinking about the word or the people it denoted, let alone possess a desire to
return to an area that was indisputably hip.
And yet I had lived in Greenpoint
for several years. I felt an attachment to the area. My time there represented
a period in time when I had first been of legal drinking age and
had some
amount of disposable income. It was the first neighborhood where I really came
to know most of the bars. Many have closed their doors—Mark Bar, Boulevard
Tavern, and the infamous Coco 66—but a surprising number are still around,
including Bar Matchless (557 Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint). For this
reason, I have always felt at home whenever I'm there, which is, admittedly,
not that often.
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| Bar Matchless |
It would be disingenuous to say
that I was a regular at Matchless while I was living in Greenpoint. This is not
because I was a regular elsewhere; it was because I didn't have enough money at
the time to be a regular anywhere—not even a coffee shop. Still, I had a few
places that I liked to go, and Matchless was pretty high on my list of favorite
haunts. It was relatively cheap; it was only a few blocks from one of the two
apartments in which I lived while in Greenpoint; and it didn't require a trek
into the adjacent neighborhood of Williamsburg or what the real estate brokers
were then calling “East Williamsburg.”
Matchless would have been
considered a hipster bar at the time, but that was because there were pretty
much two types of bars in Greenpoint between 2005 and 2008. There were the bars
where native Brooklynites went and there were the bars where the younger
transplants went. Due to the fact that the neighborhood both had been extremely
Polish before gentrification began and was not easily accessible via mass
transit, this meant that the only two options, with very few exceptions, were
Polish bars or hipster bars. Since Matchless didn't see too many Polska, it was
a de facto hipster bar.
There was no shame in being a
hipster bar—at least back then. To me, it simply meant that the bar was
relatively new, and that it didn't exclusively cater to the Polish people who
had traditionally lived in the neighborhood. That was it. True, it was a
precursor to proper gentrification, but, then again, so was I.[1]
Fast-forward a few years, and a
visit to the same space feels eerie similar. However, it is now being called a
dive bar or a no-frills bar. Yelp says it has a “hipster” ambiance. This makes
it a no-frills, hipster/dive bar. To me, these terms are difficult
reconcile.
To make things more confusing, the
space looked exactly as I remembered it. The bathroom walls are thick with
graffiti; the bands who play in back room are better than you'd think they'd
be; and the crowd is the same undulating mass of youth who don't mind yelling
over Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement so long as they get something decent on tap and
the bartender doesn't take too long to get flagged down. 2017 and 2007 seemed
almost identical. The only difference was that the bar now serves food, the per
capita tattoo rate had noticeably risen and I flipped from the bottom of the
age range to the top.
That the bar looked the same was
not odd. That it was considered no-frills was equally not surprising. Places
like Matchless are now considered to be something of a lowest common
denominator when it comes Brooklyn bars in many neighborhoods. What gave me
pause was what had changed around Matchless, and that fact that people
considered Matchless to be a dive. It was an example of the amount that the
window of discourse has shifted—for bars, at least—in just a decade, and that I
hadn't noticed. The hipster bar had become the dive. The place to which I was
relegated because I was a transplant was now a local spot.
When I first started writing about
and regularly visiting dive bars in this city, there was a sense that a dive
had to lack the most basic amenities, and that, in many instances, you had to
be a local to really belong there. In your typical dive, the front of the bar
was the base of operations for at least five old men drinking away their
pensions; the pool table, if there was one, was either missing balls or
horribly warped; the bathroom looked more like a killing floor than a place
where any self-respecting human would consider going to do anything but vomit;
the taps (if they existed) would mostly be for show; Yuengling was considered a
craft beer; and you could still smoke after ten or eleven, except on
weekends—then you'd have to wait until midnight or one. Oh, and there was
always at least one Frank Sinatra CD in the jukebox. Just one. No more, no
less.
However, it wasn't what dives
lacked that made them important or memorable. More than anything, dives had
history. To me, Matchless lacked that. It remains a hipster bar, but only to me
because I didn't see it as a historical place. I was seeing the present and the
past through the same lens.
And this is what brings me back to the
final point I mentioned at the beginning of this essay—the subtext included in
the resentful statement about hipsters who pay such close attention to trends
that they learn about and come to appreciate things before they're popular with
a general audience.
What was alarming to me as I stood
in Matchless after playing a set in the back room with my band was that for the
concept of a hipster/dive to make sense requires a normalization of the people
who were once considered the city's trend setters. On the one hand, it means
that they have a place in this city, and that they are no longer a nuisance. In
this sense, “hipster” simply refers to a group of people within an age group
with a certain aesthetic. On the other hand, and for better or worse, it means
that the cultural trailblazers of the millennial generation are getting old and
comfortable.
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1Proper
gentrification being defined as replacing a person or establishment that does
not conform to bourgeois standards of normality with a person or establishment
that does. Consequently, the appearance of a DIY venue in an industrial or
working class neighborhood is not an act of gentrification. However, it is a
likely precursor to it, as real estate interests tend to follow artists.
Link:
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Jay Fox is the author of The Walls and a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.
