Ironic hipsters@Everything2.com

Ironic hipsters@Everything2.com: "The ironic hipster is like the traditional hipster in that he thinks of himself as being above mass consumerism and prefabrication; also, he is keenly aware of both current pop culture and that of the past. By contrast, he adopts certain prefab objects (objects meaning any music, movie, slang, decorative item, fashion, etc.) from eras and lifestyles completely outside his own in order to rebel against both the commercial hegemony and the traditional hipster hegemony. Anything the traditional hipster abhors and considers ridiculous, the ironic hipster appears to enjoy; ironic hipsters love kitsch whereas previous generations were defined by their distaste for it. In fact, the farther removed a given object is from current modes of traditional hipsterness, the more enthusiastic an ironic hipster will be. The act of briefly proclaiming fanaticism for certain kitsch is the most important facet of ironic hipsterness. For the kitsch to work in an ironic way, one's devotion, feigned or otherwise, must be visible to others as a signifier (much in the same way that traditional hipsters wear pins or T-shirts advertising knowledge of the esoteric). It is altogether useless to listen to an ironic band on headphones and never get excited about it in public. A traditional hipster may enjoy commercial kitsch, but he would hide his enjoyment rather than brashly assert it; this is the primary difference between the two."