Charles Bronson used to kill hipsters in movies before it was cool.

Note: Citizen Hipster does not condone violence of any kind, especially not against hipsters and especially especially not against Jeff Goldblum.

This is the worst week of the year.  As you are all aware, it’s Movember, the month when all kinds of dudes grow pathetic, scraggly cookie dusters under the pretence of raising money for prostate cancer. 

I know what you’re thinking: Is this going to be another angry post about people’s misguided efforts to raise cancer awareness?  No, I’ll leave that to Post Hipster. The reason that this is the worst week of the year is that all the November lip sweaters are getting long enough that it’s getting harder to tell the fundraising guys from the true hipsters that wear the mouthbrow all year round.

The other night I was at a bar, getting all worked up about the dumb-ass hipster waiter until a friend pointed out that he’s probably just a guy doing the Movember thing.  This was obviously a jarring revelation.  How can I avoid/ridicule the hipsters if I can’t separate them from the general public?

By the same logic, I wonder if the fact that average-joes are jumping on the mustache band wagon and making it mainstream is going to force the hipsters to find a new and more extreme facial hair.  How long until the guy making my burrito looks like the front man from ZZ Top?

Since we’re on the subject of hipster-staches, how did walking around with a sad patch of lip hair that’s sparser than the grass in the dog park in the middle of August become cool?  I mean, I think that most of today’s hipsters had the similar mustache roll models that I did: Mario, Captain Kangaroo, Tom Selic and my Dad (see picture above).  Shouldn’t they be striving to look more Frank Zappa than Gomez Adams? 

Needless to say, on December 1^st, I’ll be glad to hear the collective buzz of razors across the country.

 Greetings loyal blog readers!  Yes, I know, the Citizen Hipsters contributors have recently been missing in action so to speak.  But rest assured we didn’t forget about you.  We were just temporarily side tracked by simulated earthquakes, real hurricanes, a wedding, twenty pound lady bugs, celebrity hockey practices with George Stroumboulopoulos and a stolen pumpkin.  Seriously, all of this happened in the last two weeks. 

On to this week’s post…

Even if you don’t think you’ve heard of them you’ve probably watched one of their music videos.  OK Go, the creators of the Treadmill Dance, Rube Goldberg Machine and numerous other viral videos were in Toronto last month and Anti-Hipster and I went to check it out. Man, Queen Street West must have been a ghost town, because all the hipsters were at this show.  But that’s not really the point of this post. I am going to try and refrain from turning this post into a rant about the dumb ass hipster audience. Instead I’m going to talk about the band.

At first glance one might conclude that the guys in this band are the biggest hipsters around. The bassist was sporting the best mustache since Dick Dastardly and the lead singer was wearing a sweet pair of beat-up Chuck Taylors. But after careful consideration I had to conclude that although their fans might have been hipsters the guys in the band definitely aren’t. 

This opinion hinges on my view that although hipsters may love to be associated with creativity (hence the love of Apple products, graphic design and freaking weird clothes) the actual passion that is required to develop something new and innovative directly conflicts with their busy lifestyle.  Imagine trying to find time to create something of value when your day (I use this term loosely since we all know hipsters don’t get up until noon) is filled searching through vintage clothing stores, cashing allowance cheques from mom and dad, and figuring out which of you favourite bands you have to drop because they “sold out”.

OK Go is all about making a big splash will a small budget by the sheer enormity of their creative muscle (just watch some of their videos) and their live show was no different.  As with the videos, the concert was full of endless gimmicks.  The set list included an entire song performed solely with hand bells and the show must have set a record for most confetti ever used in one concert (I’m still coughing up bits of shredded paper). The encore featured the band wearing LED covered jackets playing guitars with lasers coming out of their necks!

But beyond the cheeky gimmicks is a band that really gets the new reality of the music industry. Thanks to all you kids out there who steal music (I can wag my literary finger at you because I’m the last guy in Toronto who is still buying CD’s), the record companies have no money to promote bands in the old way, via grossly elaborate music videos.  The guys at OK Go realized this a long time ago and have used the internet (yes, the same internet that supposedly killed the music industry) to promote their art through viral videos and social networking.  At their concert they took a picture of the audience and posted it on their facebook page for anyone to tag themselves.  They also gave us a Chicago area phone number to text our email address to if we wanted a free mp3 file of a live recording of one of the song they performed that night. These guys are using every angle to increase their fan base. In fact, they’ve said in interviews that they feel that the seismic shift in the music industry actually opened doors for them to become intimately involved in the creative production of their videos.  They just seem like a bunch of positive, fun guys who used their own innovative ideas to find a unique path to success in a time when their industry is reeling.  Who can’t find inspiration in that?

Picture a sunny fall day, Grandpa Hipster and I are just leaving a nice lunch in Kensington Market and heading back to the office (I know what you’re thinking: “What are these two guys who seem to dislike hipsters doing in Kensington on their lunch break?” 1. Hipster research. 2. The burritos at The Big Fat Burrito make it worth the trip into a Hipster Den like Kensington.). All of a sudden, some freaking hipster is making a ruckus in the middle of the street. This guy is shouting his head off. Since the amount of energy this guy is putting into his tirade is very uncharacteristic of a hipster, Grandpa and I decide to investigate. It turns out that he is yelling at two uber-hipster friends who were two hours late to meet him for brunch.

There are a couple of layers to this little drama that I would like to point out. First, it’s totally in character for a couple of hipsters like this to be hours late for a morning appointment. This young, angry, American Apparel clad gentleman can’t really be surprised that his hipster friends couldn’t make it to breakfast before noon. When you’re an unemployed recipient of a generous allowance from Mom and Dad, it’s pretty tough to pull your ass out of bed with the rest of the world.

Second, can someone please explain to me how this hipster dude can spend almost half of a weekday hanging around and waiting to have breakfast! And doesn’t it say something about the substance (or lack of it) of this sub-culture that the most passion I have ever seen from a hipster was when his friends kept him from his chicken and waffles? Worst of all, he still didn’t seem to have enough motivation to ditch them and find something productive to do!

How did our parents raise a generation of the most apathetic humans to roam this earth? Why are today’s young, twenty-some things so uninterested in becoming productive members of society? The last generation to have this feeling was the so-called Generation X, but they had an excuse. There was a terrible recession going on and no hope of finding more meaningful employment than your standard McJob, so they didn’t see a reason to try. I think that most would agree that the hipster pandemic had settled in long before our current economic down-turn. So, how do we explain this lethargic generation?

Maybe it’s because as kid this generation was raised in a constant state of orange alert. All of their lives they’ve been told to be afraid of terrorists, global warming, internet predators, cell phone radiation, trans fats, grades less than A minus, leaving the house without Purell, pesticides, genetically modified foods and about a million other things. Is it any surprise that all of this led to a generation who’s brains are now incapable of getting passionate about anything?

In a recent Rolling Stone Magazine interview with Jenny Eliscu, Kings of Leon front-man Caleb Followill has something pretty intense to get off his chest about hipster music culture:

“I hate f**king hipsters,” frontman Caleb Followill told Eliscu in her profile in Rolling Stone #1116. “Everyone talks about indie this and indie that, but would you really want to be one of those indie bands that makes two albums and disappears? That’s just sad,” he said. “When we signed on with our manager, we all said we wanted to have a box-set career. We’ll gladly be the next generation of bands that aren’t going anywhere.”

So, let me get this straight, he doesn’t like hipsters because they aren’t authentic enough? I think we’ve finally encountered the hipster singularity. Maybe this guy should take a look in the mirror. Dude, you’re wearing TWO JACKETS AT ONCE: Hipster QED. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black…

(Interview Link)

While riding the subway the other day, I stumbled upon the interesting specimen pictured above and could hardly believe my eyes. Could it be?! Could this be – irony of ALL ironies – a Bay Street Hipster?!

If you recall, a colleague of mine here at Citizen Hipster recently blogged on Bike Polo – a post which ever so subtly drifted into an anti-“suit wearing, Blackberry focused, Bay Street finance d-bag” diatribe (how very hipster!). In that post, Reluctant Hipster contrasted the open-mindedness of hipsters with the shallowness of the brown-nosing Bay Street (or Wall Street, for our two American fans) type. C’mon, you know the type:

Scene: it’s 7:30 PM on a Thursday evening at a crowded pub near Bay and Elm. The Suit that’s been talking about himself for the last fifteen minutes has only come up for air once, but it was just to thumb his Blackberry in a very self important manner. Having absolutely nothing to else to say to this guy, you grudgingly ask the one question he’s been dying for you to ask him ever since he accosted you:

You: “… er, so what is it you do for a living?”

The guy in the suit somehow simultaneously implodes and explodes in a fit of exuberance and, in an utterly failed attempt to feign blasé, he announces loudly (to be sure everyone in the vicinity can hear):

Him: “Oh, I’m a(n) [insert mundane, overpaying Bay Street job title here]”

But I digress. All of the above is to say that, as Post-Hipster pointed out in his epic post on the Axis of Fashion, the Traders, Lawyers, and Consultants (*gag*) found on Toronto’s Bay Street are the polar opposite of Hipsters – in fashion, and in probably every other respect. So, this begs the question: Who the H-E-Double-Hockey-Stick does this guy this he is?! I imagine that his superiors at the office must frown upon his work attire. But what do his contemporaries think of him? Every office has one of those – the guy that thinks he’s just so cool, but that everyone else absolutely loathes. Certainly, every true hipster would call this guy a wannabe hipster and a sellout.

Alternatively, maybe this guy IS the cool guy at the office. If that’s the case, what’s it say about hipster fashion when guys on Bay Street can get away with dressing like this for work? I’m pretty sure it means that it’s time for hipsters to hang up their skinny pants, take off their Ray-Ban^® Sunglasses, and forage on to greener pastures.

Pretty bright in the subway tunnel, is it? And how’s that book you’re obviously not reading? Your ophthalmologist would be so upset with you, you rebel!

What a dork.