The Existential Crisis of Alternative Culture

(Credit goes to a good friend for telling me I should write this)

     We all know what is meant by the term “hipster”. Someone who dresses in “retro” clothes, listens to music that you wouldn’t have heard of, and whose greatest ambition is to have a cult following for their music/art/poetry – but to still end up starving in a garret anyway.   Someone who is dissatisfied with popular culture, the much reviled “mainstream” and by way of protest affiliates themselves as exclusively as possible with alternative culture.  Someone who seems deliberately aloof, obscure, inaccessible.

     We all know what is meant by the term because alternative culture has become such a universal phenomenon.   Hipsters are becoming an accepted, numerous breed of subculture to be spotted regularly on the high street.  And here is where today’s reflections lie.  Since alternative culture has become so trendy, so common, so...mainstream – what does this mean for its future?

     In metamorphosing into the very thing that it opposes, what has alternative culture become?  With high street shops stocking hipster trends of only a year or two ago, will alternative culture, with its retrospective trailblazing, be caught up by its less cool, popular sister?  Will hipsters be able to cope when the point comes that every new old thing that they find to champion is snatched away and shoved into the limelight that is the mainstream media?

      My predictions are twofold.  They might both occur, or maybe neither of them will, but then they’re just ideas.

Prediction 1:  A shiny new subculture will emerge

     Once alternative culture is well and truly established as one of the predominant influences over music, art and fashion, something else will come along to counter it.   In the same way that the last few decades have seen mods, rockers, hippies, punks, goths, emokids, indie kids and more, something else, something new and its own will come about.  An alternative to the alternative if you will.  Perhaps it’ll be an evolution of something already around, steampunk, Gothic Lolita or somesuch.   Perhaps they’ll be ironically futuristic, or have a carefully crafted “normal” persona, an antithesis to the obsession with non-conformism.

Prediction 2:  The “true” hipsters will rise again.

      Despite alternative culture being ever increasingly popularised, the very fact that it has lost sight of its original “different” identity might just be its saving grace.  Even with all the bandwagon-jumpers that have vintage-style jeans bought at Topshop and a mix-tape with Pitchfork’s favourite bands, there are still those select few who genuinely trawl through charity shops, vintage shops and eBay looking for the particular model of that one shirt.  There are those who truly feel at their most comfortable in clothes that remind them of times gone by, that can’t stand what music is now in the charts, so revel in what it is that they can find by word of mouth or  at underground gigs, that they relate to and get involved with.  There are those who are themselves creating and reinventing alternative culture with their music and art and fashion and poetry.

 It is the ones who originated it in the first place who are the ones who will help hipsterism maintain its non-conformist identity, by being immune to the conventional media’s influence and turning a blind eye to whatever it is they are being told is cool, because to them, it doesn’t matter .  It is they who will keep a stronghold of true alternative culture until the mainstream populous moves onto its next craze.

      Whether or not alternative culture is in immediate danger of breakdown, it cannot keep this momentum up too much longer.   Sooner or later, either the indifferent masses will find a new target, or what we now know as alternative culture will undergo fission, imploding under its own popularity. But what new creatures will step out from the mist to take its place?