May 2009
9 posts
WTF is HIPSTER RUNOFF?
Carles, its author, calls it “a blog worth blogging about! HRO is intended to be a ‘culturally relevant’ blog.” It’s probably more than that.
It is satirical yet loving, endlessly hypocritical, and bitingly hilarious. Its author is a (semi-)fictional character. It makes fun of everyone, and it’s gaining fans.
It might just be the vanguard of a radical shift in cultural...
A pithy introduction to hipsters.
The concept of “hipster” can be hard to nail down; the subculture, as one MetaFilter commenter notes, is based on rejecting one’s being part of it: “It’s usually a safe bet that no one actually refers to themselves as a hipster. A hipster is only something someone else is.” Yet there are some attributes that nearly everybody can affix to the label. A 2008 Adbusters article on the...
A Quick Sidebar
By the way, here’s an ultimate irony. I could try to make that description more and more exhaustive, but inevitably, even this (yes, this) description of what a hipster is will necessarily fail, as any self-respecting hipster (an oxymoron, that) will quickly point out. They’ve moved on. They’ve always moved on.
HRO + language
“Carles can blog about basically anything.”
-Carles, in the sidebar of Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff’s author, Carles, is a character. Whoever is behind that character has thus far remained a secret, though journalists are itching to find out who it really is. But regardless of that (old-fashioned? Anti-Barthesian?) yearning for a creator behind this giant project, Carles creates the voice...
HRO's New Sincerity
More profoundly, possibly, he also obsesses over what it is to be authentic.
In a world fraught with multiple meanings, trends moving at the speed of light, and not enough language to capture it, Carles becomes (understandably) disappointed by irony. But, much like the langue of internet-speak, it’s the only thing he knows.
Not to ass-kiss here (seriously, I just like the quote), but the...
So, what?
Maybe it’s blatantly obvious to end with that traditional “last section” of a story or essay, here, but what does it matter? What does Carles mean for us ‘as a society’?
This author is excited by the fact that hipsters, the reappropriated generation, the intertextual-without-meaning subculture, can make fun of themselves and reappropriate their own image again for a...
END NOTES and SELF-PROMOTION
Hipster Runoff is on:
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Steve Spillman (this article’s author) is on:
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Comments are welcome, via any of the above means.
“This is the inaugural paper on Hipster Runoff studies.”
– Steve Spillman
“hey”
– Carles (via hipsterrunoff)