Pink Monkey Chatter

Yeah..I know. It’s redundant to be annoyed by hipsters. I might as well try and talk sense to the women wearing Ughs with booty shorts in ninety degree weather. For those of you not familiar with hipsters I will try and explain. Hipsters are the Emo kids who are now in their twenties and thirties. They dress in expensive clothes that are painfully hip and slightly gay looking. Constantly smoking, drinking coffee or low-shelf alcohol, they maintain  less than 10% body fat while appearing to devote their lives  to anything hip or ‘deck’ such as music, art, clubs, or indie-movies. If your lavender scented deodorant,Oil of Olay eye cream, and all your Modest Mouse cd’s suddenly disappear from your house, you have probably been robbed by a hipster (a male one).

Why turn my judgemental glare at these poor frail creatures? You ask?

Well, frankly, Darling..they piss me off.

I am a product of the 1980’s punk scene in Los Angles. A scene that was started over the dissatisfaction of youth for their parents’ conservative values and economic greed. The music was our vehicle for protest. We hated Ronald Reagan and Reaganomics, and I can honest say that at the time, I thought I would die from nuclear attack before I was twenty-one. We dressed in torn home-made clothing in protest and by defining ourselves with our clothes and haircuts, we could tell who shared our values. For the most part, I could happen upon a group of kids who were dressed like me and knew that they stood for the same ideals and listened to the same music. I could literally just go sit down and start talking to them, and they would share whatever money, beer, and cigarettes that they had. Furthermore, I would probably have a place to crash for the night.

Hipsters, on the other hand, all look alike, but they listen to different music and have very different impressions of what’s ‘cool.’ The goal is to be into the newest or recycled music, fashion, literature etc and to rub it in other people’s faces. In fact there is no one more pretentious and judgemental than a hipster toward another hipster. As  a result, as a group, they stand for absolutely nothing. Content instead to spend hours in local diners, coffee shops, and lounges complaining about their own superiority while ordering PBR , hot tea, or martinis on their parent’s credit card.

Hipsters talk so often about their intellect and genetics and have such thin, flaccid bodies and horned rimmed glasses that you might mistake them for nerds. This is simply not the case. Nerds are entrenched in top labs and universities inventing vaccines and new computer search engines while hipsters are quoting snatches of information they read in local college papers. Nerds are attending Harvard and MIT. Hipsters are the bread and butter of the smallest of the metropolitan liberal arts and art colleges. I once heard that you should always be nice to nerds because one day they will probably be your boss. The only chance of a hipster being you boss is if you get a job at an art supply warehouse, comic book store, or Newbury Comics.

Most hipsters are on the surface big supporters of PBS, NPR, and the arts; however their support is limited to standing around small, local clubs and hipster sponsored events. They rally to preserve vintage cocktail drinks but have little concern with unfashionable world issues and the lives of people on farms, small towns, or in the suburbs. I love the culture of the 40’s and 50’s as much as anyone, but drinking while wearing a Bowler doesn’t really count as activisim.

These people talk constantly about their artistic work. But the truth is that many hipsters I know have been working on the same graphic novel for thirteen years or cart around large boxes of junk from one cheap apartment to another in Somerville without sculpting anything since graduating from college ten years ago. They proudly display their talents on Facebook and try to impress each other with such statements as “I speak three languages.” When in actuality speaking a language translates to listening to a few tapes in Japanese that they checked out at the public library. In fact the only artistic endeavor this subgroup seems to pursue with any dedication or fervor is the creation of their own fake image.

So, who cares? Why be so annoyed?

Well, these people are growing older, and what many of them are doing is creating an atmosphere of apathy, selfishness, superiority, and division. The alternative world use to be a place were people who felt like they didn’t belong found refuge and family. The hipsters turned this place into a high school cafeteria. Hipsterdumb is a class system based on how you look , not who you are or how you contribute. And with all that time spent pursuing the next cool trend and ‘waiting for the world to change’, there is little time to concern themselves with such irrelevant details as the economy or the state of education for children. Unless, of course, some Emo/Indie band sings about it. Yet, the rest of us have to deal with their skinny asses monopolizing all the best booths. And what is America going to do with all these hipsters once their aging parents can no longer support them, and they are too old to work at Urban Outfitters? Government sponsored hipster retirement homes???

So, I say let’s wake these people up and maybe put them in their place at the bottom of the food chain….A good punch to the pie hole should do it. I always say that you can’t really be a productive, active member of society until you have had a good sock to the kisser. At if this were back in my day, this group would have never got away with this pretentious crap. As the hipster looks at you with shock, tears rolling down his face, glasses askew and cellphone poised to call Mommy and Daddy, tell them Pink Monkey asked you to do it.