Chronic hipsterism is ruining my life

It’s a well known fact that hipsters are bad people.

Pretentious, elitist and invariably from a bland middle class background shared with 80% of the university’s students. The mere sight of a man with a poorly developed beard, superfluous glasses, sipping an espresso in the type of edgy café that now dominates gentrified neighbourhoods should be enough to give you an aneurysm.

The cynically constructed personality derived from their own cynical interest in the arts is surely an obvious sign of a lack of any real character. The hatred is probably warranted, but I ask you to give them your sympathy, for through no fault of my own I have slipped into this dark area of the social Venn diagram, and it is ruining my life.

I’m a terrible human being

It started in my formative years, where I’d fallen into the juvenile trap of rockism (read: if there isn’t a guitar, it’s not music). While my friends were listening to an eclectic mix of Eminem, Beyonce and Basshunter, I found myself lost in my own little world, sound tracked by Radiohead, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine (something to do with ‘r’ perhaps?). I was that kid who insisted on dominating the classroom speakers, proclaiming all pop artists to be terrible, and that I, like some kind of 14 year old prophet, would enlighten them to the gospel of ‘real music’ (I still have no idea what I meant by that).

It felt like some kind of personal mission, to smother their much beloved pop in a wave of glorious 90s alternative rock. I was the messiah, reuniting my artless brethren with the glorious noise that radio/MTV/illuminati had so cynically torn away from them. Naturally, they told me to fuck off.

It doesn’t

I withdrew, forced into musical isolation, beginning to ferment the horrendous attitude that still haunts me to this day. Eventually I managed to move on from boorishly listening to ‘Can’t Stop’ 18 times on a single bus journey and actually began to branch out, developing (if I don’t say so myself) a fairly deep and varied love of music. Unfortunately, though, the incessant rockism was displaced by a nasty attitude to other peoples music taste, one that manifests as a kind of reflexive sneer whenever you bring your favourite pop idol up.

The sort of pretentiousness that has lead to many a painful night in Life (when prinks were undercooked) and brought new meaning to the phrase ‘I prefer their older stuff’. It got to the point where I would even sneer at my past self: The Chili Peppers were now too poppy, Rage Against the Machine too banal and Radiohead basically Britpop.

Sadly, I was unable to prevent my painfully pretentious views on music from infecting the rest of my life (like some kind of hipster virus). Before long I was indulging myself in expensive filter coffee, french art house films and a vast quantity of floral shirts. My bookshelf became an awful assemblage of the most basic foreign authors (cynically read to produce the illusion of culture), my ITunes a mass of the most obscure and specific sub genres I could discover in the depths of the internet.

I was bearing witness to my own ugly metamorphism into the worst kind of pretentious git, and for every moment was so painfully self aware that I began to question if I really did like that Swedish dream pop band that Pitchfork (a disgusting hive of kitschiness) gave Best New Music. Did I really enjoy Nihilistic twentieth century Russian literature? Honestly I have no idea.

The wavy dream pop band in question

This kind of epiphany has led me to try and correct myself, a kind of hipster rehab. Trying my best to not sneer at other peoples tastes in film, buying clothes from River Island and listening to pop music (dosage: twice daily, less for under 12s).

It isn’t easy, but gradually, I’m returning from the pretentious oblivion. It’s just a case of establishing what I actually enjoy in life….