Student nightlife: House and the hipster paradox

Thinking back to the frenzy, gore and debauchery of fresher’s week – three short years ago – I’m not at all surprised I rinsed my overdraft in weeks, broke a few bones and scraped though with a concede pass. There I found myself, in a tower block full of Ikea furniture and thousands of trainee adults, all poised for their next life-changing experience.

Southern, privileged, middle-class kids largely populate redbrick Unis. Most were raised to believe that their higher education was a birthright. They left college feeling genuinely entitled to a gap year and a further three of hedonism, Jägerbombs and casual sex at Uni – all to postpone an impending adulthood of grinding monotony, office jobs and corporate ass-licking.

Uni presents some prime opportunities to binge drink, flirt with narcotics, steal traffic cones with your incestuous friendship group and tell all your mates back home you’re getting laid on the regs. No doubt we all watched enough American pie and Skins in year 11 to get us well excited about partying and shagging our way through a degree.

Student nightlife typically consists of getting topless and singing about sport in the Union, trekking between awful pubs in the rain because some genius labelled it a ‘bar crawl’ and endless, endless opportunities to be a right joker and put on your best fancy dress. Not forgetting things called “socials”… which were presumably invented for people who struggle with the concept of socialising.

One thing seems to unite all these events; the music, which invariably seems to be little more that an after thought. Thrown into the background so you can flail your arms to something when the alcohol blunts your debilitating English inhibitions sufficiently to propel you on to the dance floor.

But in the course of a Home Counties grammar school kid’s university journey, there usually comes a transitional stage – they step outside the convention and homogeny of the student bubble and acquaint themselves with the local ‘scene’. They trade in their chinos and gilet for vintage garms, bucket hats and Nike Airs and generally start becoming a trendy motherfucker. There’s a notoriously thin line between looking hipster or homeless, and many struggle to achieve either for a while.

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They begin to deny having ever really liked the pop-punk and indy that defined their teenage years and proclaim to be all about 90s ‘bangers’ and repeat how happy they are about garage making a comeback. Since the Internet became a thing, there’s roughly a two-day gap between a song being an absolute belter to becoming overplayed and a complete embarrassment, so at first most just make names up and pretend to know what’s playing. And when they finally manage to decipher their Detroit from Chicago, most decide their new favourite sound is, of course, Deep House.

There’s something about Deep House that makes it the least offensive type of electronic music. Not as many BPMs as in drum and bass or jungle; no one brings out the gun fingers when a disclosure tune drops. It’s also less intimidating than techno or psy-trance; where the locked jaws of the locals might make them look as if they’re searching for a confused student to take home and eat.

House is precisely the kind of music a student who’s just necked his first bomb can shuffle his feet to in an abandoned warehouse, without feeling like he’s strayed too far from the sheltered middle-class existence he’s always known.

Rich kids possess a natural confidence and inherent self-assurances that can be kind of infectious. But their dancing often appears more like a sarcastic impression of somebody having fun, rather than the motions of a person actually having fun. Hating on student hipsters is a favourite of locals and the Internet at large, but in the end, they’re only trying to escape the monotony of their inevitably ‘successful’ lives and experience some real culture.

If hating the mainstream is so mainstream, then surely liking the mainstream is actually pretty hipster – so goes the hipster paradox. Elitism goes both ways. Maybe one day I’ll be able to turn up to Ascot in a tracksuit and actually get in. But in the meantime, I won’t pretend to be any better that a pumped up first year in chinos who’s just hit his first House night and is now spewing words in my face as he comes up like an erupting volcano of enthusiasm.