Categories: Humor; News, Politics, & Pop Culture

Hipster San Francisco: What's the matter with the kids these days?

By Juliette
updated 2 months ago

Anyone can be a hipster. All you need is an elitist and disaffected attitude, a few pairs of skinny jeans (maybe American Apparel's unisex pant, which come in many colors, or a pair of Cheap Mondays, a Swedish brand that got huge two years ago but is still selling at Urban Outfitters), some ironic thrift store t-shirts (the cotton has to be worn really thin so that they are an aura of 'authenticity'), a huge collection of music (note: vinyl > mp3), an apartment in the Mission District, a non-corporate job (bartender, barista, retail clothing associate, non-profit), a MySpace profile that has more than 1000 friends, some scuffed up canvas sneakers (NOT Converse), a neckerchief (bandanas on your actual head are so two years ago), a pair of 80s-era sunglasses, and a few visible tattoos. And while it's not necessary, it might be helpful to stop eating meat and to pick up a drug or alcohol problem.

1. Music

Music is integral to hipster culture. Hipster culture is inherently elitist, and there is no better way to be completely elitist than with an encyclopedia knowledge of music and music history. Hipsters love outdated electronic music, from new wave to disco, and they love dredging up outdated genres of music like italodisco and reclaiming it as modern or relevant. This makes them seem ironic and gives them retro street cred, which hipsters can’t get enough of. Bands that fit the above bill are Baltimora, Spagna, Ken Laszlo, Koto, Digital Emotion, Gazebo, etc. It is also completely acceptable amongst hipsters to enjoy mainstream music like Hall & Oates, Kraftwerk, and New Order, so long as those bands have not produced any new music in the last 20 years.

But music is constantly progressing, and there are lots of bands that are are relevant to hipster culture right now. It would be an oversight to say that hipsters are all completely retro. Here are a few bands that are currently touring, which hipsters seem to adore:

Crystal Castles
The Knife
Simian Mobile Disco
Justice
Digitalism
LCD Soundsystem
CSS
Daft Punk
Junior Boys
Mstrkrft
Hot Chip

Note: Basically, if any of the above bands does a remix of a song, or another band does a remix of a song written by one of the above bands, it is automatically relevant in the world of hipsterdom. Because nothing is more original or ironic than regurgitating something already created and marketing it as completely new. You can read about these bands in relevant music blogs like The
Brooklyn Vegan (www.brooklynvegan.com) or the more mainstream though
still relevant Pitchfork (www.pitchforkmedia.com).

2. Style

If you want to know how to get the hipster look, look no further than the thrift stores of San Francisco. According to the website StuffWhitePeopleLike (www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com), “Your choice of casualwear says a lot about you, and there are
stringent rules and hierarchies associated with T-shirts that you must
know before venturing into any white-dominated social situations. T-shirts fall into three categories: vintage, new, and unacceptable,
with the latter category compromising the bulk of the world’s supply.
Within each category lies another, more precise subset of rules and
rankings. Make no mistake, this is complicated.”

Vintage t-shirts are the bastion of hipster style, so the best, most valued t-shirts come from places like Goodwill. Check out the list of SF thrift stores, where you’ll be sure to run into some hipsters, looking to get more hole-ridden vintage tees.

Other hipster basic include, for both men and women, skinny jeans, vintage sunglasses, scarves, hoodies, and bomber jackets. Those are the BASICS. Here is where shit gets complicated. You can dress in the basics and look like any other American Apparel clad hipster, or you can take it up a notch and create a style of your own. This requires lots of effort and a lot of meditation. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be the young, urban lumberjack in the red and black plaid coat? The hipster flower girl, with the headband across her forehead, lots of costume jewelry, and high-waisted Wranglers tucked into brown ankle boots? The Nu Rave kid, in the neon wide-brimmed hat, day glo shades, and t-shirt with some sort of brightly colored geometric print?

Shit gets complex. To simplify things, check out some of these street fashion websites and look into visiting some of these stores below. Remember: style is way more important than substance in hipster culture. No matter how philosophical hipsters wax on the cultural significance of their clothing choice and how cerebral and intellectual their approach to fashion is, they are just as vacuous and image-based as the rest of us.

3. Fixed Gear Bikes

It’s not necessary to have a fixed gear bike to be a hipster, but it
sure is helpful, especially if you live in San Francisco, where biking
has become for many people a way of life.

Fixed gear bikes lack a freewheel and usually have only a one gear ratio. Without a freehweel, fixies can’t coast and the pedals turn in the same direction as the rear wheel. By resisting the pedal’s motion, riders can stop the bike – ie by pedaling backwards. Fixies can be ridden in reverse! A track bike is a fixed gear bike that’s ridden in a velodrome, and track bikes are appealing to many people because of their light, beautiful silhouettes.

Because it’s possible to stop a fixie without using breaks, by simply pedaling in reverse, some people ride these bikes breakless. Breakless riding has become somewhat of a cult thing amongst urban hipsters. Other people argue that riding without breaks is solely image based rather than practical and that it significantly raises the probability of an accident or injury. It’s actually illegal to ride in urban environments without a break in some states. California requires bicycles have a break that allows the operator make the break wheels skid on dry pavement.

Regardless of where you chose to ride a fixie or a bike with gears, with breaks or without, you should do your research and find the bike that’s best for you. Or, if you’re a total pedestrian and don’t mind riding public transportation, all the best to you. Bikes might be the new skateboards, but who knows. Maybe in a few years, buses will be the new bikes.

4. Food

Everyone needs food to survive, but for hipsters, food generally means coffee and cigarettes. Most hipsters are very thin, and to maintain a physique where ones thighs have approximately the same circumference as ones calves (to look most flattering in skinny jeans) it’s often necessary to develop some sort of eating disorder. Hipsters forgo food, often inventing excuses like they are too broke to eat, or that they can’t go out to eat because there are hidden animal products in food.

Having a strange relationship to food is a definitive hipster trait, and in many hipsters, this manifests into a vegetarian or vegan diet. Pescatarians have more hipster credibility than meat eaters, but if you’re a meat eater but have odd rules about eating, like that you only eat turkey or that you have to eat meat because you have a soy allergy and need to up your protein levels, you can get hipster cred too.

But for the sake of this guide, food will have a relatively loose definition, and will include mostly just…well…coffee.

Coffee shops are huge hipster hangouts. Hipsters love to work at coffee shops, eschewing the notion that a corporate job with benefits is necessary to survive. Luckily for them, many of these hip kids are trust fund babies with access to their parents credit cards. But to be fair, lost of artists, writers, and creative thinkers hang out at cafes too, and because of the bohemian nature of coffeeshops, they have major and universal appeal to SF hipsters. On any given day in the following hipster coffee shops, you will see people wearing fedoras, ankle boots, and Chrome bags, typing furiously on their Macs or writing in their Moleskin notebooks. What are these people composing so furiously? You might think it’s a great manifesto, memoir, or novel. But on closer examination, they are probably just reading celebrity gossip. Whatever. It’s the image that counts, right?

Ritual Coffee Roasters

1026 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110

This is the mama hen of all hipster coffee shops in San Francisco. There’s always a line out the door of people trying to get their daily french pressed coffee sweetened with agave nectar, and they probably won’t serve you unless you have a tattoo or an ironic mustache. A ton of fixed gear bicycles are always chained up to the parking meters outside. Ritual is so famous, the New York Times even wrote an article about it!

5. Hipster Nightlife

Nightlife is very important to hipsters, many of whom wish to convey a vampiric image of coming out of their grundgy Mission apartments only at night. This propagates the notion that they are cooler than the rest of the population who have to go to bed early because they actually work real jobs during the day. Hipsters love to drink, and they like to get their pictures taken and put on hipster party photo blogs, so the combination of drinking and vanity manifests well into a phenomenon known as Hipster Parties.

Hipster Parties are usually reoccuring weekly or monthly events that are hosted by a certain Hipster Local Celebrity and feature a party photographer who will take pictures of you if you look cool so that you can use it as your MySpace photo and get lots of hipster affirmation and credibility.

The following is a list of parties you might want to frequent in SF, if you wish to transform yourself into a hipster:

Frisco Disco at the Transfer
Blow Up at Rickshaw Stop
Lights Down Low at 222 Hyde
Stiletto at Asia SF
Ferrari Party at Deco
No More Conversations at 222 Hyde
Cassettes at Matador
Popscene at 330 Ritch
Loaded at Rickshaw Stop
Robot Rock at The Mezzanine

If you go to these parties, make sure to dress correctly (ie, no more than 1 finger width between you and your pants – they best be TIGHT) and have the proper disaffected attitude. No matter how awesome the DJ is, pretend like you’re totally disinterested in dancing. Just stand there looking cool and excuse yourself for frequent smoke breaks. You’ll fit right in!