Everyone’s talking about the hipsters. Just this week, The Oatmeal released a web comic comparing Hammer Pants and Hipster Pants (and I have to say, Oats: truer words were never spoken). But the comparisons and the discussions are nothing new. Cracked.com has a compilation page of charts and detailed analysis of the hipsters, which the site calls “people who prove that they do not care about social standards by adhering…” in unrealistic levels to, well … social standards. Even Time magazine has weighed in. In an article on the hipster’s propensity to parody, Time said that “…everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don’t care.” So it would seem that we just cannot stop talking about those tight pant-wearing, Pabst beer-drinking, vintage-loving wannabes. Why is that?
Wannabes is what they truly are. Hipsters are the post-poser subculture of people that want so badly to be cool and misunderstood that they conform (in their “ironic” nonconformity) to a state of absolute self-importance so that their coolness is protected by a thick layer of smug. Did you understand anything I just said? Let me say it a little clearer: hipsters are nothing but a bunch of smug, arrogant assholes. And they are that way on purpose.
Today at the AAA office, I saw a fine looking young gentleman clad in tight, purple pants and a t-shirt that said “Hipster for Life.” While I am certain that the travel agent/insurance carrier would have been happy to provide the gentleman with insurance for his hot pink, tandem bicycle, what he really seemed to be there for was to strike up conversations with every other person waiting for help about his superior knowledge of music. As I listened to the man talk, though (as he scratched his faux-retro mustache and I resisted the urge to punch him in the gut), I realized that hipsters are really nothing more than hillbillies! In this moment of clarity (at the dingy AAA office, waiting for my map of San Diego County), this truth became so evident to me that I wonder how we all did not see this before.
Let’s compare the two:
Both hipsters and hillbillies have unreasonably ugly facial hair. The faux-70s thin ‘stache is among the most popular.
We have that God awful fad (that still seems to be lingering) of people drawing or putting fake mustaches on their faces; they even have mustache parties. What the hell is the point? – is what I have to ask, but that is another blog altogether. In a comparison between hipster facial hair and hillbilly facial hair, you see that the two are absolutely identical. Each prides itself on being unkempt. Each is mocking some former style that they believe deserves some weird sort of respect. And, inevitably, each looks disgusting.
Both hipsters and hillbillies drink the shittiest beer known to mankind. In particular, that PBR piss water.
With the number of options for cheap, and yet quality, beer out there, it is astonishing to me that people still drink Coors Light, Miller High Life, and PBR. Pabst Blue Ribbon is the worst. Why do they do it you ask? Well here is another thing the hipsters and the hillbillies have in common: they like to be cheap, even when they don’t have to. I see no reason for it though, particularly when a case of Heineken is only about $2 more than a case of the piss water hipster hillbillies drink.
Both hipsters and hillbillies are smug ass mother fuckers.
Here is where I draw the real correlation between hipsters and hillbillies. The true sign of a hipster is one who thinks he is better than everyone else around him because of his personal choices to not conform (in such a way that is completely conformist). He thinks his music is the best (it’s not), his clothing is the most fashionable (it’s ugly as hell), and his ideas on life and the world are so much more transcendent than anyone around him (very likely he is a dumb shit). Hillbillies are the same, exact way. Where hipsters look down on others for eating meat, hillbillies look down on others who don’t eat meat. (I can’t even remember how many times I have been to my redneck family gatherings and been scoffed at for saying I don’t eat red meat – a choice for personal health and not involving any meats other than red.) Hipsters think their taste in music is far superior to everyone else – something Cracked.com and Time emphatically pointed out; just as hillbillies refuse to acknowledge the existence of anything but country (or if they do acknowledge, it is followed with disdain). The absolute arrogance of hipsters and hillbillies is so paralleled that their every move in life is preemptively defended with a vague and somewhat narcissistic rant about how they are removed from the world in ways most people could never even understand.
So the only possible conclusion is that hipsters are nothing more than neo-hillbillies: all the same attitudes with slightly different details. This, I fear, is just more proof that The Hipster Apocalypse is upon us.
Heather Christena Schmidt 
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