A Hipster By Any Other Name

A recent NY Times article by Jessica Pressler discusses James Spooner's new film, "White Lies, Black Sheep" about the black and white racial dialectic of the indie rock scene. The article mentions the term "blipster" to describe black hipsters. This is troubling in the way she links it to the history of black music and rock, genres she attempt to discuss in the language of cultural ownership.

Part of the reason blipster is a frustrating term is that it belies the rampant cultural cross-pollination of "indie music," and the cross-pollination of white/black music in general. To argue about who started blues or when it became rock, or the validity of John Lee Hooker versus Led Zeppelin is futile; the history of blues, rock and indie-rock is a history of mutating ideas and identities. How could one subcategorize all the mutant identities involved in, say, TVOTR, ooioo, Fujiya & Miyagi, Jose Gonzalez and Girl Talk?

If a black fan wanted to adopt the term "blipster" to react to the whiteness of a perceived scene, so what? The terms hipster/blipster themselves are semantical. What seems more offensive is the ownership implication that hipsters, or indie music fans, are essentially white, and that black people need a sub-category. Or that black indie fans must be so starved for identity that they should validate themselves by creating an identity which distinguishes them from the "normal" hipster crowd. It would be sad and ironic for a term which has roots in black-culture to be shifted to whites, and then used to establish a negative identity (negating in the sense that it's "blipster," NOT "hipster").

For a music that porously engages conceptions of identity and exists in a racially messy society, it just seems feckless and eidetic. Pressler may not be advocating the term in her article, but she is creates an obnoxious case, if only to pass it off as "interesting". That's what shoddy music criticism is all about.