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The Truth About Cool Guys

07/31/2006

If you haven't already had three half-hour long conversations about Rob Walker's Sunday Magazine piece on hipsters trying to turn a fast buck on their own retarded lifestyles, we advise that you get your cultural radar checked.

Using such up-to-the-minute examples as A-Ron the Don and the Hundreds, Walker explains how the latest generation of downtowners rebel through logos. Rather than going to work for a big corporate brand, they slap their own logo on parties, flyers and t-shirts, only collaborating with the big boys when the project is right, the money dear, and the liquor free. (Hmmm ... sounds like the m.o. of basically everyone we know in this town, who have had varying degrees of success at at it: Diplo, Oxy, Amanda Blank, Philebrity, Paperstreet etc.)

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Refusing to be the fodder for someone else's lifestyle-making machine because you are building your own still strikes me as a hollow victory. But maybe I'm just too old to get it. And I have to admit, the more time I spent with the minibrand entrepreneurs, the more I had to concede that what they have been up to is more complicated than simply imitating the culture they claim to be rebelling against. They believe what they are doing has meaning beyond simple commercial success. For them, there is something fully legitimate about taking the traditional sense of branding and reversing it: instead of dreaming up ideas to attach to products, they are starting with ideas and then dreaming up the products to express them.

MAYBE I'M JUST TOO OLD TO GET IT. Has a man who gets paid to observe cultural trends ever uttered such courageous words?

The Times is usually at its worst when talking about trends--slow, sloppy, frequently snide, and always hopelessly out of touch. Walker, on the other hand, drops all the right names, arranges them around some fairly brilliant and well-stated ideas, and frames the whole task with a perfectly neutral combination of sympathy and skepticism. Mr. Walker, we tip our beak.