Calling All Hipsters?

It’s only takes a couple of hours to get from Albany to New York City — but sometimes it seems a lot farther away.

I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this:

Seriously? Hipsters? Apparently, the people at the paper just heard of these exotic PBR drinking, ironic t-shirt wearing, eccentrically eyeglassed creative-types in Brooklyn. And it’s so exciting, they want to see if they can dig up some real live hipsters around here. I’m betting they’re in Troy!

Look, the hipster trend was so firmly established in 2003 that it was already being roundly mocked — and if you care what New York magazine has to say, hipsterism was already dead by 2010. I’m not saying that the hipster sensibility has disappeared, just that it’s really, really (really) old news.

At this stage of the game, doing a story about hipsters makes you seem like… well, rubes. Or at the very least, a tiny bit clueless.

Anyway, I look forward to next month, when the Times Union will be doing a big feature on punk rockers.

10 thoughts on “Calling All Hipsters?

  1. 10 years for a ‘Hot Trend’ to migrate up the Hudson to Albany? Sounds about right. Were it not for Freihofer’s, we’d no doubt be slicing bread by hand.

    1. Well, I’m interested in seeing this “story.” I’ll bet it’s more about style than sensibility — and much of the hipster look has become quite mainstream.

  2. I know for a fact that many TU people frequent the hipster-infested Troy farmer’s market, so they can’t pretend that they’re just noticing them now.

  3. Donald Fagen of Steely Dan has a memoir out called “Eminent Hipsters” that is one of the best books I’ve read this year. In his intro, he notes that “hipster” is a term that has developed a peculiar modern connotation . . . but he doesn’t care: he titled his book and writes about his heroes the way the word was used when he first heard it as a kid in the ’50s, meaning that it’s a compliment, not a snarky sort of sub-curse. Read his book instead of the Times Union. You will learn a LOT more.

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