Look at that fucking hipster. Pants are tight, sneakers vintage and pristine; the Poison t-shirt is ironic (or IS IT?), visible tattoos are edgy, a fine trucker hat covers his tousled undercut, all manners of hair bedeck a pallid face framed by thick horn-rimmed glasses. John Brown might have approved of his facial hair, had he lived on instead of getting himself hanged fighting against slavery a hundred and fifty years ago. Loser, amirite? Ambling down the sidewalk, skinnycino™ in hand, weaving in and out of traffic on his fixie, what have you, he’s on his way to his local, a former dive bar bought out by Wall Street investors and renamed Dive Bar, cans of PBR served in a bucket, microbrews on tap, avocado toast on the menu, you know the deal. It’s right around every corner of every city now, and that is where that fucking hipster is always going. There he may meet his mates and there may well be women too—you’ll know them by the fashion, the twenty different kinds of bangs, flower tattoos creeping down bare arms and mix-and-match stratas of once and future cool fashion—vintage anything, because all that is past, whether it was cool then or lame then, is cool now; all carefully crafted carelessness. You know their night will be brighter than your day, Instagrammed and hashtagged for good measure. You may only live once: hipsters live again, and again, and again.

A cliché, you say?

Of course. And like all clichés, the hipster has become part of the décor, a nuisance from the past woven so seamlessly into the fabric of our days that we no longer notice. There’s no telling a hipster from a douchebag these days—both are everywhere, seeking uniqueness in universally recognizable ways. It wasn’t always like this, not really. Once upon a time, in the 1990s of yore, the hipster’s natural habitat consisted of specific, delimited urban ecosystems: Manhattan’s Lower East Side; Brooklyn’s Williamsburg; Berlin’s Kreuzberg; London’s Shoreditch (or the fictional Hosegate of BBC’s cult classic Nathan Barley); Paris’s Marais (aptly, French for “swamp”). Since then, hipsters have multiplied exponentially and expanded their domain. The whole world is their oyster bar now, and we all eat in it.

Yet before he was cut into pieces and scattered Osiris-like into the zeitgeist, the hipster had to be born. Though none would claim him, he had many parents, some of whom we will observe in following chapters. For now, let us just say that he materialized in the late 1990s from the same heady brew that gave us the major subcultures of the twentieth century: avant-garde art meets popular culture at some uncharted crossroads and, around innovators in art, fashion, journalism, organizing, forms a scene of connoisseurs, fans, and followers that grows as the niche goes from well-kept to open secret. But for all that a trend may owe to popular art, popularity necessarily kills its claim to artistry. A trend too popular becomes a standard, a commonplace: it finds its spot on the wall next to taxidermized narwhals and LCD Soundsystem record sleeves. It may manage to retain a measure of surprise, but once its conventions are known, it becomes part of the cultural fabric. So, arguably, went the twenty-first century hipster: he waxed (vinyl’s the best), he waned, or maybe he diffused, all the more loathed because his idiosyncrasies melted in the mainstream.

And so these are the 2020s, and you can no longer really see the hipster. He is dead, buried in 2004 and again the following year, and every year after that until about 2016, when we suddenly found ourselves dealing with much more important matters, like the death of truth. Donald Trump as president: so much for irony. But perhaps the rise and fall of hipsterdom and the reawakening of the white supremacist beast that ushered Trump into the White House are not completely unrelated. Let us now return to John Brown, the leader of the 1859 antislavery raid on Harper’s Ferry. Bear with me, or more specifically, beard with him and the lush wonder of facial hair he sported in his guerilla years, a fashion statement that tripled as a religious and political statement—as Sean Trainor has demonstrated in his research, the history of American facial hair trends is political, and therefore racial. Reflecting on Brown’s execution after the failed raid in his poem “The Portent,” Herman Melville dubbed the man’s beard “the meteor of the war.” The beard stuck out from the hood which Brown was forced to wear when he was hanged, and appeared to Melville as an omen, the celestial sign announcing the upcoming Civil War. My turn then, and there she blows: from the vantage point of 2020, let me declare here (and discuss later) the hipster’s undercut/beard combo a portent of its own, announcing the arrival of the orange love child of Andrew Johnson and Jefferson Davis at the White House. In order to get there, and then rampage through American streets, in full view of all, unashamed and unimpeded, the beast had to feed and grow strong. The hipster provided it with comfort and nourishment; it also offered fair-trade, Chemex-brewed cover so that the beast could sneak by undeterred and undetected. When the hipster finally fell, struck by one final opinion column, fascism rose from that empty shell, Dreamcatcher-style.

So that’s the hipster. And you’ll get there with me, eventually, but for now let’s backtrack a bit. Let me sit down and, like everyone before me, ponder the indefinability of the hipster phenomenon even as I go about attempting to define it.

The common agreement is that the most recent incarnation of the hipster came about in the late 1990s. The decade boasted a few new subcultures and musical genres, easily reduced in collective memory to the sonic and visual markers they flaunted as so many anthems or flags flapping in the wind: dripping superfuzz, hunger dunger dang singing, plaid shirts and jean shorts for grunge, glow sticks and phat pantz for the candy raver, specific brands for specific scenes, so on and so forth. But the hipsters, to the extent that you saw them in relation to music in particular and culture in general, weren’t necessarily attached to a particular scene so much as they boasted all-around scene savvy. It bears mentioning that the slow rise of the hipster was contiguous with the rise of indie rock, this amorphous blob of a genre label best defined in the song “Gimme Indie Rock” by one of its flag-bearers, Lou Barlow, as “a new generation of electric white boy blues.”

An aside: Lou Barlow’s short historical survey and celebration of “indie rock” was also very much a mockery of it and its heroes, even as Lou Barlow himself was well on his way towards becoming one of them. Somewhere in the potent brew of self-consciousness, self-assessment and self-deprecation that yielded Sebadoh’s little gem also lurked the monster to come. Barlow knew well the utter whiteness of his being, the unspoken quest for cool that underlay all pop scenes and how, at some increasingly inchoate ideological level, these impulses both welcomed and clashed with the possibility of commercial success. But in this, he himself echoed awareness shown not by a white boy but by Sonic Youth’s bassist Kim Gordon.