You've probably heard of
hipsters. Heck, you may even be a hipster. If you don't know what a hipster is, you might spend some time on
this sometimes entertaining website. Where do hipsters come from? Let's work backwards. Before hipsters (1990s), there were
slackers (1980s): middle-class, college-going, white kids into Alternative rock. They were hipsters in all but name. Before slackers, there were
punks and
pseudo-mods (1970s): middle-class, college-going, white kids into Punk and New Wave rock respectively. Neither of them was really "hip" because they liked to take speed and be "intense." Before punks and pseudo-mods, there were
hippies (1960s): middle-class, college-going, white kids into rock and folk. They weren't "hip" because they smoked a lot of dope and were embarrassingly earnest. Before hippies, there were
beats (1950s): middle class, college-going, white kids into outre poetry and literature. They weren't "hip" because they took narcotics and liked to be "cool." Before beats, there were
proto-hipsters (1940s): middle-class, college-going, white kids who liked hot jazz and black people. They were more like modern
wiggers than hipsters. (If you don't know what a wigger is,
here you go.) And before proto-hipsters, there was the mother of all middle-class, college-going, white American subcultures--the
bohemians. They were a lot like hipsters.
These hipsters-before-hipsters are the subject of
Joanna Levin's fascinating new book
Bohemia in America, 1858-1920 (Stanford UP, 2010). In it, she deftly traces the mid-nineteenth-century migration of bohemianism from the Parisian Latin Quarter to American shores and its spread to middle class, white culture thereafter. Bohemianism offered Americans who, as Tocqueville noted, were all about equality (read: conformity) a chance to be different in a safe way. The bohemians practiced a kind of satire-of-the-deed: they used themselves--the way they dressed, talked, loved, worked--to poke fun at everything "bourgeois." They were performance artists, and they wanted attention. Just like hipsters.
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