Travis Bickle ain't no hipster
Relax mate, I think it happens when you get to a 'certain age'. I was listening to Black Sabbath ten years after Paranoid came out and the old guys probably wondered about me listening to old 70s music. I never did surf on old equipment though.
Like, haha
Please burn every last "mid length" board while you are flushing the sport down the toilet.
The idea of a single unified vision of utopia probably died around about the same time that most of the hippies of my parents generation decided that greed is good, and coke beats dope.
Around the same time this postmodernism thing appeared, which conveniently justified much of what went on/is going on. The thinking being that there is no single utopia, only individual utopias. My utopia could be your hell. Hooray lets buy crap we don't need.
So now it's a free for all. The past is the now is the future. There's nothing new, only new ways to pillage the past.
I think another perspective on this is well overdue.
As for hipsters, they're ok if they make good coffee. The thing I don't like is the hipster preemptive sneer. 'I know you think my glasses are entirely unnecessary, so just before you're about to order that coffee I'll raise my nose a little, then give a half laugh in an attempt to give you the impression that I know something that you don't.'
Then there's Seapunk. Google that for further enragement
Bugger me backwards....Seapunk. I've just spent the last twenty minutes reading all about this musical and cultural, ahem, revolution and the light in the room dimmed has a few notches. I'm more than happy to put up with hipsters if seapunkers are the alternative.
"The idea of a single unified vision of utopia probably died around about the same time that most of the hippies of my parents generation decided that greed is good, and coke beats dope."
That may be so but it says a lot about the cultural moment that dystopian books such as The Road or The Dog Stars, and end of the world movies like Oblivion and Independence Day are the stories of our age. Goodbye Shangri-la, hello climate change, or asteroid collision, or pestilence, or World War Three.
Indeed, another perspective is well overdue.
Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the hipsters, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.
I've watched from a respectful distance the metamorphosis of a gang of young longboarders at my local beach change from curious students of an old art to prancing sideshow puppets dressed in the vestiges of best-forgotten age. Hipsters, my friends, hipsters. Making their way through the minefield of self-concious adolescence by playing fancy dress in Ma and Pa's clothes. But my lord they take it so seriously! Fancy dress was meant to be fun not grim.
If you're dressing up in daddies clothes then have at it boyo. Do it the way it should be done. You've seen Elvis impersonators, those guys know they're frauds but they've got the chops. Swing baby, swing. Elvis impersonators dont make the charts. They don't get remembered past the last Las Vegas show. Yet the best Elvis impersonator at my beach is now sponsored and getting page time in magazines. Surfing in 2013 is so bloody odd we now give credit to kids who turn their back on the future and pillage the past because...why?
Because every new fashion is a rehashed old one. Because Hollywood remakes are safer than original storylines. Because the past is the future. And while we're getting Orwellian why have humans given up on Utopia? Dystopian and doomsday scenarios outnumber grand visions of the future. At what point did we give up on humanity?
But I digress...
There's a line between sourcing inspiration and cut-and-paste plagiarism. Let me ask, young moustachioed hipsters, what do you REALLY know about the 70's? You think Nat Young had soul? You think longjohns are functional? You think Travis Bickle was a good guy?
I tell you this, I think someone should just take this sport and just...just flush it down the fucking toilet, and in the words of someone who came of age in the 70's, the future is unwritten. Have at it boyo.