My Ode Of Loathe To The Hipsters

I fucking hate hipsters. Yes that's right I said it and I'm not taking it back. You do not own Brooklyn, Berkeley, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington DC or any other city. You come into the cities, the reverse of white flight and make everything kitschy and cute.

No the crack head on the corner isn't an allusion to Andy Warhol's take on the rapidly increasing urban culture in Manhattan in the 1960's- and what the hell does that mean anyways? Stop tossing around artists, and historians, and writers, and theorists as if the more you say with less words between them the more important you sound.

No the too tight, too short pants, and the overly dyed and then purposely distressed one of a kind designer label version of some vintage jeans from the 1960's are not cool. Neither are those ridiculously over-sized glasses you got from Urban Outfitters but scratched off the label so no one knows are not cool either. Or the plaid shirts, or hand me down looking print t-shirts that cost you a minimum of $30 and have your favorite witty phrase about drinking, politics, or sex. Nor is the forced awkwardness and humped shoulders and overly emotional nature.

They are a imitation of a reality that is a little too real for us working class folks of color because the real reality is that every one of US has a picture of ourselves or our parents with these exact outfits in the 60's, 70's and 80's because we lived what you're pretending to. The forced awkwardness was real. The print t-shirts left over from events long past, dad's flannel, and cousin's jeans were just that. Those glasses were the ones my mom had in her drawer but I had to change the prescription of the lenses because I was nearsighted and had an astigmatism before I could spell those words.

You can redo our classic Etta James, Nina Simone, Drifters, Supremes, Stylistics, Donnie Hathaway, and Billie Holiday all you want but all the lessons you take, all the albums you buy, and all the looks you imitate will not buy you what they all had- real soul based on real emotions because they were dealing with real shit. You think "Strange Fruit," is actually about fruit and "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," can somehow be paralleled to the the experiences you gained growing up in the suburbs trying to define your identity against your parent's definition of you.

NO. I will not stand for it anymore. You cannot appropriate pieces of our culture and our community and our history and separate it from our black identity as if somehow doo wop just created itself. You're image, you're new culture is simply a cheap imitation of what really existed, what we really experienced.

Next time you get off the train in my neighborhood and push gentrification a little farther with each one of your steps, new stoops, and new spots realize you're wack.

That's it.