Rock journalists have to be very careful about categorizing new bands. For example, they can't call some bands emo, because emo kids who find the term confining and insulting won't want to listen to them. Those emo kids are like Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense or Jim Carrey in the Truman Show or the girl you're flirting with who has a grotesque booger slowly ebbing down out of her left nostril; they're living a bald-faced lie. (And they'll never get their cake - also: lie) No one is permitted to inform them of who they really are.
Which is unsettling, isn't it?
I mean. Most of the people I know are in a similar predicament. Aside from a few (privileged?) people, all of whom have attended Emerson College where it's impossible to ignore (like attending clown college and claiming to hate the sound of laughter), all my friends despise the term "hipster." Understandably so, I suppose. I mean, hipsters are really an extreme, contrived version of people who actually cannot be categorized without mentioning their birthplace or birth date. '90s slackers, for instance, didn't premeditate their plain t-shirts and bored faces, that's just what was on the sale rack at Ross that week - and I always have that face on after an hour and a half at Ross.
When I go shopping, I want to buy pants that fit my legs. Generally. Said pants eventually compile holes. What can you do? I listen to music that makes me feel something (good, sad, whatever it is). The fact that this music happens to be largely made between 1962 and 2009 is not my fault. So, why I am a hipster?
Not that many people have called me a hipster if the topic hadn't already come up, but what else don't I know that people might think that I am?
Now I know how Jackie Chan felt in Who Am I?, or Matt Damon in that dragged out espionage trilogy, or Ed Norton when the Pixies kick in....
