Pete Wentz, Kanye West and Clara Bow- what do they have in common? All dirty, dirty hipsters. Yes, “hipster” has replaced “hippy” as the fun-to-hate-on category (at least in our book) and yet, we still don’t quite know; what is a hipster, and from which smoking meteor crater did they first come? The thing is, the more you dig, the more you realize they have been among us, always. As Gavin McGinnes (Vice Mag co-founder) puts it in a Black20 news interview,

“[Hipster] just means fashionable young people.”

So why do we feel compelled to throw sticks at anyone wearing skinny jeans or ray bans? Is it sheer jealousy because we know we know we’d look like a moose struggling to get out of a ziplock bag, if we wore skinny jeans? Or is it just that it’s tempting to mock anything that gets popular? What’s so bad about being a hot piece of popular ass?

Maybe part of what made people grumble about hip kids is that they represent change, which people tend to be scared of. As Gavin McGinnes constantly reminds us in the video, flappers like Clara Bow were hipsters too, and now we think they’re cool but people used to hate on them too. The faster things change, the less our stability-loving brains can keep up, and the more disgruntled and confused we feel, at least as long as we’re trying to hold on to firm ground. Something that writer and cool guy Todd Patrick said sums it up perfectly;

“These days things last so briefly, so people just have started to think of trend itself as being worthless..now [hipster] just means phoniness”

But what’s phony? Is Gwen and Fergie co-opting chola style phony? What about Elvis imitating the shit out of R&B musicians? Is Kanye and Janelle Monae dressing like nerdy white kids from the 50’s phony? Cool is usually what’s new and different than what we’re used to, so doesn’t it make sense that we’d all swipe trends from styles we didn’t grow up with?

Anyways, the whole series of street interviews is here, watch it and tell us what you think hipster means!

What’s a Hipster? [Buzzfeed]

Is “Hipster” a Dirty Word? [Black20 News]