Sample Culture

I missed a chance to hate something. That sucks. Now I have to try catch up.
I quit reading Adbusters when it stopped being a spray can and started to apologise for advertising. Adbusters dropped its guts, became something that we used to put in the waiting room at the ad agency. Oh how ironic. They still think they are culture jamming, the liars.
Anyway, got an infrequent gig where I have to teach VJ and sample culture at the Australian Film Television Radio School. This is as good as gigging Fruity Loops on laptops at the Conservatorium of Music a few years ago. Wearing a suit. Which I did. The AFTRS gig  has the potential to offend somebody somewhere so I IMMEDIATELY SAID YES.
Problem then is that I have to teach sample culture, which has the potential to suck badly, as 90 percent of sample culture is thieving neo hippy bullshit. But I think I have a good angle worked out that involves Eisenstein’s montage, Freud’s dream work, Jung’s collective unconscious, inkblots, memes, power politics and a few other things that young minds need for nourishment. It also involves culture jamming, so I peeked at Adbusters.
Where I saw this entertaining article.
This is curious, because there was once a time when I would have detected the stench of an incoming plague well in advance. Did I not say that techno was the music they would use to march us into World War Three? I did. Did I not lament the replacement of lyrics with fascist imperatives to Get Up, Get Down, Roll Over and Beg like a little dog? I did and was shunned since that time. Did I not identify Mandlebrots as psychedelic bird shit? Did I not pinpoint Nirvana as the day the music industry lost its nerve and retreated 20 years? And NIN as the Wal*Mart of Industrial? I claim the right to be called curmudgeon. Curmudgeon, C’est Moi.
I am old. I missed this one. Or did I?
Your Honours: In my defence I’d noticed the bits but missed the totality. Yes, there is a shop up the road where the youngsters queue for bread. Then sit outside on milk crates, before driving off in daddy’s Porsche. Yes, everybody is collecting cassettes and paperbacks again, they are so ironic. They have thick rimmed glasses with no glass in them. All of that. It’s just that, like Douglas Haddow says, it’s not much of a movement. Christ, it’s not even funny.
It’s midnight right now: outside my window the kids are piling out of the local hipster pub. They’re ironically singing Ian Dury’s Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick (from 1978) and somebody is ironically blowing a clown horn on their ironic hipster bicycle in time with the chant. There’s been times when I wished I was young again but this isn’t one of them.
This is serious. Your Honours, where did we go wrong? Did we deconstruct our culture so much that our children have nothing left to tear up? Has post modernism led to post childhood? Admit it. I feel like joining the Catholic church and blowing up a few laundromats just to create a bit of senseless beauty. Why don’t they?
But Your Honours, perhaps this is a furphy. Usually it’s the people in the movement that set the language and it spills out. This sounds like the ‘hipster’ tag has come from outside and is an attempt to encapsulate a random collection of nothing in particular. It’s people like Adbusters that desperately need to sum something up, and voila we have a movement. Christ, there was a band in the 70’s called the Native Hipsters and they were using the term for mocking 30 years ago.
Maybe we should stop mocking their complete lack of taste (not bad taste, lack of taste) in music, and start to praise their exquisiste taste in Facebook updates?
I’m lost.