There’s a good number of Serious Topics that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time now, but work keeps getting in the way. So, you get the Hipster Kitty instead.
This page has more info on the credits, history and context; that’s also where the image above came from. This one, too.
More images here, along with dinosaurs and superheroes. (Thanks to Matt for the link.)
So. Hipsters. According to Wikipedia:
Hipster is a slang term that first appeared in the 1940s, and was revived in the 1990s and 2000s to describe types of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture […]In the late 1990s, the term began to be used in new, sometimes mutually exclusive ways. In some circles it became a blanket description for middle class and upper class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, alternative hip-hop, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, or vegan food, drinking local beer (or even brewing their own), listening to public radio, and riding fixed-gear bicycles. Time described them as follows in a 2009 article: “take your grandmother’s sweater and Bob Dylan’s Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars and a can of Pabst and bam — hipster.”
But wait… Terminology aside, the phenomenon of putting together personal lists of top 10 albums of the year that nobody else has ever heard of was already kind of old back when I was growing up in the 1980s, as was the phenomenon of ridiculing such lists. (It indeed goes back to when those things were called “albums”.) The Hipster Kitty captions might as well have been targeted at my generation, and in some cases, specifically at me.
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