Suicide Is Painless

The initital idea behind Stuff White People Like is pretty clever, if you enjoy the sort of snark and knowingness that ultimately renders you unable to enjoy your own life. But we're all very clever nowadays, so there you go; we love knowledge=power, even if it results in the kind of self-awareness that has us knowingly consuming steaming piles of cultural shit, whittling away post-show blues with caustic cliche-spotting superiority. Hard is hard, but everything else will either pass the time or take our punches. We're lazy, really.

But anyway...

David has indeed dipped into this well from time, and had others guide him there on others. I'm right up the alley readerwise of SWPL. Apparently my tastes and predilictions are both rare in my particular environment and crushingly obvious and generic in the wider world. And honestly, some of the shit SWPL rips into deserves it, but after a dozen or so rounds of you're-not-specialness, this idea plays out with deadly force. Read through the entire site/book and you'll soon enough come up against harder, fiercer, sadder truth: everything's been cordoned off as generic, as obvious. A lot of this boils down to supposed notions of "hipsterdom", a truly noxious notion that's been picked up and used as a weapon by everyone from Armond White to, gee, every second poster on Metafilter / The A.V. Club et al. The knowingness (that again) with which it's deployed doesn't make it any more palatable.

Hipsterdom is the web's there's-too-much-out-there fear (inevitable, considering the nature of the beast) experienced as constant ear-shredding feedback, the idea that somebody else's niche interest is a secret joke on you. That the niche's are smaller and harder to find these days is beside the point - all you need is attitude and a chip on your shoulder, and soon enough everything from Merzbow to Spike Jonze to literally-anything-that's-in-the-entire-world is made solely to make you feel out of it.

SWPL, now cited and used as an example by various idiot journalists, is the endgame of this affair. Both the in and the out, the hipster and his mark, melt like Roger Rabbit in dip (allusion not too obscure, not to hipsterish, I hope). Everything is a big fucking laff.

It's love that won't speak its name in public. It's cowardice. It's very self-conscious fun. It's waiting to make you the crowd. It's there to flatter you. It doesn't really believe in quality, or evne in the idea of belief. It believes, then, in the reflection of popularity, cultural guesswork, and back-row spitballs. Christ, it's really saddening and infuriating and not worth all these words.