"It feels like a perfect night," Taylor Swift flirtily professes, perfectly in sync with the equally coy 4/4 backing beat, "to dress up like hipsters/And make fun of our exes."
Those are the first lyrics she sings on "22," the newest single from her dominating and inescapable Red album, released in 2012. And, as far as opening lines go, it is an absolute wrecking ball.
By expressing her desire to lampoon former boyfriends while dressed like a hipster, the former country-music sweetheart, Kanye West stagebombing victim, and serial monagamy exhibitionist, was actually putting the final nail in the 99.9-percent-already-nailed-shut coffin of hipsterdom.
That's right. If he wasn't already, well, Taylor Swift done killed the hipster fucking dead.
What's the difference between dressing like a hipster and being a hipster? If a tree falls on a hipster in a forest and everybody leaves a bunch of comments, does a blogger get a bigger bonus than usual? Or just the usual cash-for-traffic? You gotta keep 'em coming back.
Maybe, at one point, at a very specific time and in a very specific place (early 2000s, NYC), you, maybe, could have referred to somebody as a hipster and not been a total chode. But even then, the term was problematic (see also: stupid).
In 2013, it's more impossible than it already was. And that's because of the Great Hipster Trickle Down, which students studying the Military-Youth Culture Industrial Complex call "The Final Solution."
In the course of "hipsters" becoming "the enemy" of norms and the tragically unfashionable, every last iota of what was once stereotypically grouped with "hipster culture" -- fashion, music, cinema, slang, and so on -- has, uh, more or less just become popular culture.
And that's where Swift comes in. When she debuted "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" at last year's VMAs, it was also the premiere of her newly acquired sense of style and songwriting after transitioning out of squeaky-clean pop-country. Now, Swift is all about all-striped everything, her ex-boyfriend's indie record that was supposedly much better than her own, and squeaky-clean electro-pop rooted equally in today's Top 40 EDM explosion and the blog-house contingent of the aforementioned early 2000s, when hipsters maybe sort of actually existed.
Taylor Swift. With Ed Sheeran. 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10, at American Airlines Arena, 601 Biscayne Blvd., Miami. Sold out. Visit aaarena.com, or call 786-777-1000.
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