SuperHipster

            On the horizon there is a new hope. Where evil dares to tread and atrocities of art are being committed, he shall arrive on the scene. Abandoning his teal 2005 Moped for the less mainstream way of traveling - flying through the air - is SuperHipster, savior of our time.

            There’s not much to know about SuperHipster – you’ve probably never heard of him anyway. SuperHipster is a white male youth hailing from Brooklyn, USA. He was born somewhere in the late 80’s, thought he’s not quite positive on the year. SuperHipster was raised by his bohemian folks in a privileged suburb, wherein he honed his skills and knowledge of what is hip and what simply is not. The influences of his equally bohemian friends no doubt shaped his personality, values and shapes, as the mind can be malleable when exposed to true art.

            SuperHipster completed some college, but then decided it was a tool of the bourgeois, a social class he refuses to be identified with. He decided he can be just as cultured and learned without some silly degree that his parents would’ve paid for. SuperHipster dreams of one day opening up his own comic book studio and publishing graphic novels of his adventures himself, because no one “gets him” well enough to capture his likeness.

            SuperHipster has the base ability to deem whether or not a form of art is mainstream or cool. If indeed the form of art is mainstream, SuperHipster has the ability to change it into something more underground or avant-garde. (He also possess the ability to fly, but that’s such a generic ability.) He gained the ability to alter art when he accidentally fell into an unfinished Shepard Fairey piece at an art exhibit in Brooklyn. Apparently Fairey’s art had magical properties to it, as SuperHipster went in but a lowly ironic young man and came out only slightly better.

            SuperHipster could change, say, a copy of “The Hunger Games” into a Bukowski novel, or a DVD of The Expendables into a Woody Allen drama on VHS, but he can only influence small-scale things. SuperHipster could not, for example, alter a stadium-setting Kenny Loggins concert into Belle & Sebastian, for he doesn’t possess the power to do so.

            SuperHipster appears as a regular hipster one might see on the street – mustachioed, lanky, and fitted ironically. He looks fairly average, and he swears he doesn’t work out.

            SuperHipster calls it upon himself to save people around him from ordinary, mainstream, and boring forms of art and life. He feels that people should not be spoonfed what is created for the lowest common denominator. His true enemies are NewsCorp, Viacom -  any members of the big seven corporations, and any person who propagates the values such corporations would pursue.

            In the realm of SuperHipster, there are no other entities to his knowledge that can fly or change art, so he is an anomaly of sorts. However, in the grand scheme of things his powers are so average that no one targets him as a threat or anything more than a flying trust fund. The only perceptions people have of superheroes come from comic books they have read, and in many people’s books SuperHipster doesn’t constitute a hero more than a jazz musician or a cultural studies professor. The fact of the matter is that SuperHipster is in essence a well-off young white man that knows obscure facts and has a holier-than-thou persona regarding the arts. He is an elitist of sorts, but that doesn’t resonate much negatively or positively with the public.

            SuperHipster is necessary in that he defines the growing group of hipster millennials that are turning politically and culturally militant, in a way. He presents a faction of the United States youth that feels that their views are superior to another’s but on very little basis. That basis is, in majority, that they are upper-middle-class non-minorities with upbringings that introduced them to the arts, so all of a sudden they walk on water.

            Without SuperHipster, I’m not certain much would be lost. Perhaps the sale of Kenny G records would proliferate. In all fairness, perhaps art and culture would be altered in that the underground and alternative scene embodied by SuperHipster would be effectively gone, so that may pose a problem. What is mainstream and what is underground when the underground scene disappears? For that matter, how would one identify without some sort of underground or alternative scene? It could be argued that identity complies to some degree with the notion that one is identified to some extent by what they oppose or subscribe to. Certainly the arbiter of one’s tastes comprises some makeup of their personality and identity.

            SuperHipster suggests, in my mind, that privileged white young people are entitled and superior. To go a step further perhaps he is a remark on socio-economic class and how the boundaries still exist, especially when race is thrown into the mix. You wouldn’t likely see a SuperHipster from the lower class, unless he or she existed in a much humbler form of existence.