Art Is Misery: The Hipsteria Experience

The evolution of Toronto’s “Hipster Trash” community, how I accidentally became a part of it, & eventually managed to escape.

Today’s social standard is, in general, a result of an increasing pressure of the relatively novel ethical imperative that everyone must enjoy oneself all of the time. If you do anything that may diminish the enjoyment of others you’re considered a downer. Sadness takes place off-stage, and wallowing is merely a morbid self-indulgence. Social admiration should be given to those who are able to hide their grief so completely that nobody would ever guess that anything was wrong. To sum it up, repress all emotion, and you will be accepted as a normal, contributing member of society. As an angsty, non-conformist, Nirvana-obsessed teen — hormones raging and all — this pissed me off, and naturally I became apart of those that were seen as the intimidating, weirdo, artsy kids who hung out in the music room instead of going outside ever (You know, the “freaks” in Freaks and Geeks). It was us “freaks,” along with the sensitive kids reminiscent of Timothée Chalamet’s character in Ladybird (and probably just Timothée Chalamet in real life) who sat in corners brooding. Everyone thought, “Wow, they really think about things…they must really hate us,” but in reality, these freaks and sensitive types were just thinking about how to sulk enough so that the other kids would think about how much they must be thinking about, and how much they must hate them. Kurt Cobain’s journal was our bible, Morrissey our Jesus Christ, and Patti Smith our Virgin Mary. You weren’t cool if suicidal ideation wasn’t apart of your daily routine, and everyone’s dream was to be clinically diagnosed with some sort of mental illness- otherwise you could not, and would never be, a true artiste.

When I got to UofT, this high-school attitude morphed into some other creature I like to call Toronto’s Hipster Trash Union. I had chosen the same University as a lot of my familiar freaks and sensitive flowers, and naturally we congregated. We found our “scene”- the Toronto indie music scene, that is, based upon political outrage and the broken Capitalist system that we live in. This mentality gradually escalated through the study of Camus and Nietzsche in philosophy classes, to seemingly, in the blink of an eye, half of my friends sporting around Nick Cave tote bags. The Hipster Trash Collective seemed to live by the dogma, “life is pain, and anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something,” ironically, a quote from one of the most brilliantly funny films of all time (I’ve heard it used completely un-ironically). To them, the world is one big Panopticon effect and the only solution is anarchy, and to yell louder than anybody who holds a differing opinion within their “safe space.” They protest practically every weekend and truly believe any party to the right of the Green party are fascist pigs. To put it into perspective, my boyfriend at the time would never buy me flowers for fear of enforcing gender roles, and would only make me DIY gifts or buy me used books (Sometimes you just want a Chanel purse, you know?). I always felt like Elaine in that episode of Seinfeld where she tries to get the commie she’s dating to put on a fancy shirt. The funny thing is, a lot of these kids are loaded, but hang out in dive bars and dress like thrifty homeless people for “the image.”

If you ever look at any of these people’s Instagram profiles, you’ll see one of three things; either they’re failing to ironically humble-brag about their vicious depression/anxiety cycle, posting incessantly about things they see on a broken sidewalk in the fog and rain as if nobody else could have possibly noticed it before (if you want to know if the weather is bad, just check this person’s Instagram story), or the lowest possible quality photos of them and their friends in parks at night. They really want you to know they’re having a terrible time, counterintuitive to the aim of other people on social media, who despite the terrible time they’re having, want you to think that their life is way better than yours. The music they make is usually fine — it’s not great — but that’s ok because the point of this scene seems to be to hail mediocrity. I’m justified in saying this. I had a group of music scene kids tell me they wouldn’t listen to the likes of Quincy jones because he’s, “a lizard person playing into the interests of the corporate music machine.” I’ve come to realize that people who criticize and downplay greatness often contribute very little.

On top of finding myself within Toronto’s indie music scene, I also decided to specialize in English Literature (The two worlds are quite interconnected). Let’s just describe the program as a circle jerk of misery, people vomiting up their melancholy bait on typewriters to the class, and Leonard Cohen stans just eating it up. The artsy academic types were another mutation of some familiar species I had encountered when I arrived in the city. There were owlish glasses, leftist philosophers with cushy university jobs, and lazy filmmakers who talked big, but wound up spending their production allowances on gummy bricks of hash. I got invited almost every day to grainy black-and-white movies in which ponderous, turtle necked men slogged the stony beaches, plumbing the depths of their souls, and cursed the gulls for their ability to fly. I thought true art must be based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible. Unfortunately the school has no accredited sulking program, and I realized that this behaviour wasn’t cool, won’t get me very far in life, and that I wasn’t having very much fun at all. I’ll never forget the drunken night when I finally accepted the absurdity of it all. A friend and I decided we were Greek, and started throwing plates into the fireplace of an old, abandoned house where a film screening was taking place (notice the use of the word “film”), much to the chagrin of my turtle necked friends. They just rolled their eyes at the fact that we could possibly be enjoying ourselves and we got up and left to go to a Rihanna dance party. One of the filmmakers came up to us and asked where we were going, said, “Ugh you just don’t get it,” and stormed off. I didn’t care if these people thought I was ignorant. Pretentiousness wasn’t my jam anymore and I wanted to enjoy life while I was young enough to live it to the fullest.

Wedding bells have eventually torn the gang apart as they’ve met equally derivative versions of themselves to feed off of each other’s put-on issues and egos. I’ve realized so many of them are incessantly sitting inside thinking about life while billions of people are outside living it — like Candide before finally leaving his castle, and realizing, through a series of hilarious encounters, that he wasn’t living in the best of all possible worlds. Even though the world is shitty, and you could wallow in the pain and suffering, you have to laugh at it sometimes. It’s a lot harder to create something that brings joy to people than something that brings somebody down. Humans have a negative bias. You can’t take life so seriously because laughter, at its very core, is an involuntary response to the realization of your own mortality. I truly believe that life is worth laughing at, and if you don’t, then I’m afraid you don’t really “get it.”