The reflexive pose of the needlessly hip

They’re out there, you know, in their grim multitudes. The needlessly hip. They have some of the nous of their cooler, more effortless cousins, enough to figure out, at any rate, what the lumpen masses are into at any given point in time. But they are not so far removed from the majority as they’d like to think. In fact, the advertising industry regards them as part of the majority, their particular niche being the early majority, the ones who adopt the language, the dress, the music, the whatever, of the early adopters.

They are constantly trying to work out what they think about, say, a new band, a new type of music, a new way of cutting one’s hair. It is hard for them to do this, because ultimately the decision has been made for them by ... well, other people. Specifically: the people who they regard as below them on the status ladder, the majority, and the people who they acknowledge, at least unconsciously, as being above them on said ladder.

Being a member of the needlessly hip means suffering constantly from a peculiar kind of status anxiety, one that expresses itself in a positively toxic disregard for most forms of popular culture, as well as a perplexed attitude towards anything that isn’t quite in that particular fishbowl, what one hesitates to call highbrow or higher culture. It means not being able to have an honest reaction to anything, because one is always looking over one’s shoulder, either shoulder, in order to get one’s cue about whether a thing is lame or not.

The band was laying pretty heavily into the disco canon: Donna Summer, early Jackson 5, and horror of all horrors, Abba. It was by any objective measure, well, pretty corny, except, and this is a pretty big exception, you were out there on the dance floor. ‘Man, this is so lame,’ one said to the other. They were kind of standing there, a few metres removed from it all, drinks in hand, bored expression manifest. ‘Yeah man. I mean Abba? Come on.’ You wondered how they could ever enjoy a single thing that they passed through, wished they would muster up the courage to, you know, join the party; they were acting so cool that the whole point of being cool had escaped them. It was a black tie event, so all the guys were kind of dressed the same, and they had worked out their reflexive pose, but ... but you wanted to tell them, come on, man, there are three girls to every guy out there on the parquet at the moment, you’re kind of missing the point.

Or then there was this: he’s at a barbeque, and all he can talk about is this CD that he has discovered, he will tell anyone who will listen that the music on it is ... life changing. The kind of mannered monomania that is amusing for a couple of minutes but beyond that becomes the acme of tedium. You think to yourself, thank god for the bloke that told him, actually, mate, I didn’t really like it, and then refuses to get into an argument with him about it.

Or how about that guy that yelled ‘Judas!’ at Dylan, all those years ago? This is the reflexive pose of the needlessly hip taken to its logical extreme; the only thing that gave the sentiment any weight at all was it was backed up by a small but earnest group of Right-thinking individuals who thought they were onto something but who couldn’t have been more wrong. This, sadly is one of the dangers of the reflexive pose: it is hardly worth voicing one’s opinion about any given work of art, because the correctness of any such opinion ... yes, the correctness ... is frequently in inverse proportion to the vehemence with which it is held and/or expressed.