In declaring the Mission "hipster" to be dead, former SF Bay Guardian nightlife writer and onetime publisher Marke Bieschke has certainly threatened to kill the website 48 Hills, which published his virally popular essay. Your friends, as you only don't know if you haven't checked Facebook today, have already linked to it. That might not load due a hosting issue: If it doesn't, you can feel free to read the cache. And now, I'll attempt to summarize and not add too much commentary.
The essay is pegged to the announcement that Boogaloo's, a rather run-of-the-mill pop-up brunch spot with an excellent Valencia Street location, would close due to a rent increase.
Hipsters, Bieschke surmises, can't afford the neighborhood, and are now displaced by "Ivy League business school marketing grads, violently jogging ex-cheerleaders from the Midwest, Bonobos-sporting former frat bros, and Baby Bjorned global arrivistes who have absolutely no idea who Allen Ginsberg or Ariel Pink is, let alone Keyboard Cat."
These days, though he "never thought" he would, Bieschke finds himself missing the loosely defined group of sometimes tragically fashionable youths that roamed the neighborhood. "At least hipsters tried to be cool and attempted to care," he writes, but now, "There [are] pleated chinos at Zeitgeist. Elbo Room is closing. Hipster's dead, y'all."
Bieschke does make exceptions for Oakland and the occasional SF weirdos he meets (many at least costumed for Outside Lands).
And if hipsters were cheap, with their PBR and their Salvation Army cat sweaters, they're either holding on tight to an apartment they landed a decade ago, or they're long gone. Here's Beischke's theory as to their origins:
The 2000s San Francisco hipster was born of the first Web bust, when everyone who got pink slips suddenly had a shitload of money to blow on conciliatory cocaine parties and then invest in outlandish artisanal Etsy dreams. For a moment, rent was low enough again to move here with no plan, if you didn’t mind three roommates plus multiple cats and a diet of Arinell’s.
Since I would argue that hipsters are — or at least were — young people, now that San Francisco young people have higher salaries, the game has changed. It follows, pretty predictably, that young people's definition of "cool" has altered with the rest of the decades' fashions, and their economic means.
Yes, the times are a-changin'. But you know what they say about the "more things change." Sure, even PBR has been supplanted. But now the cool kids I know stick to Tecate. Cheers!
Related: Here's Why Everyone Needs To Stop Bemoaning A Vanishing San Francisco And Move On