Ironicannibalism, Urban Outfitters - July 7, 2003

The other day I happened into Urban Outfitters on 14th Street (don’t ask, it’s a very long story) and as I wandered haplessly around the arctic-cooled, creepily Pier-One-ed throw pillows and wacky shower curtains I swear on my fucking life the darkness descended and there – crucified and enshrined on polished chrome garment racks, attended by fawning, bindi-clad hipster glitter girls and vascular, pale-faced oompa-loompa retailers – I saw the next omen, and perhaps the most glaring to date, in the long, shitsucking hipster-strewn path from earth to post-ironic, de-de-deconstructionist h-h-hell.

What I saw surely signals most severe degradation of supposed youth culture since the MTV Beach Party. I know, I’m hedging here, but I don’t even know quite how to impart the same impact as I first felt when laying weary eyes upon them. The thing is though, most of you will say, ‘Oh sure, I’ve seen those, it’s old news! Get a clue!’ No doubt you will, you keen sonsofbitches, but I doubt very much that the most of you have fully considered the ramifications of this repulsively aggressive phenomenon; I also doubt very much that the shredded coagulates of apocalyptic detachment that roar forth from these garments and scrape dumbly at each of our scabbed over idiot meters even so much as flitted the eyelashes of a handful of you.

So I – meekly, reluctantly – agree to act as the poor harbinger of your own crumbling time, God help you. And it’s not just one of them either, no this is far bigger than that: This is an unstable manifestation of that cataclysmic crush between marketing chic and po-dunk gesture-warping – one million strong – that threatens to wipe clean the last phlemy remnant of authenticity that ever coughed along the fringes of fashion irony, and, just for the record, I’m not sure that it ever did. I’m speaking of the cannibalistic zombification of white trash bake-sale, little league and Elks Club slogans that never should have survived outside happy captivity in the acrid, wind-blown sensibilities of Columbus Ohio and Wheatridge Colorado and Scottsdale Arizona in the first place, but that the kids grew up and the parents sold everything at a yard sale and blew these crusty remnants of childhood Americana – like the first dandelions of Spring – out to the farthest reaches of the hipster empire, and at the hands of demographic-crunching SoHell they dug their blistering claws into the loamy soil of popular culture and mushroomed terrifyingly into rack upon cancerous rack of what I saw before me inside that clearinghouse of psychological skullduggery, known as Urban Outfitters.

I approached as if in a nightmare: immediately and, at first, inexplicably shaken, then curiously horrified, then overcome by gnawing panic and brazen, pig-headed denial, then fist-shakingly emboldened and embittered. Lucidity gave way to squinting snootiness and as I approached the rack, there in front of me, on bended, jean-torn knee, a dirty-haired panic-stricken male hipster cast his eyes aloft to the luminescent heavens, tattooed arms outstretched, glazed eyes swimming wildly, and he pleaded:

“Pleeease God! Pleeease! You have tested my faith before, and I have remained loyal to you!” he cried. “But Lord, why do you test me this way, when you know this is a trial I surely cannot pass!”

The central air-conditioning belched and rumbled mightily and a ring of sarong-clad women shook and lurched across the sales floor forming a circle around him.

“If you are the one true God, I beg of you!” he screamed. “Show me a sign! Show me a sign! Lest I be cast into the bikini-clearance purgatory of H&M!”
And with this, his spindly head fell to his chest, and he began to weep; furious sobs shook his body.

Suddenly, a tenebrous voice echoed crackily out of a giant pop-rendered Mao Tse-tung portrait.
“Speak mortal!” it said. “What is it you ask of me?”
“Please Lord, hear me! I …”
“Quiet!” said the voice. “Have I not continuously showered you with the latest in trashy, useless ephemera?”
“Yes Lord! Yes!” cried the hipster, his eyes ringed and swollen with tears.
“And have my pleather, faux-rhinestone studded tentacles not probed and gripped the country’s youth market share, squeezing their painfully bunioned feet into ugly, strappy, open-toed shoes?”
“Yes Lord! They have! Oh, they have!”
“And have I not wrenched your emaciated, tan-and-ink-cheapened flesh into low-grade, shamelessly knocked off logo t-shirts?”
“Yes Lord you have!” cried the hipster. “You have!”
“Then what ails you so?” asked the mysterious voice.
“Lord? It’s just …” he said, gesturing to the racks filled with hundreds of identical shirts emblazoned with the phrases ‘Caddy Day 1983,’ and ‘Gardeners Do It With A Hoe.’
“Lord?” he said, his voice suddenly wavering, “I, ah, well, I mean, I just, ah …”
“What is it my son?” came the voice.
“I just don’t understand it Lord!” he said, gripping his head in despair and falling to his knees. “I mean, are they, like, Vintage? Or are they supposed to be vintage or … what?”
“Yes, my son,” said the voice.
“I’m sorry Lord!” he cried. “I know I shouldn’t question you, it’s just that I don’t get it! Help me Lord! I mean, are they from a thrift store? Or … what?”
“Yes, my son!” came the voice again, now rising in volume.
“Yes what, Lord?” the hipster cried. “Yes they are Vintage or yes they …”
“Enough!” said the voice, thundering down from the plasterboard distance.

The air conditioning thundered ominously again and the sarong disciples began cooing and moaning as they formed a tighter circle around him.

The voice grew to an ear-splitting shriek. “Bwah Hahaha! BWAH Hahaha!”
“Oh no!” the hipster screamed. “Lord! Answer me!”
“BWAH Hahaha!”
“NOOOO!” he wailed, as the sarong disciples descended upon him. “NOOOOOOO!”

Then a large security guard swiftly pierced the circle and dragged the hipster away from the t-shirt rack.

“Oh Lord! Why do you forsake me?” he screamed. “WHY GOD? WHYYYYY!!!”
But the security guard peeled his greasy fingers from the glass door and cast him out into the ungodly heat of West 14th Street.

There was, at some time in the distant past (perhaps 1985, perhaps earlier), I’m certain, some genuine, organically provoked example of this brutally, whorishly bastardized garment– the Adam of the fashion, if you will – that fared well and even flourished, albeit modestly, on the sweet rudiments of its existence, feeding on the supple shrubbery of Alternative culture, and slurping gingerly from the radiant springs of cheekiness. True, some might say, the very fact of its reanimation from cultural dormancy (a unifying trait of all hipster shitsuckiness) necessarily tarnishes it with original sin – or second-handiness if you prefer, an acute brand of frankenhipsterity – yet undeniably, this alterna-outcropping was, even at its most pristine, created in the image of its master, giving it, at the very least, some measure – some corollary – tenuous as it may have been, with reality. But alas, far gone are we from those innocent days of mere second generation hipster fashion irony; those days when natural selection and evolutionary resistance prevented dumb slogans and puns from propagating themselves past sustainable populations and picking the brittle bones and sucking dry the honey marrow of their corn-fed audiences; those days when words printed on a low-quality cotton t-shirt made us snort with laughter because we knew that some jackass little league coach really thought Lee Iacocca was a good mascot for his kids’ team; those days when – daresay – those crumbly, poorly rendered silkscreens actually meant something; actually had some point of origin, absurdly backwards as that origin may have been, they did have some justification for existence.

During the first recontextualization of the ‘ironic’ thrift store t-shirt, we were, if you’ll imagine with me, only once removed from the source – that is to say – the weathervane of irony was only bent 90 degrees, give or take, from original earnestness. To explain, I might refer you to the oft-repeated phrase: ‘It’s funny because it’s true.’ Well it’s not fucking funny anymore, dear readers. Because somewhere between ‘Caddy Day 1983’ the event and ‘Caddy Day 1983’ the mass-produced ‘ironic’ t-shirt, the weathervane of irony was violently twisted from its course and bent into an excruciating 180 degree arch, severing it from all reference and ultimately pointing the finger of pitifully corny, cheap and vomitusly bruising humor right back, smack-dab at the stupid, unthinking motherfucker wearing it: The arrow on the “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt now points straight up, and thus hipsters and their malicious blood-sucking handlers have come full-circle into the stinking shithouse of cultural darkness, whereby the once sharp edges of t-shirt irony with which they sliced and silently bled the hokey chortles and witticisms of florists and truckers and coaches and girl scouts across the country have now rusted and dulled into cold, blunt instruments with which their handlers today beat them bloody and senseless. To them I say, most direly: You have truly lost control of your cheeky beasts and they have come back for you.

This ironicannibalism signals a watershed moment, a turning point for hipsters everywhere. I say turning point, but what I really mean to say is twisting point, gnarling point, breaking point, because that crafty, silken thread that before connected all ironic t-shirt hipsters to their poor, unwitting reference points (thus creating humor, irony) has been amputated leaving only a flaccid stump. The delicate equation of hipster humor whose product was a thin watermark of authenticity is gone, and all the implications and imagery that flowed from it (intrepid travel, modest means, thrift-nobility, shopping mall-lessness) have mutated into sad morbid shells; gaping, slobbering mouths of Want. And they will not stop, because held within the blind, nutrient-rich clutches of Retail this mutant incarnation of the ironic t-shirt is no longer confined to the scant, corny whims of trophy-shop owners, but instead is, as we speak, undergoing a sadistic population boom of unprecedented proportions. But fear not, because the cultural grasslands where these benign conversation garments once grazed is sure to collapse under the savage, tumorous weight of the new mutant zombie army.