How Not to be Cool

     The Thomas Frank reading could not have come at a better time! As I read it, I could not help but to think of how this article relates to the 2000s. In the article it discusses "the sixties" and the 90s, but the 2000s are truly a repeat of everything explained. More than anything, I focused on the definitions of "hip" discussed in this article simply because being hip is something people still strive for in this day in age.
      In the article, Andrew Ross defined the characteristics of hip, "'an essentially agnostic cult of style worship... advanced knowledge about the illegitimate'" (p. 13). The most important aspect of this "definition" for me was the term agnostic, which simply means unopinionated. As a dweller on a college campus, the number of hip people I see is astronomical. Everyone looks the same, dresses the same, talks the same, and the craziest thing is they all believe their sense of style of "original". Ball State's campus is over-ran by skinny jeans, Toms, fake glasses, piercings, tattoos, and Bieber-ish haircuts just to name a few, but like the article discusses this fake counterculture. Nothing about it is organic, it is a mass replication of what one considered to be "hip".
     At the very end of the article, Frank defined what hip meant for him in 2000, he states, "Today hip is ubiquitous as a commercial style, a staple of advertising that promises to deliver the consumer from the dreary nightmare of square consumerism" (p. 15). For me, 12 years later, this definition is relevant and telling of so much. How can one not be a part of the fake counterculture when the media tells us how to be? We're told how to dress. How to talk. The type of products we must own in order to be "hip" and ultimately placing us back into the dreary nightmare of square consumerism we were trying to escape.