OK you’re a pseudojourno writing about Shanghai’s underground (in quotes dripping with cynicism) scene. You’ve read Vice, so you know when it’s suitable to be snide. Plus the word ‘hipster’ has the word ‘hip’ in it, how derogatory can it be? Why not just go and refer to our city’s population of creative professionals and eclectic partygoers as hipsters?

Wikipedia will tell you why. To sum up, hipsters are upper class kids that acquire the accoutrements of other subcultures (be they blue- collar workers or Palestinian protesters) to accessorize their outfits, thus siphoning these signifiers of meaning, reducing material expressions to trendy pieces of flair, and achieving irony through apathy. Do you know what a keffiyeh is? Are you wearing one?

Now the charge can be leveled that Shanghai’s smart casual crowd harbors many expensively messy haircuts and superficial infatuations with imported subcultures. But does that a hipster make?

Maybe, actually. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to fall back on the cliché noun and accusation of cultural cannibalism that is the word ‘hipster.’ ‘Hipster’ should join ‘cliché,’ ‘ironic,’ and ‘underground’ on the list of once meaningful but now tired, tepid words forbidden from being thrown into articles about the habits of people wearing slouched jeans for the spice of snarky legitimacy. It’s lazy!

Except for me, I’m allowed to use all those words in a single blog post.

God, I don’t even know if I’m being sarcastic.

Anyway you can evaluate the crowd for yourself this Friday when The Shelter kicks off their one- year anniversary celebrations with DJ Co- Ma.

And don’t think I’m a hater; I’ve got a rich daddy and don’t believe in anything, too.