And I Digress...

While this topic does not fall within the scope of this blog, this must be addressed due to its pure absurdity. Societal labels have gone too far.

Professor Jerry Del Colliano mentioned this music industry trend in his Music, Broadcasting and the Mobile Future lecture last week and the entire class was dumbfounded. Not only had none of us heard of this term but none of us knew for the love of God how or why this term came about in our culture.

I know these people. They are my African-American friends who wear aviator sunglasses at night, who wear really tight pants and dance in what I can only describe as the "Velma Dance," from Scooby Doo cartoons. They listen to punk, emo and indie music more often then they listen to "Black" music like rap and hip hop. They are hipsters, just like their Caucasian counterparts. However, a New York Times article decided to segment these indie music lovers by race and call them...wait for it...blipsters.

This is not offensive in and of itself because as a society, we compartmentalize trends and subcultures based on race. I will not digress further into my political beliefs that a colorblind society could be more detrimental to minorities than how it is today, but we have and will always tie music trends with race. However, this term reflects how African-Americans are given the short end of the stick when receiving labels. Just like how every feminine term, like female or woman are derived from the masculine terms male and man, Black culture terms are derivatives of Caucasian culture terms. Blipster is not only indicative of the secondary status of Black culture trends, the term is just flat out lazy. Please New York Times, be a little more creative.

The only positive element of this debacle is that racial boundaries in music are being torn down by the African-American community. The past two decades have seen White America embrace Black music but the opposite cannot be observed. With this movement of African-Americans embracing and creating rock and roll music, the genre they started before the Whites hijacked it and made it their own, maybe everyone who listens to Death Cab for Cutie can just be called a hipster, or someone who needs to stop crying and get over the fact that she just doesn't like you.

Jessica Pressler. "Blipsters Rock On." New York Times. 29 Jan 2007.