Hood Cinema: Hipsters and Cameras
There’s nothing cooler than a snap-back wearing sneaker pimp (Black hipsters) and anyone that wants to keep up with the cool will need to add a camera around their neck. Remember how Chris Brown’s video for “Beautiful People” made you want to create a cinematic collage of your greatest nights while you imagined that your friends were all celebrities? Now that I think about it, one of the coolest videos employed a visual style that was first dissed by Banksy in “Exit Through the Gift Shop”; describing such a piece as the creation of “someone with mental problems who just happen to have a camera.” Hipsters, Black ones in particular, are developing an aesthetic appreciation for randomly jig-sawed, but thematic, video clips. These hipsters—that end up contributing films to this breaking genre—are packaging young Black consciousness into art. In other words, they are expanding the space in which Blackness can be nurtured.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHxlzcAPbBE&ob=av3e
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXM0w1DPL3I
Since Beautiful People, Wiz Khalifa has given “Reefer Party”, a similar video, this summer. Again the arrangement of individual video clips of popular artists (among hipsters)—Curren$y, Juicy J, Big Sean—smoking joints, makes the video have half-a-billion views. Ian Reid, a skater that produces these type of videos explains the attitude: “that’s [in] Barcelona, dude is just stressin’. And now we are partying in Miami with Stevie [Williams].” Life’s dynamism deserves camera time, most definitely if you’re cool. Hipsters have moments in their lives of partying and college that they wish to be shared with other hipsters and youth (or anyone savvy with internet really). I see these types of video as expositions of the complexity behind skinny jeans, novelty tees and cameras with fish-eye lenses.